Presidents juggle three core tasks when staffing the executive: maintain control over policy content, make political concessions to secure parliamentary support, and preserve the bureaucratic skills needed to implement policies. Appointments to top bureaucratic posts are shaped by the nature of ministry policy portfolios and each ministry's centrality in executive decision-making.

📊 How ministries were classified

• An objective cluster analysis groups federal ministries into four types: 'coordination', 'redistribution' (social policy and income), 'regulation', and 'distribution'.

🧾 Which appointments were analyzed and when

• The study tracks profiles of officials in middle and upper echelons of Brazil's federal bureaucracy (DAS roles, Direção e Assessoramento Superior) from 1999 to 2016.

🔎 Key findings

• Presidents tend to professionalize the bureaucracy in 'coordination' and 'redistribution' ministries, favoring career or technical appointees.
• 'Distribution' and 'regulation' ministries receive more partisan appointees.
• Ministries controlled by coalition partners are staffed with partisans from those partner parties.

💡 Why this matters

• The pattern shows targeted politicization: appointment choices are not uniform across the cabinet but reflect trade-offs between policy control, coalition management, and implementation capacity.
• Results clarify when presidents preserve bureaucratic expertise and when they use appointments for partisan or coalition purposes, with implications for policy outcomes and administrative effectiveness.