Incumbency Advantage

JOP 88/2 pp. 554-571 2026-04-01 Original The Politicization of Bureaucrats: Evidence from Brazil Anderson Frey, Rogerio Santarrosa Abstract In developing countries, incumbents commonly exercise political influence over bureaucrats through monitoring or patronage hiring. We investigate a new politicization channel: a phenomenon where bureaucrats join political parties while in office. First, with a regression discontinuity design and administrative data on the universe of Brazilian municipal bureaucrats, we identify an incumbency advantage in their politicization. Second, we find larger effects for a special set of bureaucrats: the ones that interviewed households for enrollment into Bolsa Família (BF). Third, we show that these effects are even stronger for interviewers highly exposed to voters and in municipalities where BF was expanded. Our findings suggest a policy-driven logic for this politicization: voter-facing bureaucrats who deliver salient policies accumulate electoral capital, which is converted into rents by joining the incumbent political networks.