From Ministries to Elective Offices: The Technocrat Pathway to Political Power

This paper analyses ministerial experience as a strategy to create political reputation of technocrats under coalition government in Brazil. Studies about political career in Brazil have explained the attractiveness of ministerial position as a consequence of Executive branch’s broad powers. Consequently, ministerial position offers special conditions to politicians credit claiming in comparison to legislative offices and it is supremely valued by professional politician. However, these studies have paid less attention in a particular pathway related to ministerial career: how nonpartisan technocrats have been turned into professional politicians after ministerial tenures. Part of former ministers - selected because their expertise and previous experience in particular policies – has become party members and has increased the candidates’ supply for elective offices at sub national politics. This trend has challenged the current view of ministerial nomination of technocrats to ministries as a presidential strategy to overcome the politicization’s effects upon government’s performance. The paper seeks to shed light on this pathway: why some ministers invest in a political career after their exit of the government? We explain this move as part of a partisan strategy to foster ministerial career as an alternative course of recruitment of new candidates for electoral competition. We explore the hypothesis that the likelihood of a technocrat minister to be a candidate increases when she maintained some informal linkage with the party responsible for her indication; she took part into policy communities related to ministerial jurisdiction; ministry is organized alongside to federative structures; if ministerial policies have distributive effects; the minister’s visibility and his activism into parliamentary and executive settings; the salience of policy areas. This study explores the implications of coalition politics by looking at the opportunities for parties to foster its electoral prospects in the future by ministerial selection.