Appointments and Disappointments: Revisiting Political Ambition in Brazil

How do political appointments affect electoral careers? Although there exists a broad literature on leadership, political ambition, and career trajectories across the globe, little attention has been paid to the role of appointments to cabinet positions and their subnational counterparts. We study this phenomenon in the context of Brazil, a three-tiered federation with powerful appointed positions and myriad possible career paths for politicians. First, we field an elite survey and an expert survey asking federal legislators and academics, respectively, to rate the relative status of different appointed and elected positions, and employ a novel method to create a ranking of desirability using pairwise comparisons. We then assemble an original panel of politicians’ career trajectories, including appointed positions. Finally, we test hypotheses on how appointments affect political ambition and electoral success, using matching methods to create comparable groups of appointed and non-appointed politicians. Preliminary results suggest that appointments both launch new careers and boost existing ones, leading the appointed to have higher chances of running for and winning higher-ranked office. We also find that appointments decrease the likelihood that politicians run for lower-ranked positions, which would otherwise serve as a "second-best" alternative to remain relevant between electoral cycles.