Seeing politics in the State: Citizen perceptions of street-level bureaucrats’ political affiliations, competence in their jobs, and trust in the public administration

Research into affective polarization has recently gone to some effort to emphasise the importance of the distinction between vertical and horizontal forms, yet little attention has so far been paid to perspectives of citizens towards state representatives other than parties and leaders. This paper considers interactions of ingroup and outgroup street-level bureaucrats and citizens from the latter’s point of view, seeking to understand the propensity of citizens to “see” politics in the state, and how interactions of political ingroups and outgroups influence perceptions of bureaucrats’ competence and trust in the civil service at large. Drawing on three waves of a panel survey in the politically charged context of Brazil during the most recent presidential election period, this study first shows that clients commonly perceive the political affiliations of street-level bureaucrats through interactions with them, despite rules that prohibit civil servants from expressing political preferences while at work. By testing a series of pre-registered hypotheses related to citizens’ real-world interactions with street-level bureaucrats, we show that clients are more likely to “see politics” in street-level bureaucrats if a client’s own politics is a salient feature of their sense of identity, and if they believe a bureaucrat they interact with to be an ingroup (as opposed to an outgroup) member. We further find that experiencing civil servant impartiality in a political sense – that is, the absence of the client perceiving any political affiliation in the bureaucrat – is not associated with judging bureaucrats to be more competent, nor with citizens trusting the wider public service more. Instead, and contrary to the ideals of a Weberian neutral bureaucracy, a client sensing the existence of political ingroupness (vis-a-vis outgroupness) is likely to consider the bureaucrat in question to be more competent, and to trust the public administration more in general. We discuss the implications of these findings for the developing literatures on street level bureaucracy and affective polarization. The presentation will also outline the design of a follow-up study, recently trialled in India, and soon to be repeated in Brazil.