Hypothetical Interactions with Bureaucrats, Co-Production and Polarization - Brazil 2026

This study investigates how socio-political group membership relates to the willingness of people in Brazil to work with street-level bureaucrats to solve common problems. It aims to interrogate indicators that lead people to perceive bureaucrats as competent, motivated and which bureaucrat profiles respondents choose to seek assistance from, by considering ingroup relationships of different kinds. We deliberately assess conflicting hypotheses pertaining to the commonly articulated benefits of public servant impartiality, and hypotheses drawn from the literatures on representative bureaucracy and affective polarization, pertaining to ingroup-outgroup dynamics. We aim to relate this study to another pre-registration, based on the same survey, that focuses instead on reports of real-world interactions with bureaucrats.