Interactions with Bureaucrats, co-production and polarization - Brazil 2026

This study has been designed to investigate people’s interactions with public servants in Brazil. Our aim is to study how reports of those experiences relate to political and other attributes, of both the respondents and of the bureaucrats. For the latter, we rely on respondents’ perceptions of bureaucrat attributes. We are particularly interested in the relative strength of relationships between different ingroup and outgroup interactions with trust, and on contributors to trust, such as perceived competence and motivation. While we have written hypotheses pertaining to gender and race ingroups (as well as political and religious ingroups), we are keenly aware that significant literatures support broad-based stereotyping and biases based on gender and race, which we will explore in addition to potential ingroup dynamics. The study design is motivated by alternative views on whether indicators or impartiality vs representative bureaucracy are more conducive to public trust in the public service. It allows us to compare real and hypothetical interactions between respondents and bureaucrats, by drawing on the results of a conjoint experiment pre-registered elsewhere. The design primarily refers to data collected over 2 panel waves.