ABSTRACT
Public appointments have been of interest to researchers and public managers for a long time, becoming an important field for understanding the relationship between politics and bureaucracy. From a review of the literature of the last ten years, this essay aims to discuss the main motivations, criteria, and challenges related to the process of choosing free appointment employees, and proposes an advance in the theory on the subject, so that the relationships of actors outside the public sector with public nomination processes. The results of the review show that political control is the primary motivation addressed in recent literature, and loyalty to the ruler is the most important criterion of choice, indicating as a major challenge to reconcile political influence and meritocracy in the nomination process. Studies focus on the participation of politicians and bureaucrats in the nomination process, as if they considered that only these actors influence and are influenced by choice of senior civil servants. However, other interest groups also participate, contributing both to the individual choice of senior civil servants and to the outline of the institutions that govern the nomination process.
Keywords:
Public appointments; Political appointments; Senior civil servants; Bureaucracy