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 client perceptions of bureaucrats’ competence and motivation and citizen trust in the civil service at large.

Drawing on panel surveys in Brazil and in India, in the politically charged context of the most recent general election periods, this study assesses both reported, real-world interactions between clients and street-level bureaucrats, as well as conjoint experiments that i) allow us to reflect on social desirability bias in responses to questions about real-world interactions, and ii) give an insight into perceptions of interactions between outgroup combinations that may be rare because they are avoided.

The Indian study recently completed data collection, and so analysis is just starting. The initial Brazilian data 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), 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. In Brazil, 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.