Defending Liberal Internationalism in the Legislature: When Bureaucrats Go Principal Shopping

The liberal international order (LIO) faces growing challenges from newly elected leaders and parties worldwide, many of whom also target domestic bureaucrats. While existing research emphasizes bureaucratic exit strategies, this paper explores an alternative: principal shopping. This concept describes how bureaucrats engage directly with legislatures to build alliances, influence policy, and uphold liberal internationalism. Focusing on the case of Brazil, I use a mixed-methods approach to test this theory. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Model (LLM) analysis of over 1,200 senate commission transcripts (2013–2022) reveals that bureaucratic participation is associated with increased references to International Organizations (IOs), a proxy for interest in liberal internationalism. Furthermore, sentiment analysis shows that when bureaucrats are present in public hearings, they make the discussion of IOs more positive when right-wing senators preside over hearings. Interviews with bureaucrats and politicians, along with ethnographic observations from dozens of public hearings in 2022 during an administration hostile to the LIO, further support these findings. This paper reveals how public administration can help defend the LIO but also highlights an unconventional pathway to that activism through legislative participation