Inside the Black Box: Uncovering Dynamics and Characteristics of the Chilean Central Government Bureaucracy with a Novel Dataset

Abstract

This article examines bureaucracies using a novel dataset of Chilean central government employees from 2006 to 2020. Unlike perception-based sources, this dataset provides objective, disaggregated, and longitudinal insights into bureaucrats’ characteristics and careers. The authors validate it against official employment statistics and conduct an exploratory and descriptive analysis, presenting six descriptive findings about the Chilean bureaucracy that cannot be discovered using available aggregate data. The analysis reveals significant degrees of personnel stability and professionalization in the civil service, but with considerable rigidity in careers and substantial interagency heterogeneity in turnover, wages, and exposure to political cycles. These findings suggest that the Chilean national bureaucracy is mostly well developed along Weberian lines, though not uniformly so. These measurements also serve as a benchmark for comparing other Latin American bureaucracies in the future.