Abstract:The study of the bureaucracy in Latin America, within the study of politics, has long been little more than an afterthought. It is assumed to lie in the realm of public administration, distinct from other regional subfields that have increasingly gained the attention of political scientists. As a result, scholars' understanding of Latin American bureaucratic politics is limited. Here, we conduct a comprehensive survey of peer‐reviewed articles to evaluate the state of this subfield. We find a thematically, ana… Show more
“…As Polga-Hecimovich and Trelles (2016) highlight, there are few studies with valuable information on the development and evolution of public agencies and the role that political actors have in the agencies’ administrative reorganizations. This article has contributed to testing how theory in bureaucratic politics applies to Latin America, and specifically to understand how the Office of the President in Colombia has historically undergone transformations in its internal structure as a result of a rational decision by the president.…”
There is a relative consensus in the literature around the fact that Latin American Presidents use cabinet appointments as currency to build coalitions, strengthen their government, and get their policy agenda implemented. However these partisan appointees may have their own political incentives that do not align with those of the President. This situation raises the question of how Presidents can ensure that ministers remain faithful agents or at least how to reduce the information asymmetries between Presidents and ministers. One such tool is the strategic redesign of the presidential office. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed 93 organizations established between 1931 and 2015 that constitute the set of agencies under direct control and supervision of the Colombian President. Using time series analysis, we find that the change in the percentage of ministers affiliated to other parties has a positive effect on the number of agencies that constitute the presidential center in Colombia.
“…As Polga-Hecimovich and Trelles (2016) highlight, there are few studies with valuable information on the development and evolution of public agencies and the role that political actors have in the agencies’ administrative reorganizations. This article has contributed to testing how theory in bureaucratic politics applies to Latin America, and specifically to understand how the Office of the President in Colombia has historically undergone transformations in its internal structure as a result of a rational decision by the president.…”
There is a relative consensus in the literature around the fact that Latin American Presidents use cabinet appointments as currency to build coalitions, strengthen their government, and get their policy agenda implemented. However these partisan appointees may have their own political incentives that do not align with those of the President. This situation raises the question of how Presidents can ensure that ministers remain faithful agents or at least how to reduce the information asymmetries between Presidents and ministers. One such tool is the strategic redesign of the presidential office. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed 93 organizations established between 1931 and 2015 that constitute the set of agencies under direct control and supervision of the Colombian President. Using time series analysis, we find that the change in the percentage of ministers affiliated to other parties has a positive effect on the number of agencies that constitute the presidential center in Colombia.
“…Others argue that Weberian bureaucracies may not even be universally desirable—that alternative types of bureaucracies, such as those that collect their own revenues, may be more suitable for developing countries (Ang 2017). Until now, however, few studies have examined the mechanisms through which accountability initiatives targeted at fighting corruption affect bureaucratic capacity (Bertelli et al 2020; Meier et al 2019; Polga-Hecimovich and Trelles 2016).…”
Section: Bureaucratic Capacity and Accountabilitymentioning
The solution to weak bureaucratic capacity in developing countries is often presumed to be more accountability. This paper shows how accountability initiatives, intended to reduce corruption, can actually hinder the development of capable government agencies by making it harder for directors to recruit experts and spend their budgets. It further highlights a common way public servants escape the accountability rules that limit their effectiveness: outsourcing bureaucracies to nonstate organizations. This practice of outsourcing bureaucracy to avoid accountability rules creates what I call “shadow” state capacity and, paradoxically, it may help explain “pockets of effectiveness” among government social programs in developing countries. Drawing on in-depth interviews and descriptive statistics, I show how outsourcing was a critical factor in producing two of Brazil’s most vaunted social sector programs. However, I also suggest that outsourcing bureaucracy may ultimately limit state capacity, even if it helps to build capable programs in the short run.
“…The notion of bureaucratic capacity, while the possibility of implementing a policy without external or personalist influence, combined with the political autonomy of the institution, is used to assess governance and, with it, build a ranking of public institutions, with several examples in Latin America (Polga-Hecimovich & Trelles, 2016).…”
Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…As we will try to show, there is a strong link between union and social movements by the ruling elite of the Brazilian Federal Executive where the choice of leaders occurs in a network of broader relations, not only partisan, but with a focus on loyalty, including in patronage relations, that replaces meritocracy. Polga-Hecimovich and Trelles (2016) analyzed more than 15 thousand publications on bureaucracy in Latin America, between 2000 and 2015. They concluded that there was a relative theoretical and methodological insufficiency, whose embryonic stage in the field of studies would be characterized by the great attention spent on conceptualizing and measuring state and bureaucratic capacity, autonomy and control.…”
In order to assess the most prevalent logics of action in the Brazilian land agency, INCRA, we focus on the administrative processes of development and education partnerships, management reports, control bodies, documents of many superintendencies, and ethnography of bureaucracy in two of the 30 superintendencies. Were build typologies and evaluate the actions, discourses, and loyalty chains of strategic groups in the dispute arena. As a result of the overlapping of non-universalistic logics of action -like neo-patrimonialism, clientelism, team spirit -with universalistic logics, we observe a low delivery of goods and services to society. Despite a discourse emphasizing a lack of personnel and resources, the settlement titling, an institutional priority that doesn't need a lot of resources to be completed, shows the management difficulties. In order to change this situation, a better understanding of the action logics that inform them is necessary. This article tries to bring to light the hidden mechanisms of bureaucratic practice.
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