Abstract
An author and a book for a region waiting for them
Now is a good time in history to think about the influence and relevance of The Politics of Bureaucracy (Peters, 2018a), since the book deals with bureaucracy and its role as a political actor and as a government institution. In a world that witnesses the revival of populist regimes (of the right and of the left) that represent a threat to liberal democracy, thinking about its effects on bureaucracy and what is the role it must play in this context is pressing. Precisely, the paper submitted by Guy Peters and Jon Pierre (2018) in the recent American Political Science Association (APSA) Congress is entitled Populism and Public Administration: Confronting the Administrative State. There, the different scenarios that may develop in the relationship between the leaders of populist governments and their bureaucracies is set forth.
In Latin America, we have observed the turning towards authoritarian populism in Venezuela, which hit every trace of institutional check and balance (including public bureaucracy), triggering the current humanitarian crisis the country is undergoing. At the time of writing, Jair Bolsonaro, an extreme-right populist leader, has just been elected President of Brazil, representing a serious threat for the future of liberal democracy in this country. Consequently, many of us have set our eyes on the will and the capacities that the Brazilian public bureaucracy and the horizontal accountability institutions may have to contain the concentration of power of an eventual authoritarian populist government.
The Politics of Bureaucracy was translated into Spanish in 1999, at the same time that the understanding of centrality of bureaucracies in the public policies processes grew. After the failures of neo-liberal policies in the 1980s and early 1990s, inspired in the ‘Washington Consensus’, at the end of the century many reforms designed to strengthen public institutions were processed in Latin America. They required revitalising the bureaucratic system and gaining the support of its officials (Oszlak, 1999). Therefore, it is not strange that this book has been included by many of our universities in their course programmes, and Guy Peters has since then been a distinguished visitor of our academic centres, also giving advice to different governments in the region, as well as to international cooperation organisms operating here (Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), World Bank (WB), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)).
Benefits of his theoretical and methodological approach
Peters proposes an approach of public administration that falls within the best comparative tradition of Riggs (1980), combining ideographic and nomothetic approaches. Peters (2018b) states that comparative analysis must not eliminate the name of the countries in favour of variables (as many suggest), since contexts do matter. It is with that purpose that in The Politics of Bureaucracy, before starting with the analysis of the forms in which bureaucracy participates in the political game, a whole chapter is dedicated to the study of the cultural, political and administrative dimensions. The review it then makes of traditions and particular organisation structures, of North America first and of Europe later (namely: Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Sweden), have the object of showing the significance of the contexts in each case.
In the specific case of Latin America, besides the political and cultural differences in our countries, there are a series of features similar to their political systems and public administration, represented by the influence of the North American Presidential System and its republican system of governing (Cheibub et al., 2010). This influence combines with colonial traditions, characterised by legalism, formalism and politicisation (Nef, 2007).
At the same time, it is a region wherein traditions and the transfer of ideas crystallised unevenly among its many and varied countries. By way of example, the influence of French Public Law, especially through the École du Services Publics (or École de Burdeaux), led by the eminent jurist Leon Duguit, is a feature that is common in some countries such as Argentina, Colombia or Uruguay (see Delpiazzo, 2012; Etcherverri, 2013; Zimmerman, 2013). But the strongly decentralised characteristic that the rendering of public services in Uruguay assumes, whether welfare, commercial or industrial services, cannot be explained without invoking its political history of interparty agreements and a tradition of co-participation in the machinery of governing (Lanzaro, 2018).
Peters’ interest in administrative and political culture issues are a clear expression of his way of understanding the processes of change in public administrations, against what was the globalising trend of the defenders of New Public Management (NPM) in the 1990s. He always fought against the generalisation approaches of the managerialist reforms that do not pay attention to the particular contexts and the restrictions they impose on the recipes based on an historical understanding of administrative processes.
Our author has always had the capacity to speak to a large audience, and not only to those who come from political regimes with consolidated democracies and mature administrative systems. Each of his conferences in Centro Latinoamericano de Administración para el Desarrollo (CLAD) have been an excellent pretext for academics and practitioners to think about the reforms that were proposed for their public sectors. These were generally presented through the technical and financial assistance of international organisms, as ideal solutions (best practices; one size fits all) to the structural problems of each of their countries. The message Peters always tried to convey was that the consequences of the reforms are normally paradoxical and have unwanted consequences (Hood and Peters, 2004; Peters, 2002). In Peters’ (2007) view, it is always best to talk of ‘good enough practices’. He also helped us understand that the State is not so ‘stupid’ as we were being told, in the sense that it is not longer useful to face the challenges raised by new governance patterns.
Since its first edition, this book was destined to point out the limits of administrative reforms inspired by economic doctrines anchored in assumptions of rational behaviour of individuals. On one hand, traditions and cultures matter, and on the other hand, the understanding of the consequences of administrative decisions and the role of bureaucracy is always the result of complex interactions between structures and individuals.
But Guy’s methodological approach also refuses any mechanistic interpretation of bureaucratic behaviour. In The Politics of Bureaucracy, the reference to the types of incentives (material, purposive and solidarity) is related to the different strategies and behaviours of public officials, depending on the organisation frameworks where they work (organisation climate, prestige of the public job, career formats, education systems, opportunities for professional growth, institutional innovation capacity, and so on). In the opinion of Peters, in this context the literature of Public Service Motivation that refers to the motivation of the people to contribute to society (Vandenabeele et al., 2014) is the opposite to the material assumptions of NPM.
There is certain accumulated evidence that in Latin America, the incorporation of doctrines originated from NPM, initially developed in countries where the degree of inter-personal trust is high and the margins of informality are low, have had strong implementation problems. Precisely, based on the assumption that the incorporation of certain managerialistic-type incentives as a method to obtain a more efficient performance of people (greater freedom to manage, awards for accomplishments etc.) without considering the institutional contexts wherein they are developed in many cases led to poor results. (To view the challenges that the NPM set forth to public ethics in the Chilean civil service, see Pliscoff, 2017). In the same sense, already by the end of the 1990s, Allen Schick (1998) warned of the inconvenience of following the New Zealand model for developing countries, and Ramió Matas (2001), when studying the reforms in Latin America, from a historical and sociological neo-institutionalist perspective, cautioned against institutional isomorphism.
As Grimmelikhuijsen et al. (2017) say, it takes two to tango; therefore, behavioural public administration must be a two-way street, and politicians and administrative settings provide the laboratory of the real world where to test human judgements and decision-taking. Based on this injunction, concepts such as PSM may contribute to the application of psychological insights to the study of the public administration. At the same time, Vandenabeele et al. (2014) argue that although PSM is an individual attribute, it must be taken into account as a social identity that is developed within the context of several institutions, at macro-, meso- and micro-level.
In the web of politics
A central topic in The Politics of Bureaucracy is the interaction of administration with both formal and informal political actors and the impact on the behaviour and decisions of the administrators. Within what Peters classifies as informal forms of political activity in public bureaucracies, the analysis of interest groups and their relationships with the public sector bureaucracy (whether legitimately or illegitimately) and, through those, with the government have a strong relevance in the literature of Political Science that deals with processes of political intermediation.
This topic is particularly relevant for Latin America, where the low credibility of political institutions is linked to the inability of the States and their bureaucracies adequately to represent the interests of their citizens. According to last report of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2018) series: The Latin American Economic Outlook 2018, this happens not only because of the absence of efficient channels but also because private interest groups force or encourage the State to deviate from its duty to serve the public interest. Peters makes reference to the legal and direct forms of intervention of interest groups in public policy processes, which can be addressed not only from the classical literature on corporatism and neo-corporatism (Schmitter, 1974) but also in more recent approaches on varieties of capitalism, such as those of Hall and Soskice (2003). Guy Peters also refers to relationships of clientele, making reference to the fact that a state agency awards an interest group the representation of certain social sectors. Always at the centre of this discussion is the ability of the central government, as well as of its specialised agencies, to avoid capture by particular interests.
In Latin America, we have seen strong processes of economic opening and reforms of the State of neo-liberal inspiration. We have also introduced modalities of public–private partnerships and contracting out of public goods and services, all that without the corresponding strengthening of practices and mechanisms of democratic governance (Zurbriggen, 2014). In many cases, as shown by the literature inspired in the analysis of Hellman and Kaufmann (2001) on the ‘captured State’ and corruption, countries deal with a particular and illegitimate way of clientelistic capture, represented by the private payments that the companies make to public officials in order to influence the design and execution of laws and regulations. In his book, Guy also examines the different strategies and instruments that the bureaucracies and the political actors develop in the game of politics that falls within the terrain of public policies.
One good example of that is the study of Araya (2016) on the Chilean public technocracy and its strategic role in the implementation of a successful Senior Public Management System (Sistema de Alta Dirección Pública (SADP)). As a result of successive corruption scandals and under strong pressure from the media, in 2003 the Chilean political system agreed to create a SADP. However, once the pressure from the media passed, political interest waned, which created a fertile environment for the ‘policy bureaucracy’ (Page et al., 2005) to take an active role in the design and implementation of the SADP (Araya, 2016). The Chilean case offers, at the same time, proof of other qualities of what a ‘bureaucratic government’ would be; that is, ‘the incumbency of positions’, or the game of bureaucracy to occupy offices of strategic relevance for the design of public policies.
However, except for the creation of agencies that act as ‘ islands of excellence’ (Parrado and Salvador, 2011), in general, Latin America is not a region where career bureaucracy accesses positions related to the design of public policies. The scarce diffusion of Public Senior Management Systems in Latin America, as well as the difficulties of sustainability they face (Iacoviello et al., 2017), are related to the resistance of the defenders of the patronage system. As pointed out by Marille Grindle (2012) in her book Job for the Boys, the consolidation of meritocratic civil services has been a continuous process of decades of commitments and construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of these systems. Despite patronage generally being associated with corruption and inefficacy, its resilience is anchored in complex negotiations between leaders of the Executive, and a set of party, legislative and bureaucratic actors that vary according to the institutional contexts. Patronage obeys a variety of reasons that go beyond the exchange of electoral favours, at the same time that political appointees usually carry out several roles depending on their abilities (Peters et al., 2018). Among other things, it offers political leaders the flexibility to appoint technocrats; that is, like-minded people with high technical qualifications, in order to promote their programmatic reforms (Dargent, 2015).
Other essential components of ‘bureaucratic government’ do not refer so much to the bureaucracy’s internal flow of communication with the political authorities but towards the outside, in the implementation of the public policies at street level. This pattern is a very vast area for analysis, and I will only refer to the influence of street-level bureaucrats on the delivery of public policies, since it allows me to expose a very relevant issue in Latin America. These bureaucratic actors, depending on their secondary flexibility margin (Luhman, 1983), have the ability to shape who obtains what and at the same time generate a certain image of the government (Lipsky, 2010; Peters, 2018a).
In the context of Latin America, with many clientelistic party systems (Kitschelt et al., 2010), it is frequent that in the terrain where the administration is related to citizenship, the Weberian bureaucrat is replaced by the figure of the broker. According to Zarazaga (2014), brokers obtain political support from their clientele, not so much for their capacity to proactively control the support thereof (as sustained by Stokes et al., 2013), but by their capacity to gain the support of members of the community. The Argentineans so-called ‘punteros’, or Brazilian ‘cabos electorales’, generally act in poor municipalities, and given their grassroot knowledge of their neighbourhoods (gained by their active communitarian involvement as social workers, members of sports clubs, medical assistance centres, and so on), they capture the needs of the people and exercise political representation in those places where the State reaches very deficiently with its public policies. Therefore, they dispose of resources such as workfare programmes and municipal jobs, but it is their abilities for community networking that converts them into a relevant political actor before their political head’s patrons.
Although Zarazaga offers good arguments in favour of the good reputation of the brokers, when representing in a clientelistic manner the needs of the poorest people, many times the lack of a Weberian-cut street bureaucracy represents the presence of behaviours related to corruption. The ‘jeitinho’ in Brazil, ‘coima’ in Mexico and ‘cometa’ in Argentina are names used to designate these types of behaviour that, together with red tape, are transferred to the citizen as administrative costs (Moynihan et al., 2014) that limit their access to the public services. These scenarios of low trust bureaucracies (Peeters et al., 2018) are developed in societies with low social capital indexes and with serious difficulties to establish adequate styles of democratic governance.
Administrative reforms and accountability
The last sections of the book are dedicated to dealing with the complex dimensions of accountability and the present trends of administrative reforms. For reasons of length, I will deal with both issues jointly, making an emphasis only in some aspects of accountability that are being addressed by the most recent administrative reforms in Latin America.
Faithful to his classic classification of emerging models of reform (Peters, 1996), Peters identifies the ideas that have inspired the governments in their continuous efforts to make their public administrations more efficient: the market, de-regulation, the participation of employees and clients and the flexibilization of their structures. The specific effects of these reforms are observed in the following: (1) trends of fragmentation of the structures of the public sector, as a consequence of the process of ‘agencification’ (for the European case view: Verhoest, 2018); (2) the flexibilization of the personnel management systems (Van der Meer et al., 2007); (3) the trend to the consumerization of the government, or taking the public as consumers (Clarke et al., 2005; Pierre, 1995); and (4) the weakening of political accountability in favour of a managerial one (Gregory, 2009).
In terms of administrative reforms, Latin America has been an importer of ideas. From the colonial legacy that shaped the modern States in the 19th century up to the ideas of the new public administration of mid-20th century, and of course, the NPM of 1980 onwards (Ramos Larraburu and Milanesi, 2017), that limits the identification of a ‘Latin American model’ of administrative reforms. However, as reported in the work ‘Government at a Glance: Latin America and the Caribbean 2017’ (OECD, 2016), in recent years the governments of the region have been making comprehensive efforts towards making governments more efficient and transparent and decreasing unacceptable levels of corruption. This effort includes a set of reforms where the logics of NPM, neo-Weberian (Ramos Larraburu and Milanesi, 2018), post-NPM (Donaddeli et al., 2018; Laegreid, 2017), ‘intelligent public governance’ (Criado, 2016) and others related to the agenda of ‘new public service’ (Denhardt and Denhardt, 2007; Ramírez-Alujas and Dassen, 2016) are mixed.
Reforms such as the strengthening of the central agencies of governments (Alessandro et al., 2013) and the installation of monitoring and public expenditure evaluation systems (Kaufmann et al., 2015) have the goal of reinforcing the responsiveness of bureaucracies, as mechanisms of vertical accountability between the Government and its agencies. Instead, those who promote agendas and probity and transparency codes, protections for whistle blowers and manuals for the prevention of conflicts of interest aim at strengthening their responsibility, which is the subjective aspect of accountability (Peters, 2018a). At the same time, the creation of laws and organisms that are conductive to accessing public information and the strengthening of external organisms for the control of expenditure and administrative acts, such as Audits, Comptrollerships, Court of Audits and the Contentious Administrative Courts (Villoria forthcoming) have been destined to reinforce the mechanisms of horizontal accountability (O’Donnell, 1998). Particularly, regarding the external audit organisms, the Organisation of Latin America and Caribbean Supreme Audit Institutions (OLACEF) and the IADB have been promoting the application of international principles and standards defined by The International Organisation for Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI), regarding financial performance and compliance audits.
Unfortunately, as the report itself observes, results are very modest. Generally, the rhetoric of integrity and transparency is way ahead of the specific outcomes, as shown by the cases of bribes to political leaders of Brazil, Ecuador and Peru by the company Odebrecht. In the rankings represented by the World Justice Project (WJP) (2018) ‘The Rule of Law Index 2017–2018’, Latin America has only made significant advances in the matter of Open Government, where 10 of its countries appear in the ranking among the 50 first countries of a list of 113. The region did not perform well in all the other dimensions of rule of law, such as limits to governmental power, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory compliance, civil justice and criminal justice. In the field of fighting against corruption, only three countries Uruguay (18), Chile (26) and Costa Rica (27) show good indicators. Although corruption has not increased, it is still endemic and more exposed than in the past to citizen controls, which explains recent scandals (Kurtenbach and Nolte, 2017). Hence, it is not strange that there is low support from citizens of democratic institutions. According to data from the Latinbarómetro 2017, only 30% of Latin Americans felt satisfied with their democracy, while in 2010 that percentage was 44%. In the same sense, a recent poll from Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) shows that among Latin Americans, the support of the Churchillian statement that ‘democracy may have problems but it is better than any other form of government’ fell from 69% in 2010 to 58% in 2016–2017 (Cohen et al., 2017).
It is worth noting that although the states of Latin America and the Caribbean between 2007 and 2014 did on average increase public expenditure by 4.7% (reaching 31% of GDP), Latin America is still the most unequal region of the world. The Gini coefficient after taxes and transfers is 70% higher than the average of the OECD (2016). On the other hand, most of its countries have party systems that are not very competitive and weakly institutionalised (Mainwaring, 2018). This means that, although reinforcing the capacities of the Latin American administrative systems with new logics and management tools is necessary, this is not enough. In a recent article, Levitsky (2018) makes reference to the weaknesses of the State and of the party system that end up undermining support for democracy. As Guy Peters (2018a: 346) reminds us in his final considerations in The Politics of Bureaucracy, … the emphasis on efficiency that has been dominant in most governments for the past several decades will have to be supplemented with increased concerns about democracy and participation, and the capacity of the public administration to be a principal locus for democration action.
