Empirical Characterization of the Latin American Bureaucracies: Configuratios and Roles in the Process of Public Policy Making

This paper provides a balance of the situation of bureaucracies in Latin America. It offers both quantitative and qualitative analysis based on data collected from the countries through a series of studies sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank. Bureaucracies are categorized in different groups according to their features and the roles they can play in the policy making process: clientelistic, administrative, meritocratic, and parallel bureaucracies are the names we used to characterize the different nature of the institution according to countries and policy sectors. A final section, an attempt to derive conclusions of the meaning of this analysis, is made in terms of the efforts of State reform and modernization.