By Iana Alves de Lima
Reformist proposals often aim to change how the public sector recruits top managers for executive positions. In general, they aspire to replace political appointments – also known as patronage – with merit-based systems. Indeed, several studies show the importance of a strong merit-based bureaucracy for building state capacities. Patronage has a bad connotation and is recurrently blamed for poor governmental performance. Nevertheless, political appointments persist as a form of recruitment in several countries, especially in Latin America (Panizza, Peters, and Larraburu 2023; Grindle 2012). Why is that? Is there something we are missing?
Figure 1 displays the Merit Index Score, an assessment of to what extent hiring in the public sector is open to all candidates and based on technical criteria, whether dismissals are motivated by political change, and whether there are safeguard mechanisms against arbitrary decisions. Even Brazil, the country with higher scores and which possesses the oldest and most stablished merit-based system in the region, still distributes all Federal Executive directive positions through patronage – here defined as “the power of political actors to appoint individuals by discretion to nonelective positions in the public sector” (Panizza, Peters, and Larraburu 2023, 5).
Even though power is increasingly more dispersed and governments may struggle to manage fragmented coalitions and social groups (Ansell and Gash 2008; Newman 2005), it is unwise to extensively distribute top-level positions to people who cannot deliver public policy. Governments will be held accountable one way or the other. Yet, governments in the region resist giving up the prerogative of patronage, and it is hard to believe that it is purely due to the value of these jobs as coalition goods.
In addition to the long history of patronage recruitment (Grindle 2012), Latin America is known for shredded executives – combining highly fragmented multipartisan systems and the need for coalitions to expand support for minority presidents (Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power 2018). This adds complexity to how to maneuver public policy, since there are multiple political players with competing authority that expect to have a say on executive business. This organizational complexity requires a skilled manager who not only understands the technicalities of public management but also is perceptive about how these democratic political interactions unfold within the executive branch – and knows how to maneuver through them.
We know little about technical-political executive governance tasks and what is required of the individuals who perform them. I suggest that we cast aside our prejudgments that simplistically link patronage to corruption, and critically assess how we conceptualize bureaucratic capacities. If there are executive tasks that are both technical and political, there should be a model of bureaucratic capacity that incorporates a political dimension, reflecting the ability of top managers to produce actions inside public administration. The goal of this piece is to discuss new developments in the study of political appointees and point out blind spots that we need to face in order to advance this research agenda. This is crucial to understand state capacities in Latin America and to inform future reforms.
The technical-political divide
Studies on bureaucratic politics have long been guided by a research tradition that sets the realm of technical expertise apart from the realm of politics (Weber 2019; 1948; Wilson 1989; Sager and Rosser 2009). The idea that good public bureaucracies are non-political is widespread in academic work (Peters 2010), as well as in public opinion in general. It is not unusual to read that a government decision was based on “political reasons” rather than technical ones. Of course, there are bad governmental decisions everywhere, and there is no issue in pointing out when an administration overlooks critical information for policy success. However, not considering political issues as a matter of successful public administration, and villainizing consideration of politics altogether, is problematic. Debating on the proper intersection between politics and bureaucracy should not be prohibited since that balance is, I dare to say, at the very center of how we keep democracies operating.
Even though this agenda may seem like a minefield, scholarship on bureaucratic politics has not been oblivious to it. For instance, the belief that public administration should be kept separate from politics has been challenged during the recent COVID-19 crisis. As we watched countries with high state capacities failing to respond to the pandemic, scholarship realized that important political factors were not accounted for in the way we conceptualize such capacities (Kavanagh and Singh 2020; Greer et al. 2020; Woo 2021; Salazar, Zeng, and Arbetman-Rabinowitz 2022). Variables commonly cited as measures of policy capacity – such as infrastructure – were not sufficient to explain policy delivery. That sparked the drive for better understanding of the political dimension of state capacity.
Recent contributions from political science also approach the interplay between politics and bureaucracy and claim that political connections may be valuable in scenarios of low state capacity (Toral 2022; Rich 2019). Nevertheless, they do not explore technical-political governance in a broader sense. Diving further into the subject, recent research on Latin America has identified multiple roles played by political appointees in the region (Panizza, Peters, and Larraburu 2023). Authors identify four major types of political appointments: party professionals, programmatic technocrats, political apparatchiks, and political agents. Party professionals are those who combine both partisan trust and technical skill and are common in top bureaucratic positions. Programmatic technocrats are independent specialists with no partisan affiliation. On the other hand, political apparatchiks hold partisan affiliation and political capital, working as “brokers” inside the government and between parties and their constituencies. Political agents also possess political capital, but not through party connections – their relationships and loyalties are to a specific leader.
The identification of such roles has multiple implications for the understanding of public administration. Firstly, patronage systems vary widely. Not all bureaucrats are the same – they play different roles that are important in different ways for sustaining democratic political systems. Understanding how these roles are distributed among different levels of government and what the implications are for executive governance should be examined in more depth, especially when talking about high level positions.
The technical-political divide belief system has affected the advance of this research agenda on top-level appointees – we hardly know anything about what these people do, what competencies are required for the job, and the implications for internal processes in public organizations. This is not to disregard the importance of merit-based bureaucracies, but to acknowledge that some positions play crucial political roles that should be deeply investigated. This investigation is no easy task and requires a different set of research tools.
Opening the “black box” of top management positions
The focus on measuring results in public administration and management studies compromised the fields’ ability to understand process and context, which calls for efforts to open the “black box” of public administration (Elías 2023). When talking about top-level appointees, we often hear that they hold partisan and/or personal trust of their leadership and that they engage in political tasks, but what are those specifically? What are these technical-political tasks, what are the competencies required to perform them, how is trust mobilized to get the job done, and what are the implications for executive governance? This is a huge box to open and one that requires qualitative work.
I approach these questions in my dissertation research by conducting interpretive grounded theory fieldwork with current and former top-level political appointees in Brazil. The goal is to conceptualize political capacity based on these individuals’ actions inside public administration. Top-level executives are hybrid positions in essence – with both technical and political attributes required, and therefore need to be filled by hybrid professionals. These technical-political governance tasks are diverse and range from opportunity-raising to purpose-building inside public bureaucracies.
Public policy does not happen simply because a law is enacted. Not only is there a wild journey between policy design and policy implementation – processes that also occur simultaneously –but there are also always obstacles on the way, including limited resources, opposition, social groups pressure, veto players, and actors with competing authority over the policies. It is crucial to recruit people who can navigate this context; ministers and presidents cannot handle it all by themselves. As an example, the following excerpt from one of my interviews exemplifies the political aspects of opportunity raising:
“Now, I always had an ease in formulating policy because of this competence in politics, so I knew what [the Minister] would find interesting, I knew what the press would find interesting, I knew what [the President] would find interesting, I knew what the marketing specialist would find interesting… I knew what I could propose and what I could not propose, so that made me mediate the formulations and managed to identify windows of opportunity, being able to be in a meeting where I had a problem with one side and I proposed an alternative, so I facilitated that”.
(Political appointee between 2011-2016, Health)
The ability to map key players, the understanding of different interests, and the accurate assessment of policy viability based on disputes among such interests is essential to build policy in complex political environments like the several coalitional presidential countries in Latin America. Nevertheless, capacity-building is not only related to designing policy but also to managing bureaucracy, as in the example of purpose-building tasks. Contrary to what we often see in management studies, embedding technical work into politics may be a powerful tool for purpose-building inside public organizations. The possibility of understanding your work as part of a broader political picture might boost motivation and a sense of meaningfulness. In the excerpt below, a political appointee who previously worked with as a political advisor in the Senate shares his experience when he arrived at the Ministry of Justice:
“They didn’t talk to the Congress. The technicians [civil servants] were only making a legal report on legislative bills, and that was it. […] I said: no. First, we start working with what the Constitution and Justice Committee agenda is, what the Congress agenda is, which of these bills we have already given an opinion on, which we haven’t, the ones we have already agreed with, then let’s go after the senators. This made the technicians understand the relevance of what they were doing. Before, they didn’t even know whether the bill had been voted. Suddenly, I was talking to the senators, I had to explain our positions. That greatly increased my legitimacy, increased the meaning of the work they were doing, and that came from my ability to articulate.”
(Political appointee between 2004-2011, Justice)
We still have much to learn on how executive governance actually works at higher echelons of public bureaucracy. Opening the “black box” of public administration in Latin America could provide a more believable portrait of how executive governance unfolds and help us understand why patronage persists. There is also an opportunity for overcoming the technical-political divide and incorporate the analysis of politics to management studies.
State capacity literature could benefit greatly from incorporating the analysis of individual agency when exploring technical-political governance. Political capacity should not be treated only as a static institutional feature but a toolbox of informal resources and strategies to manage the political relations inherent to policymaking. This has multiple implications for the study of modern states, from the accurate measurement of performance to the understanding of authority-building inside public organizations and the capacity to promote institutional change. A large avenue for research is open and requires multiple strategies and creativity, one that should bring context-rich analysis embedded in a South-centered point of view.
Iana Alves de Lima is a Ph.D. Candidate in Public Administration and Government at Fundação Getulio Vargas’s Sao Paulo School of Business Administration (FGV EAESP), and received an MA and BA in Political Science from the Institute of Political Science, University of Brasilia (UnB). She was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at UC Berkeley in 2023-24.
References
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