Bureaucratic Politics and Administration in Chile

BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS

AND ADMINISTRATION IN CHILE

Bureaucratie

Politics and

Administration in Chile

PETER S. CLEAVES

University of California Press

Berkeley, Los Angeles, London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1974, by

The Regents of the University of California

ISBN 0-520-02448-6

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-76111

Designed by Jim Mennick

Printed in the United States of America

To Dorothy

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

PREFACE

LIST OF ACRONYMS

1 ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY AND THE POLITICAL SETTING OF CHILEAN BUREAUCRACY

ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

THE GENERAL ENVIRONMENT OF CHILEAN BUREAUCRACY

CONCLUSIONS

2 BUREAUCRATIC STRATEGIES IN FORMATION AND EXECUTION OF THE BUDGET

PAROCHIAL ASSUMPTIONS AND RESOURCE MONOPOLIES

TRADING SITUATIONS

FINANCE ATTEMPTS TO MAINTAIN THE VALUE OF ECONOMIC RESOURCES

FINANCE ATTEMPTS TO EXTRACT INFORMATION AT LEAST COST

FINANCE ATTEMPTS TO COUNTERACT RESTRICTED INFORMATION

AGENCY ATTEMPTS TO MAINTAIN THE VALUE OF INFORMATION

AGENCY ATTEMPTS TO EXTRACT SUBSIDIES AT LEAST COST

AGENCY ATTEMPTS TO SECURE INDEPENDENT FUNDS

CONCLUSIONS

3

COALITION FORMATION FOR SHORT-TERM PLANNING IN THE ECONOMIC COMMITTEE

SHORT-TERM PLANNING AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION

COALITION FORMATION IN THE ECONOMIC COMMITTEE

INSTITUTIONAL POWER AND DECISION-MAKING STYLE

DEVELOPMENT AND PLANNING

4 INCREMENTALISM AND THE POLITICAL RESOURCES OF THE ECONOMIC COMMITTEE

THE ECONOMIC COMMITTEE’S DECISION-MAKING STYLE

THE COMMITTEE IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE FREI REGIME

THE ECONOMIC COMMITTEE, THE PRIVATE SECTOR, AND THE FORCED SAVINGS PROGRAM

THE COMMITTEE AFTER THE FORCED SAVINGS PROGRAM

THE ECONOMIC COMMITTEE, SOCIAL ISSUES, AND THE PUBLIC SECTOR

RESOURCE UNCERTAINTY AND AN INCREMENTAL DECISION-MAKING STYLE

5 BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS AND ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM IN THE HOUSING SECTOR

CREATION OF THE MINISTRY OF HOUSING AND URBANISM

CARDINAL ASSUMPTIONS OF ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM

INITIAL STRATEGIES FOR ORGANIZATIONAL REFORM

THE SANITARY WORKS ISSUE

THE COMPLEXITIES OF ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM

6 POWER, AUTONOMY, AND COORDINATION IN THE MINISTRY OF HOUSING AND URBANISM

FUNCTIONAL SPECIFICITY

AUTONOMOUS STATUS

THE BREAKDOWN OF THE ORIGINAL SYSTEM

REASONS FOR FAILURE IN COORDINATION

THE CORPORATIONS’ INITIAL ADVANTAGE

CORPORATION ATTEMPTS TO CONSOLIDATE AUTHORITY

CORPORATION ATTEMPTS TO RESIST FUND TRANSFER

CORPORATION POWER AND AUTONOMY

DIVIDED MINVU REACTIONS

MINVU COUNTERATTACK

COORDINATION AND RATIONALITY

7 THE CONTRACTORS AS PUBLIC CLIENTS

BUREAUCRACY VERSUS THE CLIENT AND THE INTEREST GROUP

ORGANIZATIONAL ACCESS TO AUTHORITY

CCC SUCCESSES

CONTRACTORS’ EFFORTS TO INCREASE PROFITS

CORVI EFFORTS TO REDUCE DEPENDENCE

INTERDEPENDENCE AND ACCOMMODATION IN CLIENT RELATIONS

8 POBLADOR VIOLENCE AND ADMINISTRATIVE RESPONSE

A POSSIBLE FORMULA FOR URBAN VIOLENCE

POBLADORS, MINVU, AND CARABINEROS

URBAN LAND INVASIONS AND GOVERNMENT REACTION, 1965-1970

CONCLUSIONS

9 ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY AND BUREAUCRATIC ACTION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

POWER AND BUREAUCRACY

SHIFTING COALITIONS FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

PREPARATION AND ACTION FOR COMPREHENSIVE CHANGE

APPENDIX: FORMAL ASPECTS OF THE CHILEAN BUDGETARY CYCLE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

PREFACE

Many students of comparative politics maintain ambivalent attitudes toward the subdiscipline of public administration. On the one hand, bureaucracy is commonly believed to be a very boring subject for analysis. The idea of administrators filling out forms, issuing contracts, and attending staff meetings does not fire the imagination as does an aggressive trade union movement, an elaborate political party system, a guerrilla uprising in the hinterland, or rapid agrarian reform. On the other hand, the most casual observer cannot avoid recognizing that almost all attempts to make a nation more productive and equitable are filtered through, or depend on, the bureaucracy. Thus public administrators cannot be ignored in any strategy for industrialization, social development, or structural upheaval.

In the past, scholarly contributions to understanding bureaucracy in low-income countries have sprung from either optimistic or pessimistic assumptions. The optimistic approach stresses the instrumental role played by national bureaucracy in the development of the country: In the absence of relative equality of power among competing groups in the society, of a progress ethic, or of sufficient economic and industrial infrastructure, bureaucracy is the only institution capable of leading the country toward developmental ends. In my opinion, much of the literature on development administration has been ethnocentric and lacking in conceptual and semantic precision.

A second approach to public administration in Third World countries has focused on the bureaucrats themselves, their values, motives, and behavior. This more pessimistic current of literature places an onerous burden of responsibility on the ethical epiderm of the individual, while neglecting significant structural factors in the administrative setting. Such a line of reasoning usually begins by noting the bureaucracy’s malfunc- tioning, whether due to corruption, failure to make courageous decisions, empire-building, redundancy, or any of a series of other malaises. Since bureaucracy is typically made up of native-born administrators, the search for the root causes of bureaucratic deficiencies begins and sometimes ends with observations on the socialization process of the men holding administrative posts. Often, by severely exaggerating the true explanatory worth of these social variables, analyses of this type can explain almost anything their authors wish about in-country administrative behavior.

The present study of administrative processes in Chile leans away from both a generalized developmental approach and the gamesmanship of predicting behavior from imputed psychological variables. The concepts most frequently used here have more specific empirical referents than do those of either of these schools. Bureaucracy refers to the aggregation of state ministries, agencies, and public enterprises formally considered within executive jurisdiction. Administrative processes are routine and frequent bureaucratic activities that monitor, guide, or control interaction between two or more organizational entities, or between relevant publics and units of government. An array of actors, groups, and organizations have identifiable goals inside of or in association with public bureaucracy, and they have at their disposal resources to attempt to further their aims. If the goals of two or more groups are partially reinforcing, they may join in a coalition of more or less temporary duration. Whether inside or outside a coalition, actors devise strategies and adopt tactics to reach their goals. These maneuvers are more or less rational in terms of the way political resources are managed.

In my approach to this research, I first chose a number of ongoing processes that characterize bureaucracy: budgeting, planning, organizational reform, coordination, and client relations. The three chapters on budgeting and short-term planning examine these processes in the administration as a whole. However, limitations of time and finances prevented a thorough examination of reform, coordination, and client relations throughout the Chilean public and private sectors. Accordingly, for the latter half of the research I identified certain target institutions which interested me personally, were accessible for interviewing, and seemed to lend themselves to a political analysis of their activities: the ministries of Housing and Public Works, the large building contractors, and shantytown dwellers.

Via preliminary interviews and published and unpublished sources, and from my own knowledge of Chile, I listed the major issues and crises associated with these five processes in the different agencies, especially from 1964 to 1970. I then conducted open-ended interviews from one to three hours long with many of the major actors. These 150 interviews represent the empirical base of this research and provoked many comments on Chilean administration. In assembling these data in chapter form, I have attempted to double- and triple-check the facts as put forth and to insure that the final product is as fair and accurate a picture as possible of what transpired. In many chapters I have adopted the position of an armchair advocate, overtly speculating on the implications of the research for the responsibilities of leadership, induced administrative change, and greater public service to society.

The timing of my research contributed in practical terms to the study’s methodology, and theoretically to its conclusions. I began my interviews in Chile the day after the election of Salvador Allende. This meant that many high-level administrators from the previous regime of Eduardo Frei received me as private citizens, or at least liberated from the code of prudent silence imposed by the responsibilities of office. At the same time, their memory of the events of the previous six years was still quite fresh. In addition, it was feasible to compare notes on the Allende regime until its overthrow, with the problems faced by Frei, and to develop propositions applicable to Chilean bureaucracy under two different governing philosophies. As this book goes to press, Chile’s military rulers have initiated a wave of repression which promises to alter the past roles of the political parties and Congress, and reduce the scope of democratic choice at least over the short term. The descriptive sections of this research thus serve as a baseline study of Chilean bureaucracy before the political system entered into this authoritarian period; however, my desire has been to keep the focus on comparative bureaucracy, not on Chile.

In a certain sense I have prevailed upon the patience and goodwill of Chilean acquaintances to derive generalities from their experience to apply to other cases. For their kindness and help I am deeply grateful. In return I hope that they, and other students of Chile and Latin America, will find much in this book valuable for a historical understanding of Chilean bureaucracy, and for devising specific strategies for bureaucratic change. An earlier draft of this manuscript is in the libraries of the National Planning Office (ODEPLAN) and the Interdisciplinary Center for Urban and Regional Development (CIDU) of the Catholic University of Chile.

This research was funded by the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Fellowship Committee for 1970-71, and the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship program for 1971-72. Some of my observations on the budget were generated during my participation in a project headed by Aaron Wildavsky and Naomi Caiden, Planning and Budgeting in Low-Income Countries, sponsored by the Twentieth Century Fund. While in Chile, I received assistance from the Convenio Universidad de Chile-Universidad de California. Colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley—Warren F. Ilchman, Robert L. Ayres, and Francis Violich—encouraged me and provided helpful comments throughout the research and writing of this work. Giorgio Alberti, Lois Athey, Jorge Cauas, César Díaz-Muñoz, Clifford Kaufman, Gustavo Levy, Federico Lorca, Martin Scurrah, and Eugenio Yrarrázaval read portions of the text, corrected errors, and suggested modifications prior to the final draft. Juan Armijo and Katherine Hewitt generously helped type earlier drafts of the work. My wife, Dorothy Barcham Cleaves, continually offered moral support and intellectual stimulation, and gladly removed some of the excess verbosity from the text.

Without the collaboration of these persons and institutions, and of the informants who granted me time from their busy schedules, this research would not have been completed. I express my thanks to all of them and willingly credit them with much that is worthwhile in this book. Unable to incorporate all of their suggestions and observations, however, I must accept responsibility for the final product.

P. S. C.

Lima, Peru

September, 1973

LIST OF ACRONYMS

1

ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY AND THE POLITICAL SETTING OF CHILEAN BUREAUCRACY

Alternative instruments for political action, organization, and diffusion exist in Chile. Among these are party structures, labor unions, mass media, the armed forces, peak interest associations, and even small paramilitary and indoctrination groups. Newly elected regimes, however, have usually chosen to implement their policies through the public bureaucracy.¹ One reason for this delegation of responsibility is that Chilean presidents have had little difficulty gaining bureaucracy’s allegiance. Almost all middle and upper administrative posts are spoils of the new government. Though protected from summary dismissal and salary cuts, the displaced administrators from the previous regime are delegated minor tasks in which they lose almost all influence. Their experience is not tapped; they are in a position neither to initiate policy nor to sabotage it, if such were their intention. When the ruling group is unified, the objectives of the regime can be dictated to the bureaucracy with very little slippage.

Even reliable public officials, however, cannot be pointed down the road to goal achievement and expected to arrive by self-guidance and good intentions alone. Administrative subcultures permeating all complex organizations result in skewed resource flows and displaced goals at every level of authority.

This fact lies behind two very important questions about bureaucracy.

First, what elements internal to an organization explain administrative behavior? Second, what is the relationship between changes in an agency’s setting and its internal operations? This book, treating these inquiries as central themes, examines how organizations can be controlled, reinforced, or enervated for the implementation or thwarting of public policy. It proceeds from a consideration of generic features of organization to a series of case studies that generate propositions with comparative applicability. These case studies show that Chilean public agencies compete over scarce resources and often take advantage of supportive outside groups to maintain or increase their operating capacity. The strategies and tactics employed by clients and public agencies to gain an upper hand in bureaucracy and to mitigate the power of competitors have demonstrable effects on administrative processes such as budgeting, planning, coordination, and reform. They also have connotations for executive behavior, goal mutation, and organizational productivity.

The theoretical construct used in this book assumes that all organizations share at least three common features: resources, goals, and environment. Resources are elements of power valued for their exchangeability in the satisfaction of perceived wants. Organizational goals describe a future state of affairs denoting material objects or tangible services. Often overall institutional goals are not easily distinguished from inwardly oriented objectives (e.g., personal welfare, job security), which induce cooperation from the organizational members, and other functional ends (e.g., efficiency, effectiveness) important for maintenance and survival.2 3

Environment refers to those entities with their own resources and goals which operate outside the boundaries of the organization under study. Organizations are most sensitive to the activities of reference groups or clients in their task or immediate environment who exchange resources with the organization in function of their perceived interests. In addition, cyclical or sudden events in the organization’s contextual or general environment may alter the availability of resources to both clients and the organization, fundamentally changing the nature of their interaction.

ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY

This book owes a heavy intellectual debt to a number of well- known treatises on general organizational theory. These authors and their work are discussed in greater detail below. An equally important influence, however, has been the inability of much comparative administrative theory to answer basic questions on Chilean bureaucracy satisfactorily. I have found it necessary to reject two of the most common approaches to comparative administration because of their lack of explanatory power and their apparent biases. The detrimental values school attributes bureaucratic rigidity and conservatism to the bureaucrat’s socialization within a particular cultural milieu, which implies that poor countries pretty much deserve the bureaucracy with which they are plagued, because bureaucratic values mirror those of society as a whole. Alternatively, the writings on development administration decry the technical incapacity of something arbitrarily called development administration to reach the unspecified but presumably desirable goals of development. To place this book in perspective, therefore, this first chapter reviews several propositions purporting to explain individual behavior in bureaucracy and bureaucracy’s relation to Third World societies. Contrasting these efforts with the concepts, and their empirical referents, employed in subsequent chapters makes my approach more explicit and introduces a certain amount of background information on Chilean bureaucracy.

The Previous Socialization Theory

A number of writers have used cultural and class values to describe less laudatory aspects of non-Anglo-Saxon bureaucracy. Lucian Pye’s perspective on the Burmese bureaucrats, for example, stems from his observation that they suffered from three serious shortcomings in administering the government’s polity: ambivalence over the nature and forms of progress and modernization; profound confusion over the difference between ritual and rationality in administrative operations; and, most important, a fundamental, all-pervasive lack of communication within the bureaucracy.⁴ During his inquiry into Burmese personality, Pye discerned two Oriental cultural traits that served as foundations for much of his analysis: the Burmese was highly motivated by the contradictory social forces of awza and an-ah-deh.⁵ Awza—similar to power, influence, and prestige—led the male to try to aggrandize himself in relation to his peers. Concurrently, the Burmese was severely restrained in his outward aggressiveness by an-ah-deh, probably best translated as selflessness, or generosity and meekness before his fellow human beings.

If in die Burmese administration there was a search for status, crippling lack of communication, poor coordination, exaggerated corruption, form without substance, and an obsession with personal popularity and career mobility, awza was probably at fault. If at the same time there was insecurity, fear of face-to-face relations, intention without deeds, indecision, suspicion and mistrust, inconsequential actions, ritualism, loneliness, and fatalism, an-ah-deh was to blame.⁶ These values were not necessarily mutually exclusive, and many of the problems of the Burmese bureaucrat issued from the fact that these driving forces had to be reconciled, no matter how painful the internalization process.

Though he discusses structural constraints, Fred Riggs also prefers to explain administrative behavior through value patterns prevalent in Third World society.⁷ For Riggs, overlapping, fossilization, and attenuation in bureaucracy result from the fact that administrators are subjected to contradictory social forces. They are inextricably caught in the ambiguity of more modern (diffracted) and traditional (fused) value orientations. Incapable of coping with the movement toward modernity, they reflect a curious duality in their behavior, resulting in an epidemic of characteristics typical of prismatic or transitional bureaucracy: attainment rather than achievement, elects (a combination of sects and cliques), selectivism, polyfunctionalism, formalism, nonenforcement, double-talk, administrative prodigality, nepotism, and normlessness.

One problem with this approach is that any administrative pattem imaginable can be attributed to one of these two value strains. The authors were remiss in not indicating why awza and an-ah-deh, or fusion and prismatism, did not motivate behavior highly appropriate for a goal-oriented bureaucracy. The former might have spawned decisiveness, perseverance, bold decision-making, courage in the face of attack, experimentation, and emphasis on personal excellence; while the latter might have increased the frequency of honest, generous, and modestly confident bureaucrats in public administration. Each author selected the most detrimental manifestations of each tendency in describing his subjects, which leads one to question the validity or desirability of this approach for replicable research.

Their attempt was reminiscent of early psychosociological attempts to explain why the Hispanic American race was incapable of keeping up with Northern Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century. For many writers the answer lay in the pathological mixture of the bad traits of both Indian and Spaniard after the conquest. The intention and method of one of these authors, Carlos Octavio Bunge in Nuestra América, were very similar to those of Lucian Pye:

The practical objective of this work is to describe, with all of its vices and peculiarities, the political life of the Hispanic American peoples. In order to understand it, I must first penetrate the collective psychology that engenders it.⁸

Bunge deduced that the colonial Spaniard was ritualistic, conformist, arrogant, indolent, and discordant. He intermarried with the Indian, who was fatalistic, passive, and vengeful. The unfortunate cultural progeny was a Latin American oriented toward laziness, sadness, and arrogance.⁹ The concrete manifestations of this mixture were creole laziness (pereza criolla)—responsible for an absence of activity, discipline, method, and work hygiene—and creole fibbing (mentira criolla)—a morbid tendency to exaggerate and a total lack of precision. Perhaps overly infatuated with his schema, Bunge could not resist lambasting fellow Latin Americans for their psychological disharmony, degenerate semi-sterility, disregard for the law, lack of a moral sense, and tendencies toward envy, literary sophistication, inconstancy, melancholy, and napoleonism. In this case, caudillismo (tyranny) was a direct outcome of pereza criolla. In a situation of social laziness, it was only natural that the most active and venal should rise to the top.

From a different angle, but still dealing in values, James Petras attempted to explain bureaucratic output in Chile by the social background of the bureaucracy’s administrative elites.¹⁰ Basing his observations on a large-scale survey carried out in 1965, he concluded that: (1) Chilean bureaucrats were not oriented toward development; (2) the lower- class members of the Chilean bureaucracy were more likely to hold modern and progressive attitudes; and (3) the upper reaches of the administration tended to be characterized by uniquely conservative postures toward social change—all of which could be explained through the bureaucrat’s social background. The administrator’s position

on issues tends to be related to the social stratum into which he was born. The bureaucracy may be organized rationally … but social background still determines attitudes.¹¹

Substantiation of this argument depended on the existence of significantly different attitudes toward social change among the upper and lower members of the bureaucracy. The data presented, however, were hardly apodictic; despite differences in class and hierarchy, orientations within bureaucratic subgroups were remarkably similar, as Table 1 indicates. If the administrative elite were self-interested, so were the service and unskilled personnel; if the professionals and technicians saw the best hope for the country in a traditional liberal education, so did the office workers; if the semiprofessionals were severely harmed by runaway inflation, the same could be said for the technical assistants.

Petras mentioned two agencies in the Chilean bureaucracy which were actively pursuing innovative goals at the time he conducted his research. To substantiate his argument, he contrasted the preferences of the administrative elites with the performance of the Agrarian Reform Corporation (CORA) and the Institute for Agricultural Development (INDAP).

Thus, the reforms supported by the elite for the campesinos are not the structural reforms advocated by CORA or INDAP (the government’s agrarianreform agencies) but incremental changes pursued by Radical-party governments.¹¹

The admission that upper-middle-class administrators in CORA and INDAP used their organization for change makes it difficult for the author to sustain his thesis that class background is a predominant influence on the orientation of Chilean public agencies. Indeed, Petras’ study suggests that many administrative characteristics are determined more by vertical than by horizontal factors. That is, competition between agencies is often a more important indicator of bureaucracy’s impact on society than are the relations between superiors and subordinates in separate administrative entities.

Petras jumped all the way from manifest class values to organizational output (development-oriented administrative behavior) in one move. Pye and Riggs made a quantum leap in their analyses from esoteric cultural and religious values to bureaucratic behavior, completely skipping over or minimizing the structural factors affecting career uncertainty, the rewards for indecision, the disincentives for individualism, the fear of censure, and the obligatory conformity to administrative routine. If Pye and Riggs explained everything through their own brands of yin and yang, they may have explained very little. Bureaucratic apathy, indecisiveness, torpor, a desire for status accrual, poor communication and coordination, extensive formalism, cynicism, and general wariness of

"Petras, p. 292.

TABLE 1. COMMITMENT TO SOCIAL CHANGE: HIGH-PRIORITY RATING OF ISSUES AMONG STRATA OF BUREAUCRACY (In percent)

SOURCE: James Petras, Politics and Social Forces in Chilean Development, p. 333.

other administrative units are hardly unique to Third World bureaucracy. There is little in these analyses which proves that cultural or class values are the most important, or even one of the more plausible, explanations of why bureaucrats act the way they do.

The Development Administration Approach

Works imputing behavioral propensities to administrators on the basis of criteria enthetic to bureaucracy have provided few links between culture (or class), personality, role, role-set, and bureaucratic structure, precisely because they have not considered individual inducements within the organizational context. The development administrative literature, an alternative approach to studying comparative bureaucracy, has been deficient in defining bureaucratic goals and administrative structure and assaying their effect on the fulfillment of social ends.¹²

In studies of development administration, the principal independent variable is the activity and output of administration, while the dependent variable is development itself.¹⁸ Operationalizing these variables for research has proved almost impossible, for two reasons. First, the approach transforms administration into a general concept called development administration, which tends to remove bureaucratic units from an empirical base and infer to them standard goals that often do not withstand close scrutiny. Second, this approach does not treat development as a concept, but as a concrete fact. The vulgarization of development conjures up the impression that everyone knows exactly what the term means. But that is hardly the case.¹⁴ Even though academicians have con-

¹⁸ What is meant by development administration can be culled from several quotes on the subject. Development administration in government refers to the processes of guiding an organization toward the achievement of progressive political, economic, and social objectives that are authoritatively determined in one manner or another.'* Development can be described as a concerted effort in various interrelated fields leading toward high forms of social and economic life. Its administration is a continuous process of formulating, reformulating, and implementing a set of related plans, programs, operations, activities, and undertakings directed at realizing stated developmental ends in a prescribed time sequence by optimal means.'* "It is necessary to modernize parliaments, to make the executive versatile, to shake the bureaucrats out of their routine, to revamp the tax and budget systems, to mobilize all moral, intellectual, and economic forces in an effort to attain projected goals. All this poses a challenge to public administration. Up to now we have given attention to planning for development, but very little to the administration of development.'*

The study of development administration can help to identify the conditions under which a maximum rate of development is sought and the conditions under which it has been attained. As a part of the policy sciences, the end-object of such research would be to relate different administrative roles, practices, organizational arrangements, and procedures to the maximizing of development objectives. Interest in personnel, budgeting, and O and M would be confined to a study of the manner in which these aspects of administration contribute to or negate development. In research terms, the ultimate dependent variable would be the development goals themselves.** The student of development administration can help discover which [developmental goals] under what circumstances seem to lead most fully to the achievement of development objectives." In order, these quotes are by Edward W. Weidner in Heady and Stokes, Papers (p. 98); Aryeh Attir (p. 79), Donald Stone (pp. 54-55), and Guillermo Nannetti (p. 2) in Kriesberg, Public Administration; and Weidner (pp. 99, 103, and 99-100) in Heady and Stokes.

¹⁴ John Gunnell has pointed out that a considerable step lies between the definitions of development and its operationalization for scientific research: It is unlikely that we shall succeed in clarifying our ideas about development administration until we arrive at a more meaningful concept or theoretical definition of development.** He adds that in discussion of development, there is often either an immediate redefinition in terms of another concept such as ‘modernization,* ‘industrialization,’ ‘Westernization,* ‘self-sustained growth,’ ‘structural differentiation,’ and/or a shift to a consideration of the requisite conditions, causes, goals, or impact of development. Although this may be quite relevant, development in the end seems to connote much, whereas its denotation is vague and its defining characteristics tend to remain unspecified. Gunnell, Development, Social Change, and Time," in Dwight Waldo (ed.), Temporal Dimensions, pp. 48-49.

sumed reams describing, subdividing, categorizing, and then reconciling the different components of development (such as economic growth, mobilization, and institutionalization), the nature of the concept remains as controversial and varied as before.¹⁶ The use of such indefinite concepts in both the independent and dependent variables may mean that no proposition can ever be put forth linking development administration with development in any meaningful way.¹⁶

It is precisely this vagueness that enables national elites to use the term development to disguise the true extent of their commitment to innovation. Even when leadership declares that certain parts of the bureaucracy have been elected to carry out policies connoting far-reaching change, the battle is only half won. What is often not visible is the continual wrestling match between the chosen agencies and other bureaucratic units over very scarce resources. The aims of the traditional units of government may not be patently anti-developmentalist, but because of the nature of complex bureaucracy, some overt or covert conflicts are inevitable. Semantic aspects of the competition need never refer to change or social justice. Discussion usually revolves around more technical items, such as the quality of essential services, the return on investment, fiscal equilibrium, full employment, or monetary stability.¹⁷

The relative productivity of bureaucratic units is ultimately a function of their access to resources, and their resource base in part is an outcome of bureaucratic politics. When technical discussion over fiscal equilibrium, full employment, or monetary stability evolves into politics,

"I feel that the concept of development is not very useful for conducting indepth research on specific bureaucracies, since bureaucracy apart from the nature of its goals does little or nothing different when it contributes to development from when it does not. Usually it serves little purpose to consider a bureaucracy in the abstract, as an integral whole acting on society as a single force. Rather, it is more appropriate to conceive of it as divided in goals, resources, and skills, and having a variable impact depending on its field of activity and institutional coherence. Compare with Charles Perrow, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, p. vii.

¹⁴ Development administration as first introduced in the literature is employed here as an example of the type of systems-level theorizing that relates to neither resources nor structure, and only vaguely to purposes. This approach has now mutated into a new form with greater conceptual rigor and policy implications. See Joseph Eaton (ed.), Institution Building and Development: From Concepts to Application, especially the contribution by Milton Esman. While institutionbuilding emphasizes purposeful administrative behavior and resource management, its theoretical relevancy is unnecessarily weakened by deliberate ignoring of the effects of violence on administration, or coercion on society—which, though distasteful subjects, give considerable insight into administrative behavior in a turbulent environment.

¹⁷ James Q. Wilson has pointed out that of all the groups interested in bureaucracy, those concerned with fiscal integrity usually play the winning hand. Wilson, The Bureaucratic Problem, in Alan A. Altshuler (ed.), The Politics of the Federal Bureaucracy, p. 28.

the agency attempting to implement innovative policies tends to be at a disadvantage. It is usually newer, less allied with powerful clients in the political community, often staffed by younger personnel—and, most important, dealing in areas of social action where the marginal utility of investment is difficult to measure in economic terms. If it has little money, few qualified personnel, and stringent legislation, and is abandoned by political leadership when it requests cooperation or runs into trouble in the outside world, its impact cannot be very great. Likewise, if traditional agencies are financially solvent and have consistent political support, prestige inside and outside of government, and wide legal latitude, they are more likely to respond to and reinforce special interests or social purposes consistent with their organizational goals. While the concept of development administration is too soft a tool for analytical precision, it is quite probable that administration for nondevelopmental ends is a fair description of the majority of public bureaucracies.

How did agencies within Chilean bureaucracy rank in terms of these criteria? Figure 1 tentatively distributes the most important public organizations in the Chilean government according to the amount of political support they enjoyed during the 1960’s and whether their institutional goals denoted social change. The figure indicates that within Chilean bureaucracy many of the less innovative units tended to profit from greater political backing. A majority of the agencies called innovative clustered together in a condition of low general support.

At least two observations can be made concerning Figure 1. First, despite the disadvantages of change-oriented agencies, Chilean bureaucracy on the whole during this period should not be considered stagnant. Agriculture, Housing, and Education affected large segments of the population and acted as aggressive change agents in the society, not to mention the less dramatic contributions of Health, Planning, and the other agencies not receiving such consistent support.

Second, it is impossible to ignore the interrelationships of individual agencies in the study of comparative administration. For instance, one of the more common ways for an organization to consolidate its operating influence within a sector is to be classified as a decentralized agency. In Chile, these organizations were also known as semi-fiscal, autonomous corporations, or state industries. Decentralized agencies profited from direct authority links to the president of the country; they usually had a large percentage of guaranteed revenue; they were liberated from sending their regulatory decrees to the General Comptroller’s office for prior approval; they could change their organizational chart and number of personnel without going through Congress; and they could set their

FIGURE 1. THE POTENTIAL INNOVATIVE IMPACT OF CHILEAN BUREAUCRACY

salary scales above the levels in the centralized portion of government. Decentralized agencies, and those centralized agencies preferring autonomous status, claimed that they need to carry out their functions with extensive institutional agility to respond more quickly to changes in their environments and to perform their functions with fewer bureaucratic hindrances.

The more influential agencies in Chilean bureaucracy are identified by the criterion of political support for their activities, often reflected in their decentralized status. The rule of thumb is that decentralized agencies in high-priority sectors are considerably more influential than their centralized counterparts in low-priority ministries. This rule leads to an ordinal power scale which, though not perfectly consistent throughout government, is helpful in predicting the outcome of internal bureaucratic competition. The organizations with the most favorable configuration of resources during the period studied are the decentralized agencies in boxes 1 and 2 in Figure 1 (such as the Central Bank, INDAP, and CORA). They are followed by the decentralized agencies in boxes 3 and 4 and centralized agencies in boxes 1 and 2 (such as the Development Corporation, CORFO, the National Health Service, and Public Works).¹⁸ Finally, the least favored are the centralized agencies in boxes 3 and 4 (such as the Department of Prisons, Indigenous Affairs, and the Labor Arbitration Board).

The concepts of development administration have not been useful in focusing attention on factors such as these which appear to be crucial for estimating the impact of bureaucracy on society.

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

In my opinion, the two approaches to comparative administration examined above do not hold the prospect of either contributing to integrated and comprehensive theory or serving as guides for policy implementation. Class and value differences between and within bureaucracies may contribute so little to explaining administrative behavior that analysts might do well to lump them together with other unexplained and unmeasured factors in the error term of some hypothetical equation. Moreover, variations in bureaucracy’s relationship with society from country to country appear to be differences more of degree than of kind.¹⁹ One might argue that Riggsian neoterisms derived from observations in Asia are useful for describing the disintegration of Anglo-Saxon administration.²⁰ I am convinced, however, that a more promising strategy is to refine and build on the wealth of concepts and insights in classical North American and European administrative theory to study bureaucracy everywhere.

¹⁸ With the arrival of the Allende regime, the ministry of Economy gained new stature vis-a-vis Finance, because of the prestige of the minister and the key role Economy played in the expropriation of large industries. As a result, one could say that Economy (and CORFO) then moved up to box 2 while Finance (and the Central Bank) fell to box 3.

This idea is consistent with a quote by Charles Parrish: It is hoped that this divorcing of organizational concepts and political development theory may be beneficial and may, if pursued, provide a greater understanding of the similarity of the problems presented by organizations in society, whether that society is a rich, industrialized one such as the United States, or a relatively poor, industrializing one such as Chile. Parrish, Bureaucracy, Democracy, and Development: Some Considerations Based on the Chilean Case," last page.

*° In arguing that the work accomplished by Riggs and others is at this point in time of great practical relevance to the conditions of American political-administrative life, Kenneth Jowitt referred to the fact that many of the phenomena which supposedly characterize underdeveloped or backward states are currently visible in ‘postindustrial,’ ‘end of ideology* America. He felt that the form of Riggs’ theory is appropriate for generating a conceptual breakthrough necessary for raising consciousness and highlighting the political, cultural, and ideological variables in decision-making settings. Jowitt, Comment: The Relevance of Comparative Public Administration, in Frank Marini (ed.), Toward a New Pubic Administration: The Minnowbrook Perspective, pp. 250-260.

What follows is not an exhaustive review of classical organizational theory.²¹ The main purpose of the exercise is to identify and characterize the concepts most commonly used in this study of Chilean bureaucracy, such as resources, structure, hierarchy, goals, tactical exchange, and environment. Except for the concept of contextual environment, the reader will find few empirical referents specific to the Chilean case in the next few pages. Nevertheless, he should keep these concepts in mind for the sake of clarifying the subsequent empirical chapters concerning inter- organizational competition over the Chilean budget, short-term planning, administrative reform, and certain types of client relations. The development of this construct continues in Chapter 9 with a number of propositions summarizing the work as a whole.

An emphasis on resources and strategies places this research in a more general body of literature called political economy. Charles Anderson, who has written extensively on Latin America, notes one of the important principles of the new political economy when he states that every government, after all, has a finite quantity of resources at its disposal. Its capacity to effect change cannot be greater than the resources available to the society of which it is a part. ²² Warren Ilchman and Norman Uphoff have developed a model which makes political economy especially relevant to the study of Third World Countries.

Each regime is differentially endowed with a supply of resources. Combined in policies, resources are the means by which a regime induces or coerces compliance in order to implement its objectives for the policy. Policies of different regimes can be compared over time and among countries on the basis of the comparative efficiency of different combinations of resources. These resources, and their currencies, used or withheld, constitute the regime’s factors of political production.²³

Authors using the political economy approach have tended to emphasize the relationships between political leadership and the various organ

n The eclectic discussion of these authors cannot do justice to their arguments. Their contribution even to the approach used here goes much beyond that recorded explicitly on the following pages, and I refer the reader to the original works.

²³ Charles W. Anderson, Politics and Economic Change in Latin America, p. 4. See also R. L. Curry, Jr., and L. L. Wade, A Theory of Political Exchange: Economic Reasoning in Political Analysis.

²³ Warren F. Ilchman and Norman T. Uphoff, The Political Economy of Change, p. 32. Mayer N. Zaid has attempted to apply political economy to the study of bureaucracy in his Political Economy: A Framework for Comparative Analysis, in Zaid (ed.), Power in Organizations, pp. 221-261. Zaid joined with Gary L. Wamsley in The Political Economy of Public Organizations. Also see Jerry L. Weaver, Bureaucracy during a Period of Social Change: The Guatemalan Case; Gary W. Wynia, Politics and Planners: Economic Development Policy in Central America; and Oscar Oszlak, Diagnóstico de la Administración Pública Uruguaya.

ized sectors of the society. One of these sectors is public administration itself, which can facilitate or frustrate the government’s ultimate aims. However, there is no implied restriction within political economy making complex bureaucracy a consistent and unified whole. Competition among bureaucratic units comes to the fore throughout the process of policy-making and in the subsidizing and implementation of programs. In the quotes above, substituting the words group or agency for government and regime helps relate political economy to bureaucratic politics among and within agencies, between agencies and political leadership, between clients and agencies, and between relevant publics and political leadership, through bureaucracy.

Inducements and Resources

Chester Barnard’s main concern in his book The Functions of the Executive was with the inducements for individuals to join and cooperate in organizations. He identified two characteristics of persons which were similar to organizational attributes: the individual’s powers in the situation, and his determination or volition within the limits set by his powers.²⁴ Barnard joined questions of power and purpose throughout his discussion of incentives and inducements to cooperation. He noted that above a subsistence level, the opportunities for distinction, prestige, personal power, and the attainment of dominating position are much more important than material rewards in the development of all sorts of organizations. … ²⁸ The economy of incentives, or the calculation of the precise combination of incentives and of persuasion that will be both effective and feasible, is a matter of great delicacy. ²⁶ Herbert Simon was more explicit than Barnard in recognizing the crucial role of resources as primary, though not irreducible, elements of organization. Simon treated authority as a tool which in strategic combination with other resources can achieve compliance-related aims, such as permitting coordination of activity and securing information in making decisions.²⁷ Information too is a marketable resource which often serves personal and group interests. It

tends to be transmitted upward in the organization only if (1) its transmission will not have unpleasant consequences for the transmitter, or (2) the superior will hear of it anyway from other channels, and it is better to tell him first, or (3) it is information that the superior needs in his dealings with his own superiors, and he will be displeased if he is caught without it. …

" Chester I. Barnard,