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The politics of bureaucracy: A view from Latin America

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