Civil Service Reform in Latin America: External Referents Versus Own Capacities

Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 27, No. 4, pp.
554573, 2008
2008 The Authors
Journal compilation 2008 Society for Latin American Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing,
554 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Civil Service Reform in Latin
America: External Referents
Versus Own Capacities
CARLOS RAMI AND MIQUEL SALVADOR
Univesitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
In the context of state reform and democratisation in Latin America,
reinforcing public institutions becomes critical to sustaining and con-
solidating realised gains. In this area, civil service reforms are critical.
But civil service reform initiatives in Latin American countries were
designed with different degrees of compatibility with countries admin-
istrative traditions and with the role played by the civil service within
the political system. The results of different initiatives are described in
a brief review of six key features of nine Latin American civil services.
Discussion of these results allows us to draw conclusions about the
capacity to generate learning dynamics. A new conception of the civil
service and its role in the political system appears more evident, unless
the required political consensus for implementing and consolidating the
new reform strategy for most Latin American public administrations is
not conrmed.
Keywords : civil service , institutions , institutional change , Latin America ,
New Public Management , public administration.
In the process of state reform and democratisation in Latin America, a prominent
factor that has hampered the consolidation of gains is the instability of public institu-
tions. The high degree of instability in public administrations is clearly related to their
civil service management institution, which is based, in many cases, on patronage. In
this institution, in which the most important political actors implicitly participate, the
political convention is that the winner takes all and so can determine appointments
to all administrative positions.
Debate on this point relates not to narrowly conceived technocratic solutions
for improving civil service subsystems, but to the politicisation of public admin-
istrations in Latin America. A rst ingredient in the debate about the degree of
politicisation is the degree of condence, both political and professional, that the
party of the incoming government had in the administrators who had exercised
their functions under the previous governing party. A second ingredient opposes a
conception of administration as a resource that the winning party can use to reward
its supporters with posts or privileges, in favour of a conception of administration
Civil Service Reform
2008 The Authors. Journal compilation 2008 Society for Latin American Studies
Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 27, No. 4 555
as an organisation that serves the public interest along the lines indicated by the
elected government.
This article is concerned with the extent to which the reforms in the public admin-
istrations of Latin America advance this debate, attending to the external referents that
are taken into account and to the development of countries own capacities to change
the aforementioned institution. This argument is especially focused on the relevance of
external referents that are derived from other administrative contexts, with different
values and institutions, and which are insufciently adapted to the formal and informal
circumstances of Latin American public administrations.
For several decades, public administration has been characterised by modernisation
drives, which have frequently appeared on government agendas ( Collier and Collier,
2002; Peters, 2002 ). The promotion and design of such modernisation programmes
have usually been conditioned by the spread of concepts that have acted as vehicles of
institutional diffusion. An outstanding doctrinal concept in this respect has been New
Public Management, whose precepts emerged initially in the Anglo-Saxon administrative
model during the 1980s ( Hood, 1996; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000 ) but spread throughout
countries with different administrative traditions, such as in Latin America, although
not always with the same results and impacts.
This article contributes to a growing literature on the limited impacts of New
Public Management on administrative systems with traditions that differ from Anglo-
Saxon ones ( Cheung, 1997, 2005; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000; Rauch and Peter, 2000;
Wollmann, 2001; Manning, 2001; Hesse, 2003; Torres, 2004 ) by way of reviewing
Latin Americas experience of modernisation programmes.
Despite growing scepticism, reected in the literature cited above, about the general
applicability of New Public Management, several factors in Latin American countries
suggest that New Public Management could be expected to have a greater impact
there. Three of these initial conditions frame the analysis of public administration
reform programmes presented in this article. First, the political and administrative
instability of most Latin American countries, related to patronage systems, undermines
state capacities to develop strategies of reform. One would expect the governments of
those countries to become more open to external inuences. Second, international
agencies promoting modernisation have relied on greater nancial incentives, supported
by political pressure. We can hypothesise that these external actors will have a greater
impact on the design of Latin American public administration reform programmes.
Third, the theorising of New Public Management helped to spread it abroad, especially
through international agencies and consultancies acting as institutional carriers. In the
absence of any alternative strongly supported framework to improve public manage-
ment, one could expect New Public Management to have a signicant effect on Latin
American public administration.
In view of the complexity of public administration reform initiatives and the
multiplicity of factors involved, our analysis focuses on civil service systems and is
based on a combination of different sources of information. Departing from descrip-
tive studies of administrative reform in Latin America, the article focuses on six key
features of nine Latin American civil service systems, relying on data from secondary
sources supplemented by several interviews with civil servants in Argentina, Brazil,
Carlos Rami and Miquel Salvador
556 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 27, No. 4
Colombia, Mexico, Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. This eldwork was undertaken
in the broader context of the authors research project.
1

Modernisation Waves in Latin American Public Administrations
Throughout the twentieth century there were numerous initiatives designed to modernise
the public apparatus in many Latin American countries ( Spink, 1997; Oszlak, 2001;
Barzelay, Gaetani and Cortzar Velarde, 2002 ). Although they varied greatly from one
country to another, partly due to the divergences in their socio-political systems, we pro-
pose a classication in terms of three broad stages: global technocratic strategies, down-
sizing government, and changing institutional rules. This classication, reecting the
similar content and strategies of the programmes, becomes a rst indicator of the processes
of emulation that occur in public management policies, and can be conceptualised in terms
of institutional isomorphism ( DiMaggio and Powell, 1991 ; Meyer and Scott, 1992 ).
By focusing on regulations shared between countries and going beyond their borders,
a review of the evolution of the processes of reform makes it possible to identify different
dynamics of institutional emulation, even for the internal organisational transformation
of their administrations and their human resources management ( Borins, 2000 ).
Proceeding from these premises and using data provided by the already developed
historical and comparative studies ( Sulbrandt, 1989, 2002; Spink, 1997; Oszlak, 2001;
Bonifacio and Falivene, 2002; Payne and Carlson, 2002 ) means that we can distinguish
the stages of modernisation in the Latin American area. The rst stage, which we label
global technocratic strategies, covers the modernising initiatives of the state that
emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century and continued into the 1980s. During
that period, most Latin American countries embarked on reforms (although from
different starting points), designed to overhaul and strengthen their state apparatus,
conceived of as fundamental agents for structuring social relations and promoting
development. The aim was to increase intervention by the state, which during that
period saw its structures and instruments increase substantially.
An important element of this process of diffusion was the intervention of international
organisations, such as the United Nations, which, through its associated agencies,
promoted the strengthening of states as a way to help implement development plans
( Prez Salgado, 1997 ). Through programmes such as Modernisation of the State,
Public Sector Modernisation or Strengthening and Reform of the State, international
agencies intervened by prescribing particular courses of action that marked out the
different players room for manoeuvre. The resources associated with monitoring these
programmes and the recognition and legitimacy they involved helped many Latin
American countries to adopt them, even though they had limited effective capacity to
enforce them.
1 With the nancial support of the National R&D Plan through research project
Transformacin del Estado en Amrica Latina: Nuevos diseos institucionales, servicio
civil y polticas regulativas [State Transformations in Latin America: Institutional
Design, Civil Service and Regulative Policies], ref. SEJ2004-03358/CPOL.
On balance, these initiatives were largely unsuccessful; and large-scale reforms,
such as massive systematic efforts to substantially transform the public administration,
did not take root in Latin America. It is signicant that, in contrast to the failures recorded
under democratic governments, authoritarian governments made certain advances,
usually associated with the need to win legitimacy by improving the functioning of the
state organisation. On the other hand, authoritarianism may seem to offer solutions
because it can insulate government decision makers from many of the political
clientele networks that pervade society, as well as from most organised groups.
authoritarian governments weaken or destroy party-based patronage networks and
elected politicians can no longer divert state resources to their own survival needs
( Geddes, 1994: 191 ). But successes of that kind were not only sparse but also difcult
to sustain over time.
Even though the initiatives of the global technocratic strategies dealt with the
politicisation of public administration and tried to alter the patronage dynamics,
neither the strategy nor the effective concern of key actors allowed them to achieve
signicant advances in these elds.
From the 1980s, new modernising initiatives emerged under a different rationale.
The orientation of these initiatives must be understood in terms of the modernisation
processes initially set in motion by conservative governments in the UK and the USA,
which spread rapidly to many of the Anglo-Saxon countries ( Hood, 1996, 1998;
Barzelay, 2000 ). They reected an emerging management doctrine known as New
Public Management, and their inuence reached a number of Latin American countries,
even though the socio-political and economic realities of those countries differed from
those of the countries where the initiatives originated.
Nevertheless, the central objective of the reforms of this stage, which we label
downsizing government, as they were applied in Latin America was not so much to
improve the functioning of the state as to reduce it, on the grounds that it performed
functions that were not considered suitable in the new ideological context. This led to
the substitution of the state in certain areas of action (mainly through privatisation
and deregulation), and a major cutback of staff in the public apparatuses ( Jeon and
Laffont, 1999; Rama, 1999 ). From a study of eleven countries in the region, (Argentina,
Bolivia, Costa Rica, Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and
Venezuela) Sulbrandt (1989) observes continuous growth of the state through the 1960s
and 1970s, which, from the early 1980s, tends to slow down and turn into a decline.
The data show that these initiatives had major successes, much more so than the previous
reforms, although that is relative given the scope of the different objectives pursued.
The focus of these modernising initiatives was the external orientation of the state
apparatus: that is, they set out to modify the states relations with society but not its
internal operation. The World Bank was strongly committed to market-oriented
reforms after the Baker Plan in 1985 identied them as a precondition for solving the
debt crisis ( Bresser-Pereira, 2001 ). Given their orientation, the main successes of those
reforms consisted of creating agencies and outsourcing and reducing the size of
the public administrative apparatuses. This meant that they focused more on reducing
the civil service than on effectively transforming its structure (above and beyond intro-
ducing modications such as greater fragmentation and exibility). It must be stressed
that this cutting government stage constitutes a clear example of transferring receipts
and values from one administrative model to another with clearly differing values.
Rather than being an isolated organisation that can be reformed only through technical
solutions, public administration is rooted in each countrys political culture and in an
overall cultural and administrative tradition ( Arellano-Gault and del Castillo-Vega,
2004 ). So the apparent success of these initiatives in reducing the governments size (in
terms of public employment) was only a mirage in the absence of genuine and effective
reform of public administration.
In the next decade, the 1990s, a new generation of reforms emerged, different in
terms of objectives and orientation from the previous one. In distinguishing these
new initiatives we should not overlook certain lines of continuity with previous ones,
such as the tendency to cut back the structures and staff of the public apparatuses
( Sulbrandt, 2002 ); but their central goal went beyond downsizing to attempting to
change the institutions or rules of the game. The concern of this new stage of reforms
was the internal dimension and, in common with the reforms introduced before the
1980s, they aimed to improve the functioning of the public administration appara-
tuses. Among other things, that objective consisted of promoting changes to the rules
of the game in relations between the staff and the administration, affecting the very
design of the civil service model. A more important concern of political leaders of the
region in relation to the design of alternatives to improve public administrations is
illustrated in agreements such as La Declaracin de Santo Domingo in June 2002 or
La Carta Iberoamericana de la Funcin Pblica approved by the V Conference of
Public Administration ministries in 2003 in Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia). Although
both agreements were focused on the civil service as a key factor in state reform strate-
gies, their impacts are not yet clear ( Echevarra, 2007; Longo, 2007 ) because, although
they have been legislated, they have been neither developed nor implemented.
A Review of the Effects of Waves of Modernisation on Latin
American Civil Service Systems
Although some of them are still in force, the effectiveness of these stages of reform has
also been questioned ( Gaetani, 1998; Oszlak, 2001 ), especially in view of their incapac-
ity to transform the prevailing institutions in Latin American public administrations.
Before considering their impacts, this section briey describes the main results of waves
of modernisation in Latin American civil service systems. Because of difculties in
obtaining comparable data, it departs from a broad view of the region and focuses on
a more concrete analysis of nine countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa
Rica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Downsizing as the Major and Most Extensive Result
From various investigations, such as those cited by Sulbrandt (2002) and Oszlak
(2001) into ten countries in the Latin American and Caribbean area (Argentina, Brazil,
Chile, Uruguay, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela), or by Barzelay, Gaetani and Cortzar
Velarde (2002) (the process of change in public management policies in the cases of
Brazil and Peru), we can identify downsizing of public employees as the main phenom-
enon associated with the transformation of civil service systems.
The rst item to consider is the public employment dimension as an indicator of
convergence dynamics in the different Latin American countries. The difculty in
obtaining reliable data on public employment in the region complicates the analysis.
2

By comparing the different sources of data (mainly those available from the World
Bank and the IDB, and those provided by Centro Latinoamericano de Administracin
para el Desarrollo (CLAD), it is possible to detect a clear pattern of continuous reduction
during the 1990s. According to Sulbrandt (2002) , an analysis of the countries for
which there are reliable data over that period shows that the average share of civilian
public employees in the total population fell from 4.06 per cent to 3.40 per cent (the
result is the same whether we use CLAD data or those from the World Bank or the IDB).
A complementary indicator civilian public sector employment as a share of the economi-
cally active population shows the same prevailing tendency to fall for eight of the ten
cases on which most information is available (which include sufcient diversity of
country size and sub-regions in Latin America) (Table 1) .
Over the same period, the reduction in the number of public employees in the
countries analysed by Oszlak (2001)
3
is estimated at between 5 per cent and 40 per
cent. That is, despite great differences in the composition and size of the civil services,
the majority of cases exhibit the same prevailing tendency to decrease.
Another investigation undertaken in 26 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean
( Payne and Carlson, 2002 ) yields data that point in the same direction. This research
distinguishes between two groups of countries according to per capita GDP and com-
pares civilian public employment as a share of population in 1995 and in 1999. This
indicator falls from 5.8 per cent in 1995 to 4.6 per cent in 1999 in the group of countries
with gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of more than $3200 in 1997 (Argentina,
Bahamas, Barbados, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela).
In countries with GDP per capita of less than $3,200 in 1997 (Belize, Bolivia, Colombia,
Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti,
Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Surinam), it falls from 5.1
per cent in 1995 to 3.8 per cent in 1999.
Thus, all available data converge on a reduction in the share of public employment
in all the countries considered, regardless of their level of wealth as measured by GDP
per capita. The data reect the downsizing strategies promoted by international agencies
over the previous decade:
The result as the 1980s became the 1990s was often, especially in those
countries undergoing structural adjustment, a very restricted view of public
2 In addition to the major difculties in classication (see Oszlak, 2001; Payne and
Carlson, 2002; Sulbrandt, 2002 ).
3 in Latin America and the Caribbean there is no predictable relation between the size of
the civil service and the total population, even when we consider countries with similar
population magnitudes in the comparison ( Oszlak, 2001: 23 ).
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administration reform under the heading of Civil Service Reform with a
concentration on reduced numbers, streamlined hierarchies and better
managerial salaries. ( Spink, 1997: 12 )
In assessing these dynamics of reduction in public sector modernisation programmes,
we must bear in mind the inuence of international nancial agencies ( Prez Salgado,
1997 ). They were the main source of these public sector reduction processes, which
were accompanied by proposals for reforming the state, although they promoted
decentralisation, outsourcing and privatisation rather than a change in public manage-
ment. Signicant changes on these lines were not introduced until the mid-1990s, with
different measures that aimed, among other things, to transform the civil service insti-
tutions of Latin American administrations.
Six Characteristics of Latin American Civil Service Systems
In contrast to downsizing, the modernisation strategies applied to other key aspects of
civil service systems showed very limited results, as can be seen from a review of six
relevant variables of civil service systems. Following the changing institutional rules
stage of reform initiatives referred to above, the main changes were those designed to
make human resources systems more rational, with a strategic approach based on
instruments usually imported from the private sector (rather than being designed by
and for public administrations). The outstanding results are shown in Table 2 .
As Table 2 shows, the main initiatives of this third stage of reform face signicant
problems in being implemented and producing real change in the civil service. In the
introduction of planning as a key instrument for developing a strategic approach, the
absence of anticipation of needs and weak systems of personnel information extended
to most of the countries studied, but not Brazil and Costa Rica.
Training was another important element of the reforms designed to transform the
civil service. The measures adopted brought about a major quantitative increase in the
training provided for public employees, though it was often not linked to any organi-
sational strategy for promoting and consolidating the change. The increase in hours
seems designed more to satisfy this particular initiative and to promote the public servants
interests than to respond to training needs in particular areas, especially at the territorially
decentralised level ( Sulbrandt, 2002 ). Table 2 also shows the absence of a training
strategy in most of these countries, though not Brazil, Argentina or Costa Rica.
Restructuring of remuneration systems has also been an objective of the civil service
reforms. The aim was to stop the compression of wage levels, which were tending towards
homogeneity, and the fall in public employees purchasing power ( Sulbrandt, 2002 ).
Once again, the differences lie not in their conception (reproducing the dynamics of
institutional isomorphism), but in the scope of their implementation, which is usually
restricted to only a subset of public employees, namely, those in the state administration
( Oszlak, 2001 ). Table 2 shows that the lack of a consistent remuneration strategy is one
of the most extensive weaknesses in those countries.
Connected with this, the promotion of performance assessment programmes consti-
tutes a good example of the distinction between the formal discourse and its effective
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application. A number of initiatives launched in Bolivia, Uruguay, Venezuela, Nicaragua,
Argentina and Chile reveal the scope of the issue and its capacity to get on to the public
reform agenda, following patterns of mimetic institutional isomorphism. However, it
was also the least frequently implemented initiative, largely because of the existence
of cultural rules which were little open to the acceptance of meritocratic criteria
( Oszlak, 2001: 34 ). In other words, the use of management practices taken from
external referents (and promoted by certain international agencies) without suitable
adaptation has tended to yield poor results and to bring the validity of the reforms
into question.
Performance assessment is also oriented towards developing a professional civil
service based on a merit system and on the depoliticisation of public administration
apparatuses. But the attempts to introduce merit systems usually resulted in a gap
between ofcially established guidelines and actual practice, following dynamics of
decoupling, as shown in Table 2 . Only some countries developed areas more protected
from arbitrariness, but usually related to bringing out particularities that corresponded
to the logic of power within the public organisation. Thus, for example, measures to
improve the competitiveness and transparency of promotions yielded results only in
the sectors where professional qualication requirements were stricter and where the
end service was more clearly dened (health and education, for example).
This encouraged the development of distinct subcultures in which, thanks to their
uniqueness, certain professional groups managed to create their own management
space, relatively free from the inuence of politicians. The confusion between public
employees and politicians that favoured the existing system in many Latin American
countries explains their resistance to surrendering patronage or losing discretion-
ary powers in selection and promotion processes to appoint and reward their
protgs. Related to these dynamics, conceived as a political resource, the patronage
system constitutes a key element in sustaining many Latin American party systems
( Geddes, 1994 ). And, of course, there was signicant resistance to abandoning
this central resource in order to build a supposed neutral and professional public
administration.
An Attempted Typology
The situation depicted in Table 2 , although only partial, allows us to group the coun-
tries in up to three clusters:
1. Brazil, Costa Rica and Argentina register the best results in terms of the variables
shown in Table 1 and large shares of civilian public sector employment ( Table 2 ).
They also stand out as the rst to attempt to introduce elements of merit into the
civil service (Brazil in 1934 and Argentina in 1937) and to create public administra-
tion institutes (EBAP of Brazil in 1952, and ICAP of Costa Rica in 1954).
2. Mexico, Uruguay, Colombia and Venezuela are in a midway position on all relevant
variables cited, especially those displayed in Table 1 and related to a merit system.
With the exception of Colombia, they also belong to the rst group considered by
Payne and Carlson (2002) and are the rst to create public administration institutes
in the earlier period (INAP of Mexico in 1955 and ESAP of Colombia in 1956).
3. Nicaragua and Bolivia share the less-developed positions for all the variables shown
in Table 1 . They also have in common a small share of civilian public sector employment
( Table 2 ) and, in the same way, belong to the second group dened by Payne and
Carlson (2002) .
It is important to note that the rst group is characterised by a clear political consen-
sus favouring the introduction of its own solutions over the usually imported modernisa-
tion programmes, in contrast to some countries of the second and third groups. Although
a deep analysis is required to esh out this diagnosis, the data reect both the inuence
of international referents and the institutional dynamics of Latin American civil service
systems, topics that are dealt with below.
Civil Service as an Institution: Administrative Models and
Institutional Coherence
Under the neo-institutionalist approach, the civil service system is understood as the set
of norms, rules, values, routines and processes that, through their interaction, reveal
the conguration of a model of professional public employment.
4
This denition stresses
the importance of both the formal and the informal aspects of the elements mentioned
and of their adaptation to the institutional context in which they evolve.
As an institution, a civil service system generates a logic of appropriateness
( March and Olsen, 1989; Peters, 1999 ), which limits and directs the activity of the
different players involved. In relation to the increasing weight of international
referents, the prevailing institution of the civil service rules out certain options in
favour of others that focus the discussion and most probably determine the decision
nally taken. As for the modernisation programmes promoted, the institution will
condition their scope according to the magnitude of the changes proposed, the coher-
ence of the strategy with the prevailing equilibrium, or the sustainability of the drive
for transformation.
The need to consider the social, political and administrative reality in which different
civil service systems emerge and are maintained leads us to include an analysis of the
administrative tradition. While there are several classications, we focus our analysis
on two broad models or administrative traditions: the Continental-Western European
model and the Anglo-Saxon model.
This double classication is inspired by what Pollitt and Bouckaert (2000) have said
about the traditions or models they call the Rechstaat perspective and the public
interest perspective (and there are similarities with the distinction made by Arellano-
Gault and del Castillo-Vega (2004) , and in Bekke and van der Meer (2000) between
4 Dened as a set of instruments related to the mode and conditions by which the state
ensures the availability of staff with the skills and attitudes required to carry out their
activities according to their role in society ( Oszlak, 2001 ). The arguments put forward
do not refer to all public employees, but mainly to the staff working in the core Latin
American public administrations.
Anglo-Saxon and Latin traditions). In the former tradition, closer to what we have
called the Continental Western-European model, the state plays a central and very
visible role in shaping society. Among the outstanding values of this tradition are
legal security, equity and equality before the law. In the latter tradition, in what we
have called the Anglo-Saxon model, the role of the state is much less signicant and
visible; it tends to be limited and its powers controlled, while the different social
agents play a leading part in shaping society. The values associated with this model
are impartiality, transparency or pragmatism in the actions of government and
administrations.
To pursue this differentiation, one of the rst distinctive elements of the administrative
traditions is the degree of stability of their political and administrative systems. While
in the case of the Anglo-Saxon models (the UK and the USA) there is a clear line of
continuity, without traumatic or radical breaks, in those of Continental-Western
Europe (with references in France, Germany and Spain) ( Sotiropoulos, 2004 ) we nd
breaks in and abrupt transformations of the political system while the administrative
system remains stable. With these characteristics, the administrative systems of the
Continental model acquire an intrinsic value as guarantors of continuity, and their
autonomy and independence from the political system grows.
A second feature of the two administrative traditions is the relationship between
society and the public apparatuses. In the Anglo-Saxon model, this evolves in an envi-
ronment that is close to pluralism, characterised by a highly dynamic civil society,
structured and shaped independently of state intervention. Continental models, on the
other hand, tend to be shaped in a context of statism, where the public sector de-
velops a major role as regulator/promoter of civil society, with clearly interventionist
activity or alternatively in one of corporatism, in which the structuring of large
sectors of society conditions the activity of the state in a relationship of mutual
support.
The role of the civil service systems in both cases is that of an institution adapted
to different contexts. Both the stability of the political system and the relations
between state and society give rise to differentiated administrative systems that obvi-
ously foster the emergence and maintenance of differentiated human resources man-
agement systems. While a stable, continuous civil service model at the service of a
strongly interventionist state was consolidated in a context of political instability, at
the opposite pole in a politically stable context with a highly structured civil society
the civil service model assumed a different shape.
Some contemporary modernisation programmes designed to be applied in develop-
ing countries have proceeded on the basis of judgements of the successes of one model
in terms of the parameters of the other, regardless of the specic way it functions in
relation to its context ( Gaetani, 1998 ).
On the other hand, the origin and type of the pressure for modernisation also differ.
In Continental-Western Europe and the Anglo-Saxon countries, the engines of change
were fundamentally scal crisis and the expansion of demand for public services,
while in many Latin American countries the pressure came both from the problems
associated with the weakness of the state and its democratic systems, and from the
pressure applied by different international agencies ( Klingner, 2003, Klingner and
Arellano-Gault, 2006 ). As a result of these pressures, modernisation programmes
have been forced to follow constantly changing conceptual and ideological referents
through certain fashions or waves of variable duration and impact ( Aucoin, 1990;
Peters, 2002 ).
When the models are posed as a dichotomy, any discussion of their suitability for
conguring the civil service systems in Latin America tends to concentrate on the val-
ues underlying them. An Anglo-Saxon model associated with exibility, dynamism,
effectiveness and efciency is opposed to a Continental-Western European model
linked to rigidity and bureaucracy, which may tend to become an obstacle to the
operation of the public organisations. In a context of increasing inuence of international
referents, simplistic diagnoses of that kind support the introduction of the rst referent
to reform civil service systems for the countries of Latin America and the rm rejection
of the Continental model. From our point of view, that strategic decision is a mistake
that arises from confusion about the objectives and effective contributions of a public
or civil service operative model.
The importance and value of these models are related to the dynamics of institu-
tional isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991) that usually encourages the
tendency to reproduce the institutions regarded as successful in their reference
environment ( Ormond and Lffer, 1999 ). This mimetic isomorphism is combined
with coercive isomorphism dynamics that can be identied as a result of the formal
and informal pressures brought to bear by international organisations ( Prez Salgado,
1997; Spink, 1997 ). There are also normative pressure dynamics related to the impact
of professional groups, such as academics or international consultancy rms, which
dene the good practices that are to be reproduced ( Meyer and Scott, 1992; Tolbert
and Zucker, 1996 ).
In following some of these dynamics, it is true that the countries of Latin America
are looking for a civil service model that will allow them to build effective and efcient
public institutions ( Geddes, 1994; Klingner and Pallavicini, 2002 ). But there are other
values that affect the understanding of the human resource management practices
oriented to them ( Davila and Elvira, 2005 ). And, even more important, it is no less
true that the deep aim of the introduction of civil service models is to overcome the
clientelist model and help to strengthen public organisations institutionally. In our
opinion, the main problem of the public administrations in Latin America is their weak
institutionalisation, which hampers their development processes.
And so both the implicit characteristics of the civil service models and the context
in which they are set and evolve must be considered before any of their elements are
incorporated into other political and administrative realities. Since that reality in most
Latin American countries is the instability of their systems, the rst option should be
a model that fundamentally brings stability to the administrative system as a rst step
towards stabilising the whole ( Rami, 2001; Salvador, 2001; Jordana and Rami,
2003 ). The countries highlighted in the rst group of our attempted typology seem to
follow this approach (especially Brazil and Costa Rica). But in the other cases, the
evolution of modernisation initiatives in Latin American public administrations has
shown how the processes of learning and emulation have progressed in a way that has
little to do with this institutional concept.
Instability and Permeability of Latin American
Civil Service Institutions
Conceiving of the civil service as an institution, the modernisation programmes could
be dened as waves created by international pressures, with different degrees of
compatibility with countries civil service systems. Important similarities have been
detected also in the content of modernisation programmes and the strategies followed
by governments. On the other side, the references to attempts at administrative reform
in concrete areas of civil service systems demonstrate their limited impact. Despite
relevant results in downsizing the civil service, especially in the 1990s, the continuity
of internal civil service dynamics must be interpreted as the institutions instability and
permeability, but also with a high capacity to resist and absorb pressures to reform.
The instability of Latin American political and administrative systems in terms of staff
management is a major feature of the prevailing civil service institution. In this sense,
instability itself creates an equilibrium that makes it easy to introduce new rules of the
game into human resources management policies and practices (permeability), but very
difcult to consolidate them. With these institutions, Latin American civil service systems
become relatively open to international pressures in terms of incorporating new manage-
ment practices and instruments, but the difcult part is to consolidate these exogenous
and out-of-context contributions in order to change the rules of the game.
The diffusion processes of institutions through isomorphism dynamics explain the
similarities in initiatives to reform and modernise the Latin American public adminis-
trations. International agencies played a leading role in these processes, affecting both
the preparation of diagnoses and the specication of the remedial measures to be
adopted. The above-mentioned rst and second stages of reform (global technocratic
strategies and downsizing government) are clear examples of the importance of those
ideas and of certain agents capacity for inuence. Like coercive isomorphism, this
explains the spread of certain orientations for action.
The theorising of certain ideas (such as those connected with New Public Manage-
ment) helped them to spread, supported by international agencies and consultancies.
The fact that those initiatives initially focused on a mere downsizing of the public sec-
tor and only later partially tackled the transformation of spheres of management like
the civil service can be explained by the agents involved in the process.
As Bresser-Pereira says, these reforms were directed by economists: local economists
and the economists of the international agencies like the World Bank and the IMF
most of those economists are bureaucrats who are fairly unfamiliar with public manage-
ment And so they tend to sideline the issue and reduce the reform of the public sector
to structural adjustment, privatisation, downsizing and the ght against corruption
( Bresser-Pereira, 2001: 162 ). The only conrmed change is the reduction in the number
of public sector employees; and the limited results in the most important areas of human
resources management questioned their validity as a sustainable course of action. On the
other hand, the dynamics of decoupling have been able to maintain certain institutions
that determine the operation of civil service systems.
This approach must be complemented with analysis of the prevalent players interest
in the policy arena of the civil service in the context one of the main forecast changes as
dened by Klingner and Arellano-Gault (2006) in the evolutionary process for public
personnel systems, i.e. the transition from a patronage system to a merit system. As Geddes
points out, changes in recruitment and promotion [that] would convert a personalistic,
patronage-based system into a merit-based system threaten existing employees and reduce
the patronage resources controlled by political activists (1994: 28). Consequently, civil
servants, unions, politicians and party activists have often opposed such changes. On the
other hand, if the civil service were usually conceived of as a political resource rather
than a key instrument to improve state capacities, it would be viewed as a patronage-
based system that could absorb measures to increase exibility.
Only those countries with elements of a merit system that tried to adapt external
pressures on their own institutions (the rst group in our proposed typology) registered
improvements in variables related to planning, training and remuneration strategies
adopted to reform civil service systems. And in the cases of Brazil and Costa Rica, the
process was related to a political consensus on the concept of public administration
( Gaetani and Heredia, 2002 ).
In the other cases, although openness to change may be interpreted as a sign of their
institutional weakness, the poverty of the results of the initiatives shows that that their
institutional frameworks also impaired the consolidation of the new arrangements.
A lack of due attention to the reality of each country limited the potential of all these
measures to effect a transformation associated with the processes of learning and inter-
national transfer of experiences.
The Impact of International Referents
Finally, we should emphasise that the growing weight of international referents on public
management has had positive effects on developed countries with solid, well-established
public institutions ( Hood, 1996; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000; Peters, 2002 ). The new
currents in public management can make certain institutional arrangements more
dynamic and improve their effectiveness and efciency in promoting innovation in public
policy. In this way, these processes can generate highly positive learning dynamics.
However, the inuence of international referents on public management has not
turned out to be at all positive or functional in those developing countries, such as
Latin American ones, with major decits in institutionalisation or with different insti-
tutions in their public apparatuses. We can therefore draw certain conclusions:
(i) The different public management models (such as the civil service ones) in the coun-
tries of Latin America have been introduced by a combination of imposition (coercive
isomorphism and normative pressure) and emulation (mimetic isomorphism), but with-
out sufciently careful thought having been given to their specic reality. As a result,
they remain a supercial copy, far from institutional or managerial learning rules.
(ii) The globalisation of public management in developing countries has in fact meant
abandoning the institutional path and opting exclusively for a more technocratic
conception, usually without the context in which the reforms are applied being taken
into account. Our case study shows how reforms tackle the civil service not as an
institution but as a set of technical instruments. The conceptual bases of the public
management model that has been promoted since the 1990s are exibility and
post-bureaucracy, and so it is hostile towards classical public institutions. In that
sense, no account is taken of two fundamental parameters:
(a) Prevailing institutions are important. If the civil service is not regarded as an
institution, governments tend to alter the elements of a human resources
management system on the basis of the correlations of power that exist at the
time between the administrative players.
(b) The most widespread public management model may attain effectiveness and
efciency in the supply of goods and services to individual citizens. That is
important, but it does not in itself generate a system of legal security and con-
dence, which are the cornerstones of a countrys institutions.
(iii) There is no point in constructing learning mechanisms in public management on
the basis of international best practice when the process takes place without a pre-
vious analysis of the institutional reality. The civil service systems in the countries
of Latin America had very weak institutional bases which, moreover, were delib-
erately ignored or suppressed when new models were congured. But learning in
public management cannot take place in an institutional void, since it ceases to be
learning linked to an improvement of the system and becomes learning in response to
the political convenience of the moment and corporate and clientelist pressures.
A concluding comment: the phenomenon of increasing weight of international ref-
erents has created a multinational space occupied by a host of agents that promote
certain institutions. Among them we should mention the academic and professional
groups linked to the New Public Management doctrine, international agencies (with the
capacity to generate the dynamics of coercive institutional isomorphism in developing
countries), international consultancy rms, the political and administrative elites of
developed countries and, nally, a signicant part of the political and administrative
elites of the developing countries that are the object of the reforms. This multinational
space should theoretically have the virtue of generating rich learning systems that would
encourage institutional development in countries in zones such as Latin America.
However, in practice, the result is the exact opposite: a closed technocratic learning
system that feeds on itself outside the context of the countries political, social and
economic realities. There is no real institutional learning dynamic, but a process of
reafrmation of a particular orientation that is conceptually armour-plated and gradu-
ally distances itself from the institutional realities it sets out to improve or resolve. But
if the globalisation of public management is not capable of coexisting with the specic
political and social instruments of the region, it is unlikely to generate institutional
learning mechanisms that combine the global and local dimensions, which are the keys
to fostering the institutional development of these countries.
Conclusions
Since in many Latin American countries the engines of change came both from the
problems associated with the weakness of the state and its democratic systems, and
from the pressure applied by different international agencies, modernisation pro-
grammes have been forced to follow constantly changing conceptual and ideological
referents through certain fashions or waves of variable duration and impact ( Aucoin,
1990; Peters, 2002 ).
Since the reality in most Latin American countries is that their political systems are
unstable, the rst option should be a model that fundamentally brings stability to the
administrative system as a rst step towards stabilising the whole ( Jordana and Rami,
2003; Rami and Salvador, 2005 ). The countries highlighted in the rst group of
our typology based on Table 1 , and more specically Brazil, with its experience of a
professionalised merit-based career system located primarily at the strategic core of
the public administration as a means of strengthening state capacity, seem to follow
this approach.
Paradoxically, through introducing some non-managerial measures in key areas of
the organisation, Brazilian public administration was able to develop its own moderni-
sation programme without the need for external pressure, and absorb some of the New
Public Management proposals in a sustainable way so that they tended to survive
political change. In the other cases, the results of modernisation initiatives show how,
despite formal agreements, the processes of learning and emulation have progressed in
a way that has little to do with absorbing the improvement potential of international
referents.
Finally, despite the failures of the two aforementioned initial stages of reform
(global technocratic strategies and downsizing government), the results of the third
one still in force (change the institutional rules) are open. Although one can discuss
the impact of some civil service laws and the changes in civil service characteristics,
there is a relevant change in the main strategy, which is now oriented to institutional
change stemming from own capacities and looking for transformations in governance
and the political and administrative culture that underlie it.
A new conception of the civil service and its role in the political system appears
more evident, unless the required political consensus for implementing and consolidat-
ing the new reform strategy for most of Latin American public administrations is not
conrmed.
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Civil Service Reform in Latin America: External Referents Versus Own Capacities

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Civil Service Reform in Latin America: External Referents Versus Own Capacities

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Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 27, No. 4, pp.

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