ABSTRACT
The adoption and implementation of social programmes promoted by international financial institutions are frequently under the control of technical areas. Technocrats are salient in poverty alleviation policies and education and health reforms. Presidents and political parties with particular agendas or domestic problems can also appoint technocrats to advance their policies, out of short-term electoral interests or programmatic concerns. A structural perspective of experts’ power in the region rightly links technocrats’ stability to business power, but it reduces experts’ to the role of agents when in several instances they are actors. Beatriz Magaloni explains the appointment and relative stability of neoliberal technocrats in Mexico during the 1980s on account of voters’ preferences for economic prudence. Technocrats in the Ministry of Economics were associated with the neoliberal reforms of the early nineties, which a growing percentage of Argentines believed contributed to the crisis. There are different combinations of technocratic, clientelistic and patrimonial power in Latin American countries.
