ABSTRACT
Existing scholarship on Latin American public administration and public policy has tended to highlight the region's infamous administrative inefficiency and advocated different types of reform rather than explore bureaucratic politics per se. However, this is changing. Motivated by the puzzle of governments achieving policy success in supposedly “low capacity” places, scholars have used impressive survey instruments and methodological tools to show that there is a wider range of variation in agency capacity and autonomy than commonly thought. They also show that in many cases, successful bureaus are those that boast a strong organizational culture. Further, variation in administrative capacity has also enriched existing theory by relaxing a fundamental assumption of many existing models of political control of the bureaucracy, and has promoted exploration into other areas of bureaucratic politics. More work remains, but the field is already progressing.
