The Bureaucracy as an Opportunity Structure for Patron-Client Networks: An Empirical Assessment of Administrative Neopatrimonial Patterns in Argentina and Brazil (1990‒2010)

The literature on neopatrimonial states shows that governments characterized by strong patron-client networks still dominate today’s developing world. In spite of the many local and external efforts to enhance governance, there is a widespread consensus that a complex political economy explains the persistence of these low-equilibrium traps, where the capture of public resources by private agents is detrimental to the provision of public goods. What normally lay at the core of this political economy –both as cause and consequence- are poorly-endowed, low-professionalized bureaucracies that face incentives to work on a short-term basis. Although this scenario provides a generalized picture of neopatrimonial states, the empirical exploration of detailed patterns of politics-bureaucracy relations is very much at its infancy. Drawing from a comprehensive novel database of bureaucratic characteristics in Argentina and Brazil between 1990 and 2010, this article examines comparative patterns of administrative neopatrimonialism in the two countries: the “appropriation” of organizational chart reforms in the search of political returns; the dynamics of career paths within top and middle level bureaucracies; the duration and insulation of independent agencies across all different policy areas. It later tackles some of the main political economy reasons behind the contrasts and respective evolutions, while highlighting interesting deviant cases from the general patterns and “pockets of efficiency” within both state apparatuses.