Gaetani, Francisco
(2008)
Constitutional public management reforms in modern Brazil 1930-1998.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
The Brazilian state apparatus consists of a patchwork built upon a cascade of reform attempts over a span of sixty years. Multiple layers of legislation have produced a complex and inconsistent institutional landscape that has made policy change a difficult task. Four major public management policy reforms resulted in significant constitutional changes in the form of constitutional provisions, and they reshaped the modus operandi of the federal administration. The approach adopted here is comparative because it is oriented towards identifying similarities and differences among four different cases that occurred in Brazil during the 20th century. The pattern of these cases is intriguing because the frequency, variety, and speed of the reforms followed a zigzag course, and thus do not correspond to the gradual long-term and cumulative transformations that took place in many developed countries. Each case study corresponds to a specific historical episode. The material is organised and analytically narrated around interconnected events that took place within the episode. The events were significant in themselves and they clearly highlighted aspects of the means-ends chains. The framework adopted for the analysis was developed by Kingdon to explain pre-decisional and decisional stages of the policy-making process. The reason for this is the Brazilian context, characterised by fluidity, unclear technologies, chance, temporal sorting, and attention allocation. Policy change effectively took place when events in the political, problematic and policy streams converged to generate windows of opportunity, during which times public entrepreneurs pushed their policy solutions through the upper echelons of decision-making arenas. The investigation is centred on the dynamics of policy processes. The main conclusion of the thesis refers to the essential role played by entrepreneurs in getting the reforms approved. The reformers' influence in establishing the default implementation model varied in the four cases because of problems of political feasibility, rotation of reformers, policy discontinuities, inconsistencies in transitory legislation, and lack of top-down political support.
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