Explaining the formal autonomy of public sector agencies in Colombia and Venezuela

Abstract

In this thesis we aim to study and explain the formal autonomy of public sector agencies in Colombia from 1990 to 2011 and in Venezuela from 2000 to 2011. Using ´mapping of public organizations´ as data collection technique, we studied the landscape of agencies and their main characteristics in Colombia and Venezuela every five years. The basic argument, on which this study is built upon, is that due to the common administrative traditions, public sector reform paths, and external pressures of Colombia and Venezuela, these two countries will have similar patterns of agencies´ formal autonomy. However, as in 2000 Venezuela experienced a major government policy change towards socialism, we also attempt to explore how this policy change is represented in agencies' formal autonomy. Therefore, we use the Colombian case to explore the agencies´ formal autonomy since the moment in which the major public sector reform started in Latin America: early 1990´s, and we use Venezuela for comparison with Colombia because its change of policy since the year 2000. The analysis is conducted in two parts. First we present a descriptive section which explores the general trends of agencies´ formal autonomy in Colombia and Venezuela. Particularly, we look at the distribution of agencies according to their formal autonomy and the relation between formal autonomy on the one hand and agencies´ primary task and policy sectors on the other hand. The second section of the analysis seeks to give an explanation to the findings of the descriptive section. For that purpose, three main theoretical perspectives are used: sociological institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and rational choice institutionalism. The latter is divided in an agency level ration choice perspective and a country level rational choice perspective. To conduct the explanatory analysis we used binary logistic regression as data analysis technique. The results of the analysis show that the patterns of formal autonomy in Colombia and Venezuela differed both before and after the government policy change of the latter. This indicates that administrative traditions and external pressures cannot account for the levels of agencies' encountered in Colombia and Venezuela. We found that agency level factors such as the primary task that the agencies perform and the policy sector in which agencies are located is related with their level of formal autonomy. However, the results indicate that these relations do not follow the predictions that were made based on the different theoretical perspectives.