Bureaucracy and Politics in Mexico: The Case of the Secretariat of Programming and Budget (The Political Economy of Latin America)

The main theme of this book is the relationship between bureaucracy and politics in Mexico. This is examined through a study of the Secretariat of Programming and Budget (SPP), which came into existence in 1976 and was abolished in 1992. The book charts the rise and fall of the Secretariat over three presidential terms and gives an explanation of the chain of events that led to its disappearance. It shows how the nature of the bureaucratic system interacted with the political imperatives of camarillas which underpins the Mexican political system to produce the observed outcome. The argument leads to four main conclusions. First, ministries can and do have a real significance in themselves in Mexican politics. Secondly, during the period concerned, there was a significant shift in the balance between two competing polity networks, the political and the economic, and that the SPP contributed to this change. Thirdly, the split between these networks came to be reproduced within the SPP. A factor which not only contributed to its demise, but also to the growing political instability in mid-1990s Mexico. Finally, these changes in the bureaucracy therefore contributed to the growing inability of ruling technocracy to manage either the polity or the economy.