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Venezuela Public Administration
The 1961 Constitution provides for a career civil
service and
establishes standards for performance, advancement,
suspension,
and retirement. The ideals, however, have been largely
ignored in
practice in favor of a system based on patronage. Scholars
of
public administration agreed that the bureaucracy was
bloated,
inefficient, and often susceptible to corruption.
The junta that assumed power after the 1958 overthrow
of the
dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez set up a Public
Administration
Committee that obtained the advice and services of a
number of
international experts. The committee found the Venezuelan
bureaucracy to be unorganized and unprofessional; the
experts
advised the adoption of a model under which jobs were to
be
clearly defined, civil service would become divorced from
politics, pay scales would be established within accepted
guidelines, and the bureaucracy would faithfully follow
the
directives of government leaders.
Although it became immediately apparent that most, if
not
all, of the committee's suggestions were unworkable (for
example,
the notion of a democratic government such as Betancourt's
giving
life tenure to senior bureaucrats because they had served
long
years under the Pérez dictatorship), the committee was not
totally a failure. As a result of the committee's
activities, in
1959 a new Commission on Public Administration undertook
the
administrative reform of the upper levels of the public
service.
The commission also established a school in Caracas to
train
career civil servants, the Graduate Institute of Public
Administration (Instituto de Estudios Superiores de
Administración--IESA). In spite of IESA's excellent
faculty and
promising graduates, most of the bureaucracy remained
filled with
political appointees rather than IESA graduates in the
late
1980s.
Cordiplan, in the Office of the President, also was
created
in 1958. Cordiplan was envisaged as a central agency that
would
allocate resources within the government and handle
budgetary and
administrative planning, all on a nationwide basis.
Although
Cordiplan has been highly regarded and its four- and
five-year
plans have served as general guides, many of its detailed
and
imaginative goals for national development have been
undercut by
a bureaucracy resentful of Cordiplan's clout in budgetary
matters.
In 1969 President Caldera charged the Commission on
Public
Administration with drafting an overall reform plan. The
commission submitted a detailed report and plan to the
president
in 1972, but its sweeping recommendations were never fully
implemented. The effort did have some positive results,
however.
By the end of the 1960s, concepts of regular personnel
procedures
and civil service tenure had begun to take hold. During
the
Caldera government, the Central Office of Personnel
branched off
from the commission and became a force in promoting the
professionalization of civil servants.
Carlos Andrés Pérez, during his campaign for the
presidency
in 1973, promised to further streamline and
professionalize the
bureaucracy. During the preceding Christian Democratic
Party
(Comité de Organización Política Electoral
Independiente--COPEI)
administration of Rafael Caldera, the bureaucracy had
grown and
many state enterprises had mushroomed. Pérez reacted by
creating
a separate reform commission to deal solely with state
enterprises; the original reform commission became a
subsection
of Cordiplan in 1977.
Ministerial and regional reorganization plans also have
been
enacted into law, but their implementation has been
minimal at
best. Another strain was added when the oil industry was
nationalized in 1976, and a whole new bloc of private
workers and
managers became government employees. This initiated a
highly
political process, as players within the political system
sought
to exploit the potential of the state-owned oil industry
to
provide money, patronage, and jobs to the well connected.
Whatever the incentives for reform, the incentives for
continued
corruption almost invariably have proved stronger.
In spite of its many failings, Venezuelans saw the
bureaucracy as an integral part of a system in which
service and
perquisites went hand in hand. Politicians promised
services and
appointed bureaucrats to provide those services; the
appointees
themselves, however, more often than not owed their first
allegiance to the politicians rather than to the public.
Furthermore, the bureaucracy, like everything else, was
concentrated in Caracas; therefore it responded more to
the needs
of the center than to the demands of the periphery.
Data as of December 1990
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