Legislative bureaucracies: Ethnography of middle level bureaucrats in Chile

Abstract

Based on an ethnography of Chile’s public administration conducted inside the Ministry of Interior and Public Security between March 2015 and 2016, I studied how mid-level officials participated in the formulation of the 2017 immigration bill, seeking to crystallize their arguments or forcing a contrary position in the draft that finally emerged from the presidency. The main conclusion of this research is that these mid-level officials navigated the bureaucracy in the shadows of the law, taking advantage of the contact networks that they possessed and the political power that emerged from their position and from the authority’s trust on them. Mid-level officials who worked for the Ministry of Finance and the Budget Office were outliers. Their power seemed to be unquestioned. Faced with the weakening of political parties, new actors are beginning to occupy the spaces that politicians are emptying.