Abstract
Governance theories consider policy steering as modes sustained in hierarchies, markets, and networks. If governance depoliticizes public management structures, then populism and technocratic forms’ emergence in politics is a threat to public governance. This article analyzes governance styles, showing how a reconciliation between the dimensions of policy and politics is necessary to think about policy steering’s complexity and its ensuing paths. We develop a typology of governance styles to address policy and political dynamics. This typology shows how different governance styles combine pluralist, populist, and technocratic elements, along with hierarchies, markets, and networks. We illustrate our typology with different policies conceived in distinct political regimes in Brazil. We argue that governance theories must incorporate a perspective of political conflict, path dependence, and contingency. This perspective on political conflict is essential for understanding governance reforms and how they shape public management practices.
Introduction
To analyze the quandary of governance styles and how they shape government practice for steering public policy and services, here we examine governance theory and how it presupposes a pluralist political order’s process of institutionalization. Recent advances in governance theory point to technocracy or populism’s threats as barriers to advancing the institutionalization of governance. In many cases, democratic backsliding compromises policymakers’ engagement with democratic principles, making populism a threat to the functioning of governance (Bauer et al., 2021). In this article, we construct a different argument. Governments are complex and diverse organizations where public policy and services are shaped in different styles. According to political dynamics and policy styles, the same government can have a more pluralist, populist, or technocratic style among different policy domains. This dynamic between politics and policy defines different governance styles.
In this sense, how do policy and politics interact to shape governance styles? We argue that we can have different governance styles in different policy domains within the same political order. The relationship between hierarchies, markets, and networks can vary according to the policy domain and interaction between the political regime and technocracy. The objective is to resume a research agenda that considers the relationship between politics and policy as constitutive of governmental action in society.
Here, we explore these different governance styles, illustrating the analysis with five case studies from Brazil, selecting different policy domains, and pointing out dynamics and challenges. The Brazilian cases illustrate how different policy domains, originated from different political regimes, can operate under different governance styles. Brazil offers a good exploratory context, because of its huge variability from dictatorship (two periods in the 20th century) to democracy, along with distinct policies’ trajectories with particular path dependence. The central argument is that governance is determined by combining political regimes and technocracy’s roles in the political dimension, with hierarchies, markets, and networks in the policy dimension. Brazil’s political trajectory comprehends the necessary variability to illustrate our argument. We analyze five case studies of fiscal policy, health policy, nuclear energy policy, sanitation policy, and development policy.
Thus, this article builds an analytical approach that considers that these governance styles are shaped complexly over time and tend to have a path-dependent dynamic. Governance styles define practical action for changes or reproduce previous patterns when the policy was formulated. Going beyond this comparative issue between governments, reforms may produce fragmented conceptions of public management. Likewise, when we observe reforms within the same government, we must consider the dynamics of politics and policy.
Thus, we begin by examining the governance theory. In the second section, we build an analytical framework for governance styles. Then, we analyze populism and technocracy as threats to governance. Next, we examine the proposed cases, and in the fifth part, we discuss the findings.
Governance Theory and Styles: From Foundations to New Perspectives of Policy Sciences
In this section, we discuss the broader meaning of governance for the policy sciences, focusing on the original idea of styles of governance. Governance theory is based on building solutions to collective action problems (Ostrom, 2005). Societies require instruments for steering the boat, focusing on the process of goal selection, coordination, implementation, feedback, and accountability (Peters, 2011). At first, governance theory is based on ways that societies deal with solving their collective action problems. In a comprehensive approach, governance is the “regimes of laws, administrative rules, judicial rulings, and practices that constrain, prescribe, and enable government activity, where such activity is broadly defined as the production and delivery of publicly supported goods and services.” (Lynn et al., 2000, 235). Since the 1990s, governance has become a theoretical paradigm for governments, guiding reforms and styles of governing that can spread the importance of institutionalizing practices, approaches, and institutional arrangements that improve the process of steering public policy and services.
Over time, the concept of governance incorporated several adjectives and treatment for specific areas such as regulation, participation, environment, corporate governance, among others. The concept of governance attribute thematic specificities or conceptual aspects, making the concept of governance become general, abstract, and endowed with a normative feature (Peters & Filgueiras, 2022). In this article, the concept of governance is an approach of political theory and means defining the role of government in society to resolve conflicts and generate consensus among key actors (Peters, 2011). In other words, governance is a way to solve collective action dilemmas, where governments play an essential role in performing different forms of policy steering, articulating shared priorities for society, accountability, and policy coherence. This political and normative premise for governance benefits institutional changes in policy and public administration dimensions, creating new roles for governments in connection with society.
Governance involves diverse institutions to create a broad approach to government. These institutions comprehend social actors organized into policy networks (Rhodes, 2007), markets (Barzelay, 1992), bureaucratic actors (Peters & Pierre, 2016), and international organizations (Stone, 2008) to shape modern government. Delimiting the governance paradigm entails introducing institutional changes in public administration and policy. This view considers a decision-making system that involves multiple stakeholders and globalization. According to this paradigm, public administration is a space for democratization, constituting synergy between state, market, civil society, and international actors (Bevir, 2010; Warren, 2009). Governance reforms thereby seek to explore new governing approaches that emphasize markets and policy networks. In this sense, the governance paradigm is less focused on hierarchy (Bevir, 2011).
Governance theory requires new styles to govern, which are more plural and seek to build consensus among the different actors. These styles depend on political leaders’ and the bureaucratic elite’s roles. Politicians and bureaucrats act as coordinating agents, delimiting public action’s roles and forms. Governance also sets up citizens’ expectations to participate in collective decisions. It implies the government’s capacity to guide the governing process and the capacity and legitimacy to create rules. Other expectations from the government include establishing shared understandings and coordinating among agents to generate desired outcomes (Klijn & Koppenjan, 2004; Peters & Pierre, 2016; Salamon, 2002; Sorensen & Torfing, 2005; Stoker, 1998).
Moreover, better public service delivery and policies are governance’s greater purpose. The governance paradigm embeds a pluralist state (Dahl, 1956; Powell, 1990; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). The complex, plural, and fragmented nature of public policy and service delivery via policy implementation require a new governance structure. This structure—based on the permanent negotiation of values, meanings, narratives, relationships among organizations, and the context of its political environment (Osborne, 2010)—assumes there is an institutionalized democratic regime with an inclusive capacity for society to influence policy and deter any populist threat (Dahl, 1971).
Democratic backsliding in public administration alters the dynamics of governance’s institutionalization, creating a threat via populist and technocratic-based policy (Bauer et al., 2021; Stoker, 2019). Although governance theory presupposes a pluralistic and democratic political order, it requires a style that depoliticizes policy decision making and service delivery, often relying on the technical defense of evidence-based policy, evaluation, and impact. Governance theory assumes the risk of increasing depoliticization because of a steering process based on technocratic decisions (Fawcett et al., 2017). Bureaucracies—global and local—undertake a representative role and legitimize policy decisions through expertise (Trondal et al., 2015). This steering process requires bureaucracies to depoliticize policy formulation in which governance takes on global public policy’s character to solve national collective action problems. Depoliticization risks disrupting governance, impairing the legitimacy and capacity to solve such problems (Mounk, 2018).
When comparing policy styles between different national experiences, they may diverge from or converge into the standards with which the policy process occurs (Richardson et al., 1982). In addition to this divergence and convergence, governance theories must recognize the role of political contingency and conflict. Policy styles comprise an important layer where governance theory focuses. However, above that layer, a political layer is decisive for understanding the different governance styles, where democratic, populist, or technocratic mechanisms coexist and influence “steering the boat.” Governance styles can vary along time or location in the same country, depending on how the political contingency combines the political roles of leadership and bureaucracy—via policy styles—in hierarchies, markets, and networks.
In this article, we conceive of governance style as how the actors perform governance and create approaches to public policy and services. In many practical situations, the concept of governance style is confused with governance mode. Governance mode means the institutions that shape the policymakers’ actions (Howlett, 2009). On the other hand, governance styles mean government action to define policy-steering operations and procedures, considering situations of power (Richardson, 2012). Governance styles represent the way that governance modes work.
The action and role of political leadership and bureaucratic elites are fundamental to shaping the governance styles adopted in different policy domains. The objective is to resume a research agenda that considers the relationship between politics and policy as constitutive of governmental action in society. Specifically, we discuss how political and policy dynamics are essential to comprise governance’s complexity, its capacity to shape public management, and understand how they connect to create public policies.
This research agenda—though novel in the focus we have outlined—is not exactly new from a more general perspective and goes back to the foundations of policy sciences. Lowi (1972) discussed how actors and interests in the distributive, redistributive, regulatory, and constituent arenas of public policy shape political actors’ behavior in the representative system. On the other hand, Skocpol (1995) demonstrates how elites and bureaucracy can be independent actors with their organizational interests, which not only reflect society but impact policy formulation and implementation.
The relationship between policy and politics also responds to ideas reproduced historically, making policy choices, when initiated, continue to influence policy far into the future (Pierson, 2004). Path dependence situations mean that the institutional ideas and positions created earlier tend to be maintained by adding new elements that elaborate their meaning and create layers within the institution.
Governance styles tend to be sustained over time, implying different possibilities for change and internal dynamics. Path dependence is referred to as a “social process that exhibits positive feedback (…) in which outcomes in the early stages of a sequence feed on themselves, and once-possible outcomes become increasingly unreachable over time” (Pierson, 2004, p. 21). Changes occur at critical junctures (Pierson, 2004) or situations of drift, displacement, conversion, or layering (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010). There is another perspective of path dependence, with implications for public management. Path dependence can incur habituation situations, creating unreflective, non-strategic, insentient, and dispositional agency patterns for public managers (Sarigil, 2015; Sedgwick & Jensen, 2021).
Nevertheless, even in changing situations, the dynamics between policy and politics reproduce ideas constituted over time, creating an institutional foundation that defines the patterns by which governance defines styles for steering policy. We formulate this relationship in further detail in the next section.
Governance: Between Politics and Policy
To understand the connection between governance styles and steering policy, we present our working definition of governance and its primary mechanisms. Governance theory searches for patterns of interaction between the State and society to build policy (Bevir, 2011; Filgueiras & Peters, 2022; Peters, 2004; Peters & Pierre, 2000). Hierarchies, markets, and networks have different patterns of interaction between the State and society, which coexist in the policy process and define policy styles (Meuleman, 2011).
Hierarchies imply a bureaucratic policy style based on command-and-control relationships. According to the command-and-control relationships that overlap with markets and actors in networks, this policy style implies a bureaucratic management process centered on the State in Weberian type—law enforcement and regulation, defining government priorities, budget and planning processes, establishing routines, and monitoring intragovernmental actions (Metcalfe, 1994; Olsen, 2006; Roberts, 2020).
Market style is characterized by using standard techniques and processes in the private sector. In general, this involves using governance techniques adapted to the public sector, creating interactions with a society based on business models—competition, contracts, and price signaling. Usually, market-style interactions aim to build public and private sector synergy and partnership (Barzelay, 1992; Peters, 2018).
Finally, network governance means governments’ ability to coordinate different social actors to construct public policy (Peters & Filgueiras, 2022). Network governance is characterized by organic or informal social systems involving more informal mechanisms for coordinating actors (Powell, 1990). Network governance is a more collaborative pattern of interaction with society and engaging the various social actors—mainly through management systems, contracts focused on results, a shared policy view among political actors, and civil service, including a professional code of ethics and public bureaucracy ethos (Bouckaert et al., 2010; Klijn & Koppenjan, 2012).
All these policy styles are limited to the policy dimension. The relationship between hierarchies, markets, and networks implies an autonomous policy process as a core of decision and implementation. There is a tendency in governance theory to reinforce expertise in policy, separating politics and policy dimensions, even when they contrast formal and informal institutions. The decision-making process is separated from political contingency, creating a gap between policy decision makers and the public (Bang, 2009). A growing trend in governance is to reinforce a technical decision-making process (Offe, 2013), even if more informally, by recognizing different actors’ expertise. In other words, policy styles, thought exclusive to policy dimension, involve increasing depoliticization (Fawcett et al., 2017; Flinders & Wood, 2014).
Hierarchies, markets, and networks are suspicious of a democratic process from “popular sovereignty,” reinforcing the overlap between the technical and political (Müller, 2017). The tendency toward depoliticization presented in governance theories means failures in anchoring public policies in democratic political regimes. In this way, the technical and political overlap makes governance subject to populist or technocratic styles to policy steering. The conflict between a depoliticized—or not—public policy is one of the Achilles’ heels of contemporary governance theory. Because of the diverse global challenges to governments, the balance between technique and politics is essential as a foundation for governance theory. In many respects, network governance can mean strengthening the technique, where the actor who has the power to participate politically and influence the policy formulation is defined beforehand by the governments, further reinforcing the representative and specialized character of actors’ participation (Mendonça & Cunha, 2014; Warren, 2008).
Hierarchies, markets, and networks are fundamental policy styles for policy decision making, but they presume a polyarchic type of democratic political regime. However, these three policy styles are contained in the political layer, where variation can occur between democratic or technocratic policies in the political regime dimension. In other words, the policy layer (where hierarchies, markets, and networks define policy styles) is contained and coexists with the political layer (where those same governance styles coexist with democracy and technocracy). Figure 1 summarizes this corollary.
Governance styles between policy and politics.
Governance theory presupposes pluralist political regimes associated with strong institutionalization (March & Olsen, 1989; Olsen, 2010; Peters, 2011). Governance presupposes an institutional design. The institutional design define a grammar that especify norms on what is permitted or prohibited, and distributes positions in the government (Crawford & Ostrom, 1995). The institutional design establishes and reflects society’s expectations of the values to be achieved. Additionally, institutional design define who can do what, where, and how to solve collective action problems and governance challenges (Ostrom, 2005).
From this perspective, designing institutions requires outlining the specific results to be achieved. The specific results determine which values are embedded in the practices to be fostered through the institutions. Furthermore, values allows understand the rules and norms needed to achieve the intended result (Goodin, 1996). Governance theories tend to assume a pluralistic or polyarchic political regime. The problem is that polyarchic conditions cannot be verified in different countries, creating a gray zone for governance theory. For example, how do we assess governance in authoritarian countries such as Russia or China? Or how should we deal with countries that are still in the process of institutionalizing democracy? If our metric is based on the premise of a pluralistic democratic regime that is hidden, then the reforming apparatus presented by governance theory as a paradigm tends to reproduce perspectives of “one size fits all.”
Governance, situated in strong institutionalization, establishes an inclusive set of elites, associating hierarchies, markets, and networks in policy dimensions. The risk is to promote disconnection between democracies’ inclusive and plural elitism (Dahl, 1956) and the “will of the people.” In a democratic regime, pluralism and populism represent antagonistic models (Dahl, 1956). Pluralist democracies develop inclusive and institutionalized forms of competition among elites but fail to connect with the people’s direct participation in shaping the policy agenda (Barber, 1984). For governance theory, populism represents deinstitutionalizing the political dimension of democracy, which directly impacts and threatens the policy dimension (Bauer et al., 2021; Stoker, 2019) while enforcing direct links between politicians and society (Mounk, 2018).
In the next section, we discuss how populism and technocracy threat governance. Populism erodes governance because it reduces the state’s capacity, creates political instability, and increases non-compliance with the rules. Ultimately, populism weakens institutions and undermines the ability to govern (Brinks et al., 2019; Levitsky & Loxton, 2013). Technocracy strengthens specialized knowledge, dismissing representative democracy to empower a technical elite. It assumes interactive or non-interactive forms, sometimes complementary to populism (Caramani, 2017). We discuss both populism and technocracy to connect them to the idea of four different governance styles.
Populism and Technocracy as Threats to Governance
The tendency to depoliticize in public governance and the failure to anchor the decision-making process to democratic instruments create the populist threat to governance styles. Populism can take different forms and represent a complex phenomenon for political and policy analysis (Canovan, 1981, 1999; Kaltwasser et al., 2017). In general, populism is the phenomenon of politics that implies a set of practices referenced to people at the elite’s expense. In general, populism threatens governance because it promotes opportunistic policy via voters’ and citizens’ support. For example, the populist government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil created an opportunistic policy for treating and preventing COVID-19 during the pandemic at the expense of the guidelines of various actors in health policy and academia (Casarões & Magalhães, 2021). Thus, rational policy options and a more technical decision-making process based on expertise erode based on the popular will embodied in the political leader (Mudde, 2004).
The study of populism typically focuses on the electoral process and party politics (Erhardt et al., 2021; Gidron & Hall, 2020; Inglehart & Norris, 2017; Norris, 2019; Norris & Inglehart, 2019). However, populism has consequences for governance and public administration (Ansell & Torfing, 2017; Peters & Pierre, 2019; Sörensen, 2020). The analysis of populism in governance processes must consider that it can take on both a pathological and regular character. Populism has an ambiguous character and can either favor authoritarian regimes (Norris & Inglehart, 2019) or build more participatory civic processes with intense deliberative democracy (Canovan, 1999; Peters & Pierre, 2020; Sörensen, 2020).
Populism threatens governance foundations, especially regarding styles related to the market, hierarchies, and networks (Stoker, 2019). Populism threatens the foundations of governance theory because it reduces networks’ participation in the decision-making process, both locally and globally, and distrusts the international cooperation process and markets’ performance (Ansell & Torfing, 2017). However, it does not consider how informal organizations can either become bureaucratized or disintegrate in many networks. In general, networks marginalize politicians and weaken many aspects of a pluralist democracy (Sørensen, 2006). Populism seeks to weaken networks inside the bureaucracy, banishing or ignoring formal institutions and internal knowledge as red tape and obstructing the people’s will (Lewis, 2018). Populism also threatens hierarchies, weakening the command-and-control dynamics and centralizing important decisions to the political leader. For example, President Trump’s appointments in the United States broke many state chains of command, violating American public administration processes, institutions, and values (Goodsell, 2019).
Contemporary populism charge globalism, low trust in governments, immigration waves, technological advancement, transnationalism, and anti-institutionalist behavior to construct and justify an authoritarian response do crisis (Mounk, 2018; Rockman, 2019). In the policy dimension, populism erodes public policies’ institutional bases to justify reconstructing a popular will associated with a national zeitgeist. However, as Peters and Pierre (2020) presented, populism occurs in the dimension of politics and can assume a normal condition in the functioning of institutions or even an authoritarian condition. Populism can be democratic or authoritarian in the dynamics of the political regime. All forms of populism have an anti-establishment perspective and can assume authoritarian or democratic forms. Concerning the democratic form, populism can create new modes of access for marginalized groups to the State, distributing positions. How populism is authoritarian or democratic will depend on political leaders and political contingencies (Levitsky & Loxton, 2013).
On the other hand, technocracy is a type of power organization legitimized in politics by the government’s expertise and technical excellence, forming a bureaucratic elite that governs (Centeno, 1993; Fischer, 1990; Gunnell, 1982). As with populism, technocracy is usually analyzed in terms of the party and electoral system, formulating a complex picture between bureaucracy and politics (Pastorella, 2016). Technocracy may represent an antagonistic view with populism, but it also can assume a complementary relationship (Hanley, 2018). Like populism, technocracy builds its power based on distrust of the representative democracy (Bertsou & Pastorella, 2017; Caramani, 2017). For this reason, technocracy emerges against depoliticization and can assume a central role both in democratic regimes, creating a technical elite that perform policy coordination from above, or coexists with populist forms, whether they are of democratic or authoritarian populism.
Technocracy can be interactive or noninteractive with society, seeking ways to legitimize it through expertise and technical mastery. The assumption is that technocracy is not antagonistic to populism; rather, it is a complementary form of representation that also can occur in pluralist and democratic regimes (Caramani, 2017). Technocracy can take on a noninteractive character with society, where bureaucracy represents society through its expertise, reducing participation. Parties are presented as unskilled in dealing with complexity and encounter many policy constraints from multilevel perspectives. Technocracy can assume an interaction with society, where parties can delegate policy formulation to experts, whether in pluralist contexts, competition between elites, or in an anti-establishment context. Epistemic communities influence technocrats’ behavior by forming ideas and approaches to policies, being essential to understanding the contexts of change and stability (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1999). Epistemic communities define the knowledge that affects the policy domain and define forms of learning and organization that guide the technocrats’ behavior (Radaelli, 1999). They can guide technocrats’ interactive behavior with society and technocratic insulation by abolishing any form of interaction with society.
Governance theory must reconcile the dimensions of politics and policy so that governance styles are connected and combined with democratic regimes—pluralist or populist—and technocratic forms. In the political regime dimension, alternatives to pluralism and populism are considered (here, populism may vary between a democratic or authoritarian style). In the technocracy dimension, bureaucracy’s political role is considered (which may have a vertical command-and-control style without interaction with society or assume a style of interaction with society).
Pluralism, populism, and technocracy represent elements of governance styles. Governance styles reflect a combination of pluralism, populism, and technocracy in politics, coexisting hierarchies, markets, and networks in the policy. In this paper, we propose a typology of governance styles that reflects ideal types so that the complexity of governance can be unfolded and understood in the relationship between policy and politics. The transition from one type to another type holds nuances, perspectives, and values that contextualize them. Governments coexist with different and complex governance styles in politics and policy, varying in different policy domains. Table 1 summarizes this coexistence in forming four ideal types, where the political regime and technocracy configure governance styles.
Governance Styles.
Source. Authors’ own elaboration.
The corollary of this typology is that governments can assume different coexisting styles for steering different policies, including political leadership’s role, party, and electoral dynamics, and bureaucracy’s technical and political role. Political actors and bureaucracy’s behaviors depend on the political regime’s framework and public policy’s institutional foundations under examination. This coexistence shapes management conditions, spaces, and opportunities for policy design. In addition, these styles shape values and interests that guide policy formulation and public administration performance.
This typology may be opportune for comparative governance studies, focusing on how governments can play different roles in solving collective action dilemmas. The typology can demonstrate how the interaction between politics and policy configures different governance styles, depending on the role of governments and how they steer policies. For example, in the United States, policy governance changes according to the changes introduced by political leaders. During the Trump administration, immigration policy radically changed because of populist and authoritarian discourse, granting bureaucracy enormous power to restrict and use technologies to contain the entry of immigrants (Waslin, 2020). On the other hand, the Biden administration promises effective changes in immigration policy, relying on the government’s negotiating capacity and seeking anchorage in society to define the policy’s objectives.
Policy Monopoly
The first quadrant of these ideal types comprises a governance style understood as a policy monopoly. Policy monopoly is a concept developed by Baumgartner and Jones (1993) to describe when policy problems move from the subsystem to macrosystem. A policy monopoly is a type of governance where an array of actors—politicians, bureaucrats, analysts, lobbyists, and academics—share a common understanding of this policy domain, united by a common interest.
A monopoly occurs when an idea is strongly associated with this policy community, capable of mobilizing actors democratically in an institutional system. Monopolies set up a complex interaction between bureaucracy and the image of politics built on democratic systems. A monopoly characteristic ensues because bureaucracy restricts its interaction exclusively to members of the policy community, without extensive and inclusive deliberation processes and participation, but with an idea communicated democratically (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993). This first quadrant occurs when a form of democratic pluralism is associated with a noninteractive technocracy with mastery of expertise.
Competitive Structures
The second quadrant configures what we call competitive structures powered by networks and coordination systems. The interaction between democratic pluralism and an interactive technocracy makes it possible to establish polycentric networks and governance systems, inclusive participation processes, and an open and interactive bureaucracy with society, especially with policy networks.
Competitive structures powered by networks and coordination systems imply multilevel organizations with polycentric characteristics that coordinate the relationship between State and society (Sørensen, 2006).
Bureaucratic-Authoritarian or Institutional Weakness
The third quadrant refers to populist regimes—authoritarian or democratic—associated with a noninteractive technocracy. This association can take two forms, depending on whether populism is authoritarian or democratic. In authoritarian populist regimes, the governance style is the bureaucratic-authoritarian state. It involves a pattern of authoritarian populism with a noninteractive technocracy. The bureaucratic-authoritarian state is a concept formulated by O’Donnell (1973) to explain Latin America’s authoritarian states during dictatorships. The bureaucratic-authoritarian state implies a vertical authority pattern, associating populist political leaders and bureaucracies of the Weberian type and lack of accountability. The bureaucratic-authoritarian state rejects societal organization and does not want to produce political mobilization. This pattern, in which the state overlaps society, still implements policies in an authoritarian way (O’Donnell, 1973).
When a noninteractive technocracy meets democratic populist regimes, situations of institutional weakness transpire. In the presence of institutional weakness, there is an insignificant institutionalization process, meaning an inability of institutions to change actors’ behavior (Brinks et al., 2019). The result of institutional weakness is non-compliance situations—with repeated corruption—and permanent instability. Bureaucracies are insulated from society, associating themselves with populist leaders in a democratic way, considering free and competitive elections. Nevertheless, they fail to build public policies institutionally, erode government capacity, and subject them to different forms of corruption and resource misuse.
Embedded Autonomy
Finally, the fourth quadrant comprises a form of authoritarian or democratic populism with an interactive bureaucracy. Embedded autonomy means states implementing development policies with a robust technocratic power associated with a popular will expressed in populist regimes. Embedded autonomy implies organizational autonomy of the bureaucracy associated with social embeddedness. Evans (1995) argued that instances of successful policy reform result from creating coherent and competent administrative agencies embedded in broader social networks via formal and informal links (Sowers, 2007).
We argue that this connection with social networks occurs in populist contexts—authoritarian or democratic—facilitating society’s connection. Technocracy assumes the role of political leadership, usually associated with populist leadership. This association overlaps with hierarchies, markets, and networks, finding legitimacy with the connection of a popular will and an anti-establishment behavior.
The political dimension shapes governance styles that affect and nestle with policy styles regarding these four quadrants. The coexistence of these political approaches with hierarchies, markets, and networks makes governance styles more complex in the policy dimension, emphasizing the policy layer’s connection with the political layer. All these governance styles coexist in the same institutional arrangement, respecting administrative traditions. The relationship between these ideal types is dynamic, and a policy can change from one type to another depending on the political regime and technocracy’s conditions.
However, this typology faces three additional challenges. The first one is how to deal with bureaucratic turnover. Bureaucratic turnover can change policy objectives and dynamics because of personnel changes. Empirical studies build evidence that even if an agency is designed to maintain bureaucratic autonomy and steer policy through expertise and insulation from political control, party politics shape the bureaucratic agencies’ composition (Dahlström & Holmgren, 2019; Gailmard & Patty, 2007). Another challenge is federal political systems, which require a multilevel organization with different bureaucracies—often in competition. Multilevel arrangements depend on the political regime’s institutional design. This typology’s application means that the governance style depends on how centralized or decentralized the policy is, varying by policy domain. The third challenge is to understand technocracy’s role in the bureaucratic hierarchy. The policy’s technocratic perspective should guide occupation of strategic posts and cover positions at the bureaucracy’s high and medium levels.
In the next section, we apply the four governance styles typology to the case of Brazil, a country with a heterogeneous trajectory in politics and State building. We aim to illustrate how this typology can help enlighten the way of governing immersed in political power relations (Richardson, 2012), analyzing different strategies and actions to steer policy.
An Illustrative Case: Brazil
With the Brazilian democratization in 1988, the regime opened toward greater pluralism, with free and open competition from elites in the electoral and party arenas (Abranches, 2018; Limongi, 2006). With this opening, the New Public Management dimension underwent reforms with the Plan for Administrative and State Reform in 1995, opening the dimension of public policies to a market-style, expanding professionalization, and adopting liberalization and privatization strategies (Bresser-Pereira, 1996). Finally, throughout the Workers’ Party (PT) governments, a set of reforms occurred that opened up policies for various channels of participation, using different constitutional instruments, such as creating councils for policy advisory and civil society participation in policy formulation, and adopting participatory budgets in local governments (Avritzer, 2008). The condition for these reforms after the 1988 Constitution was a pluralist political regime, with free competition among elites.
Adopting these governance reforms in Brazil enabled a heterogeneous bureaucracy’s construction, marked by the presence of “islands of excellence” coexisting with organizations subject to all forms of clientelism, patrimonialism, and corruption (Bersch et al., 2017). Associated with this heterogeneity, the Bolsonaro government was elected by taking an anti-establishment position, recomposing the military’s role as a technocratic bureaucracy and conducting politics with authoritarian populism (Hunter & Power, 2019).
In this trajectory of reforms, the governance of Brazil’s public policy is complex, combining policy styles marked by the presence of hierarchies, markets, and networks, and associated with the political regime’s conditions that vary historically between authoritarian and democratic periods. Even after democratic restoration, there was the pluralism of the Cardoso, Lula, and Dilma governments, and the ambiguous populism of the current Bolsonaro administration. In Brazil, governance of public policy occurs in this complex framework, with governance styles varying between the political regime’s conditions, bureaucracies’ political role, and policy styles. The illustrative cases that we will present highlight this complexity and confirm our typology, showing how hierarchies, markets, and networks—in the dimension of policy—coexist with pluralist, populist, and technocratic forms in politics.
Policy Monopoly—Post-Real Plan Fiscal Policy
Fiscal policy in Brazil entails a situation of policy monopoly. A policy monopoly occurs when a subsystem comprises a set of policies designed to change incrementally, based on a shared understanding of policy design. This shared understanding connects an array of actors who come together for a common interest (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993). This involves a shared idea about the policy and its association with an institutional structure that guarantees the actors’ access to the decision-making system and restricts others’ participation.
After the hyperinflation cycle throughout the 1980s, in the context of democratization, economic policies for development were tried without success, finding a solution only with the Real Plan and the emergence of a fiscal policy that agreed to overcome the pressures for management of external public debt, greater control of spending, and adequate budget management. Fiscal policy in the post-Real Plan period considered some essential elements. First, it produced a balanced budget, increasing revenues and decreasing expenses. Second, the new fiscal policy promoted the economic opening to the market. The main actions established in the fiscal policy were strengthening Federal Revenue capacities and creating institutional improvements that would give the State greater power to collect taxes. A more restrictive monetary policy was made in association with price deindexation, expenditure cuts, and state-owned companies’ privatization. The result achieved was to control inflation—the main objective—and to introduce a new monetary standard—Real.
The new fiscal policy establishment arose from a democratic institutional context—first, government negotiations with the domestic market; second, the negotiation of external public debt and the fulfillment of international creditors’ conditionalities, especially the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Peters & Filgueiras, 2022). According to the actors’ consensual ideas, the fiscal policy created a complex policy monopoly that led to the Real Plan’s success. Government, international financial institutions agents, market players, and academics have strengthened a shared idea of spending control, establishing rules that follow the international standard (Pio, 2001). The agreement with the IMF implied the conduct of fiscal policy based on a design that prevents government expenditure bias, imposes restrictive rules, discourages countercyclical economic policies, depoliticizes the management of fiscal and monetary policy, and targets the control of inflation (Kopits, 2001).
Fiscal policy’s depoliticization was the main objective to reduce incentives to party and political actors’ increases government spending (Crivelli et al., 2016). The design of fiscal policy associates the establishment of clear rules of fiscal and budgetary management with punishments for national and subnational political authority, promoting fiscal transparency, surveillance, and budgetary sanctions (Peters & Filgueiras, 2022). Establishing a fiscal policy monopoly meant establishing a complex policy style, involving autonomy and hierarchical strength of the Federal Revenue, market mechanisms for budget management, and networks of heterodox economists (Pio, 2001). A complex depoliticization of fiscal policy forced the center-left government that emerged with Lula’s electoral victory in 2002 to agree fully to the current austerity.
The Fiscal Responsibility Law of 2001 brought about Brazilian fiscal policy consolidation, which established conditions for debt renegotiation, sanctions on political authority, and control of subnational government spending to avoid moral hazard and provide fiscal transparency. Based on this law, the policy design established the main terms of austerity and the recurrent depoliticizing fiscal policy process. Additionally, this fiscal policy enabled the consolidation of a macroeconomic trope based on the floating exchange rate, fiscal surplus, and fixed inflation targets. Between 1995 and 2015, fiscal policy was replicated both in center-right governments (PSDB) and center-left governments (PT), composing a shared idea that was reproduced with the same actors controlling politics (Pires, 2014). A threat to this fiscal policy monopoly occurred with the introduction of countercyclical policies in the Dilma Roussef government, causing the Roussef government’s impeachment for breach of austerity imposed in the Fiscal Responsibility Law (Dweck & Teixeira, 2017). The policy monopoly’s reaction was to impose a new government expenditure control mechanism to react to the countercyclical policies that they imposed in 2014, the first year of breaking the primary surplus. Constitutional Amendment 95/2017 set the government’s spending limit, resulting in severe punishments for political authority.
The fiscal policy monopoly in Brazil is only possible with a pluralist political regime associated with a technocracy insulated from interest groups and politicians’ pressure and the autonomy to conduct fiscal policy. Brazilian fiscal policy operates by alienating politics and creating capacities to control public spending (Loureiro et al., 2020). On the other hand, the policy dimension comprises the Federal Revenue hierarchy, market coordination, and economists’ heterodox networks.
Competitive Structures—Health Policy
In Brazil, health policy has its origins in a proto-welfare state at the beginning of the 20th century with national campaigns for immunization and control of infections and tropical diseases. The State began regulating health policies, with social security and social assistance, to workers formally included in the labor market—the so-called regulated citizenship (W. G. Santos, 1979). Health services also were provided through private hospitals and religious/non-profit organizations. Most of the population was excluded from the State subsidies and regulation of health services.
The health coalition anticipated the emergence of democratization forces from civil society. The idea of a national health system was formulated alongside a project for restoring democratic liberties. Many public health professionals, the so-called sanitaristas, mobilized political actors, and some themselves became politicians during the democratic transition (Falleti, 2010; Menicucci, 2014). The eighth National Health Conference, held in 1986, was a pivotal moment in formulating new health policy. This conference was dedicated to thinking about health as citizens’ right and the State’s obligation. So, the health system’s reformulation benefited from a democratization context of interactive patterns.
The Federal Constitution of 1988 established the Unified Health System (SUS) explicitly, changing Brazil’s health model (S. S. B. D. S. Santos et al., 2015). Health policies should cover all citizens, no matter their formal inclusion in the labor market, promoting egalitarian access and satisfying all health needs in a decentralized and hierarchical system. In 1993, the federal government extinguished the National Institute of Medical Assistance of Social Security (INAMPS). The federal government rapidly changed its patterns from direct execution of public services to financing and regulating public health provisions mainly from states and municipalities. In the following years, a Constitutional Amendment obliged subnational governments to expend a minimum amount of their budgets on public health. The Ministry of Health formulated new health programs through conditional transfers and innovative policies connecting science and technology to the pharmaceutical industry (da Fonseca et al., 2019; Machado, 2019).
During this process of institutionalizing a new health policy, inclusive political institutions were crucial. Two were particularly important to solidify interaction with society and inside the federation. The National Health Council, although created in the 1930s, gained a new role after the creation of SUS, articulating political networks in the debate of important issues for the health policy agenda. The Intergovernmental Articulation Commission was created informally at the beginning of the 1990s, gathering representatives from municipalities, states, and the federal government to deliberate about intergovernmental issues concerning health policy (Franzese & Abrucio, 2013).
Health policy mobilizes different policy instruments to implement its objectives. Along with the hierarchical instruments mentioned (as minimum constitutional expenditures in public health outlined at a subnational level) and the network (as council and intergovernmental commissions), market instruments often are used for states and municipalities responsible for public health provision. Public-private partnerships (in association with non-governmental organizations) or purchasing private services are standard market instruments. Another instrument is public consortiums among municipalities. The consórcios públicos—designed to facilitate partnerships in all areas—gets massive use in public health provision. All those instruments have a common characteristic: to combine interactive technocracies with pluralist political institutions.
Brazil is a unique country with more than 100 million people with universal health care coverage (Giovanella et al., 2018). One of the SUS’s main achievements is improving health indicators as immunization coverage, infant mortality, and life expectancy at birth. Around 95% of respondents in the National Health Survey in 2013 said they received health care the first time they sought it (Castro et al., 2019). Only 25% of the population has any private health insurance; most of them among wealthier families. Therefore, SUS is an essential public policy to reduce public service access inequality for most low-income families (Arretche, 2018). The governance style in health policy demonstrates the importance of inclusive and competitive political institutions to promote efficient policy instruments in policymaking. The SUS has its roots in inclusiveness and federative autonomy, owing to pluralistic democracy.
Bureaucratic-Authoritarian—Nuclear Energy Policy
Brazil’s nuclear energy policy has its origins in a bureaucratic-authoritarian context. This autocratic period differs from the previous non-democratic one because the State’s direction is no longer the prerogative of a populist leader, but of a bureaucratic-military body. Schneider (2015) also points out that the Brazilian authoritarian period that started in 1964 was characterized by a developmental state perspective. One of the most critical concerns of military officers was the country’s security weakness. To overcome these perceived vulnerabilities, officers invested in high technology sectors such as aircraft engineering, information technology, and nuclear energy.
The nuclear energy policy took place during Brazil’s last stage of bureaucratic professionalization. In 1967, both the Decree-Law 200 and the Congress Resolution 55 came into effect (Brazil, 1967). The former was an essential step toward the public administration’s professionalization, which was established as the federal public administration’s principles: planning, coordination, decentralization, delegation of competence, and control. The latter was a Legislative initiative to establish the Congress’ Parliamentary Investigation Committee (Comissão Parlamentar de Inquérito) to investigate issues related to nuclear technology development, the first move to justify constructing the Angra 1 nuclear plant. After 3 years, the committee’s conclusion could not be more explicit: the industry-led economic development intended by the military government would not be possible without a nuclear energy source (Brazil, 1971).
In 1971, law 5.540 established the National Nuclear Energy Commission, an autarchy linked to the Ministry of Mines and Energy. Later, in 1974, law 6.189 merged the National Nuclear Energy Commission and the Brazilian Nuclear Company (Nuclebras), a state-owned company. The nuclear energy policy, designed in the bureaucratic-authoritarian state, combined a technocratic model (not interactive with society) with authoritarian political leadership (sustained by strong nationalism).
The military dictatorship government had a nationalist discourse in its public communications, despite strong ties to international economic actors, which is one of the characteristics that distinguish this kind of State from a nationalistic fascist State (Collier, 2001). Pursuing nuclear technology development led the military government to establish a cooperation agreement with the United States that was later terminated by the partner in 1974. The US Atomic Energy Commission, claiming insufficient capacity, reneged on the future commercial supply of enriched uranium for Brazil’s Angra nuclear plant and several other clients (Nedal & Coutto, 2013). After that, Western Germany committed to export between four and eight reactors over 15 years, at an estimated cost of DM10 billion (about USD4 billion).
In 1977, under international and national pressure, President Ernesto Geisel published a document, the “white book” (Brazil, 1977), to demonstrate the peaceful and national development purpose that the nuclear project represented. It was both a response to external constraints to Brazilian atomic development and to the population on why the economic crises had deepened. A new Parliamentary Investigation Committee was established the following year to investigate Brazil and Germany (Brazil, 1982). Along with the two petroleum economic crises of 1973 and 1979, the nuclear initiative’s failure was an essential factor in explaining the military dictatorship’s decline (Sardo et al., 2020). Nevertheless, the Brazilian Nuclear Company was not dissolved until 1989, after the re-democratization and the regime’s end.
Democratization implied a decrease in the salience of nuclear energy policy. Yet the Angra 1 plant was completed in 1985 (the year of the regime change) and the Angra 2 plant was completed in 2000. The initial project intended to build three plants in Angra dos Reis, a city in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The Angra 3 project started in 1984, halted in 1986, resumed in 2010, and halted again after a series of corruption scandals related to illicit ties between politicians and civil construction entrepreneurs.
By associating an authoritarian political regime with a noninteractive technocracy, the bureaucratic-authoritarian state represents a governance style that demobilizes networks and creates predatory relationships with the market through “bureaucratic rings” that compromise the quality of public policy. Nuclear energy policy, after democratization, remained under military forces’ control. In absence of coordinating mechanisms for infrastructure and energy policy, it was a failure in accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness of policy implementation.
Institutional Weakness—Public Sanitation
Brazil is a country with a high deficit in providing public sanitation services, including the supply of treated water and sewage collection (Cavalcanti et al., 2020). In general, this low supply reproduces regional inequalities. In the North region, 58.8% of municipalities have access to treated water, while this percentage is 92.3% in the Southeast. Only 45% of sewage in Brazil is treated (IBGE, 2020).
Brazil’s sanitation policy emerges from the absence of an adequate institutional arrangement, making the reality of sanitation unattainable in Brazil. Until the mid-1960s, municipalities carried out sanitation policies, creating a trajectory of vast inequality in providing water treatment and sewage collection services. In 1971, the federal government designed the National Sanitation Plan (Planasa) to centralize sanitation policy through infrastructure investments. The country based this centralization on financing instruments and public services concession to state sanitation companies. State governors gained exclusive control of these state sanitation companies, representing an important political resource. This resulted in sanitation companies becoming state bureaucracies without any interaction with markets or control by society (Borja, 2014).
After the 1988 Constitution, there was a series of transfers of duties from the Union to states and municipalities, including the sanitation policy (Arretche, 1999). Several policies were decentralized with great success, such as basic education and health policies. In Brazil, what determines the success or failure of decentralization is the municipalities’ structural condition and the policies’ institutional attributes (Arretche, 1999). The decentralization process has not been successful in sanitation policy because governors’ control over companies has created a fragile institutional arrangement, making it difficult to coordinate policy in its various instruments. Governors use sanitation companies’ management to carry out simplistic policies and assert a populist authority in society. Companies are subject to various corruption schemes, inefficiency, and lack of investment to expand the supply of water and sewage services (Sousa & Costa, 2016).
The sanitation policy design hinders the instruments of coordination with the markets, weakens public-private partnerships, and excludes networks’ participation from the policy process. Even with the availability of resources for investment in sanitation works, the context of institutional weakness and governors’ control stifles and impedes change, reinforcing a situation of path dependence (Sousa & Costa, 2016). The institutional weakness context causes the sanitation policy to reproduce a noninteractive bureaucracy—state sanitation companies—with political leadership that captures this bureaucracy for private interests.
Embedded Autonomy—Policy Development
Brazil’s economic infrastructure and sectorial industry was mainly a state-led effort, both stimulating and directing foreign and national private investments. A developmental state has operated for nearly 60 years, from 1930 to 1990. The industrial policy successfully developed new technologies and markets in areas such as oil, ethanol, steel, and aircraft manufacturing. However, compared to other political experiences in East Asia, there was no economic reorientation toward more intensive technology use, economic innovation, or sustainable productivity enhancement. Brazilian developmentalism has failed in information technology, nuclear energy, and in diminishing huge social inequalities among individuals and regions (Schneider, 2015).
The overall characteristic of Brazilian developmentalism was the federal government’s strong presence in coordinating and executing infrastructure projects, alternating authoritarian populism—Vargas’ dictatorship (1930–1945) and military regime (1964–1985)—with democratic populism (1945–1964). The most common economic strategy was intervening directly in the market through different policy instruments such as subsidies from development banks, tariff protection, sectoral policies, and mainly state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Those instruments combined both hierarchy and market facets of state-led initiatives (C. C. C. Fernandes et al., 2017; Schneider, 2015).
The most important policy instrument in development policy was SOEs’ use in some sectors with more autonomy, although informal consultations were often typical, the so-called “bureaucratic rings” (Cardoso, 1975). Military dictatorship combined economic technocracy with national populism and prideful celebrations. We selected two examples to illustrate the interaction between technocrats and other financial and political actors during this authoritarian regime: first, the creation of new industries, mainly the aircraft industry; and second, the organization of urban planning, sanitation, and transportation with metropolitan regions.
The dictatorship created Brazil’s aircraft industry. Embraer—Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica—founded in 1969, benefited from massive subsidies and a completely new, devised environment toward the aircraft industry. Schneider (2015) emphasizes the importance of political support from the Air Force and the professionalized, well-trained personnel who graduated from the surrounding technological institutions, the Instituto Tecnológico da Aeronáutica (ITA) and Centro Técnico da Aeronáutica (CTA). Government support continued even after privatization, since foreign ownership could not exceed 40%. During the 1990s, Embraer emerged as an international competitor in the market of medium-size jets (Schneider, 2015).
The military dictatorship also designed state interventions to diminish regional asymmetries. Regional departments took broad actions focused on the less-developed Northeast regions (created in 1959, during democratic populism) and North (with an export zone in Manaus, in 1967). In the early 1970s, federal legislation created nine metropolitan areas: São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Recife, Salvador, Curitiba, Belém, Fortaleza, and Rio de Janeiro. This legislation also organized a new top-down model of metropolitan governance. The objective was to promote joint efforts to provide public services, mainly in urban planning, sanitation, and transportation. Metropolitan companies were created in each metropolitan area to manage federal resources embedded with local political elites. After re-democratization in 1988, although metropolitan arrangements continued to exist, they lacked funds and political support from the federal government. To this day, considerable variation still exists among urban areas’ effectiveness in executing standard services (Araújo et al., 2016; A. S. A. Fernandes, 2011).
The development policy emerged during periods of authoritarian and democratic populism, with hierarchical and market policy instruments. The most remarkable achievement was fast economic growth within a short time—between 1968 and 1973, gross domestic product (GDP) growth was around 11% per year. Nevertheless, social and regional inequalities remained abysmal, and economic figures revealed the dictatorship’s destructive social and economic heritage to the population. Democracy was restored during the so-called “lost decade” of 1980 and faced hyperinflation. Recent attempts to apply economic receipts of state-led fast economic growth failed, as discussed previously, on Dilma’s attempts to break the Real economic policy monopoly.
Governance Styles—Implications to Reforms and Public Management
After looking at the five case studies with our typology, we have an opportunity to consider implications and provide clarity. This typology challenges the relationship between political dynamics and policy dimension to understand how governance styles imply different strategies and actions to steer policy.
Governance styles represent the way of governing, contextualized in political power relations (Richardson, 2012). The constitution of theories with a paradigm framework, as governance theory, must consider their political contingencies in the comparative analysis to understand governance’s institutional and organizational aspects in different countries or in the same government. Constituting paradigms is essential to share ideas and shape prospects for reforms. However, the general objective of creating a theory that directly models reforms may fail, both in the comparative dynamics between governments and internally within the same governmental structure.
Comparative governance analysis can add value if it recognizes frameworks that operate governance styles that understand power dynamics (involving political and bureaucratic elites) and policy styles that embrace work for different modes of government coordination with society (hierarchies, markets, and networks). This typology is an effort to fit different governance styles that consider different realities nested within a political dimension. With the status of a paradigm (Stoker, 1998), several governance theories assume an almost universal content, influencing the reforms design worldwide but disregarding political dynamics that influence the policy design and process along with public management’s organizational aspects. The corollary of this typology is to consider that the governance styles nest policy and politics in complex forms of government action detailed in ideas, interests, actors, and institutions.
This nested relation between policy and politics creates a series of challenges. Governance styles vary internally within governments, as well as in the comparative analysis of governance. Internally for governments, governance styles vary over time depending on the prioritized policies and objects of attention in the political system associated with political leadership. Many variations in public policy in the United States produce strong or weak presidents, changing the dynamics of party politics in legislatures (Lowi, 1972). On the other hand, we cannot disregard the role of bureaucracies and how their autonomy and capacity imply different interests within the structure of the State and how public administration and party organizations select political issues and create the political agenda (Skocpol, 1985). The relationship between politics and policy defines governance styles that make it possible to understand government performance over time and internally to bureaucracy while providing a comparative approach that allows different countries to be framed in a general theory, but without claiming universality.
The governance styles’ complexity and coexistence depend on political regimes’ institutional strength and dynamics that enhance positive feedback over time, as discussed previously in this paper. Time is an essential variable in constructing governance styles, with path dependence implications for reforms. Path dependence situations occur when a policy exhibits increasing returns (Pierson, 2000), or ideational legitimation, in which courses of action are shaped or constrained by previous structures of ideas and institutions (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010), resulting in the inertia of organizations and managers decisions (Sarigil, 2015; Sedgwick & Jensen, 2021).
Governance styles’ dynamics have direct implications for reforms. As noted earlier, governance reforms can represent “one size fits all” situations. This is a trend when international organizations such as the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) build influence on the models of change that must be adopted in different countries. When adopted as a paradigm that influences reforms, governance styles, when analyzed comparatively between countries, lead to different outcomes. These outcomes tend to reproduce situations of path dependence, including utilitarian, ideational, or habituation conceptions that structure the agency. Governance styles define practical action for changes or reproduce previous patterns from when the policy was formulated. Going beyond this comparative issue between governments, reforms may fail to produce fragmented conceptions of public management. Likewise, when we observe reforms within the same government, we must consider the dynamics of politics and policy. Packaged reforms, which disregard the dynamics of the political regime’s functioning, reinforce fragmentation of public management, producing different outcomes.
The illustrative cases of the Brazilian government demonstrate that governance styles have direct implications for the agency’s construction and how public managers can constitute processes and standards for policy steering. Governance styles, which emerge at the political and policy layers, are fundamental for interpreting and understanding the institutional arrangements that shape the action and policy design dynamics. Governance styles can encourage or constrain public managers’ action situations, making it possible to understand whether and how different styles deliver effective policy designs. Governance styles shape institutional policy arrangements and define agency conditions for public managers and their capacity to steer the boat.
Conclusions
The literature on policy styles considers that governments act with different forms of policy coordination with society, based on hierarchies, markets, and networks (Meuleman, 2008). The policy dynamics assume a tendency of increasing depoliticization, hoping that governance instruments can produce greater trust and legitimacy of policies and more plural forms of interaction between governments and society. This depoliticization is frequent and results in a technical policy formulation that benefits society with a requirement for political neutrality. Depoliticization does not mean a departure from institutional politics but a requirement for neutrality that legitimizes governance (Beveridge, 2012).
Governance styles include governments’ actions to policy formulation and implementation, in the expectation that their actions’ success will yield electoral benefits, in the case of democracies, or power support, in authoritarian regimes. Populism and technocracy pose threats to governance mechanisms in liberal democracies (Stoker, 2019). However, governance dynamics to formulate and implement public policies are more complex and are not limited to hierarchies, markets, and networks. Public policies are implemented in a complex relationship with the political dimension because of political leaders’ and elites’ roles, which can occur within a pluralist democracy or in populist forms. On the other hand, state bureaucracies exercise political functions and a representative role when interacting with society. Bureaucracies’ technical attributes play an important role on whether they interact with society.
The disconnection between policy theory and political theory shows an analytical limit concerning the public manager’s actions. Governments’ roles and the way they choose to act (or not) in society are not disconnected from the political dimension, with variations in governance styles depending on the convergence between politics and policy. Whether elected officials, autocrats, or state bureaucracies, political leadership is an essential attribute, which shows that the connections between politics and policy depend on patterns of interaction between governments and society (Lauwo et al., 2022) to define the governance style. The governance theory can gain more analytical strength if it understands how hierarchies, markets, and networks act to design policies considering the political regime’s dynamics (which can be pluralist or populist) and the bureaucracies’ political dynamics (which can be interactive or noninteractive with society).
This is not exactly a new topic, considering a dispute about which comes first—politics or policy. In the first approach, institutional politics’ dynamics determine policy (Skocpol, 1995). In the second approach, policy determines politics (Lowi, 1964). In our argument, there is no definitive relationship between politics and policy. They coexist in distinct layers yet are connected and nested. As a result, governance styles involve complex dynamics that require a mix of conditions in the political regime, political role of bureaucracies, and relationship among hierarchies, markets, and networks.
The typology presented is not intended to be exhaustive. It creates conditions for analyzing the coexistence between politics and policy and different governance styles that guide policy steering. These styles coexist within the same political order and vary according to elements of path dependence. For example, the relationship between politics and policy leads to path dependence (Peters et al., 2005). Then the relationship between political conflict and policy changes constitutes a trajectory that fixes public policy’s institutional attributes, which will vary between the conditions of the pluralist political regime, populism, bureaucracies’ political role, and the relationship between hierarchies, markets, and networks.
Governance theories assume a normative character, determining arrangements for how the dynamics and relations between governments and society should produce policy outcomes. When we analyze governance, we realize that its dynamics are more complex, delimiting different styles according to the public policy path. The path is contingent upon public policy design and conflict dynamics in the dimension of politics (Pierson, 2004). In other words, the governance styles represent path dependence conditions, where public policies’ institutional attributes will vary according to the trajectories of institutional design in which the policies are created.
The different governance styles we presented reinforce this idea of path dependence. Public policy’s design and politics’ institutional attributes at the first steps create critical junctures in which each step in the policy increases the path’s attractiveness. The results obtained in a temporal sequence’s initial stage are reinforced, representing branches within the same public policy (Pierson, 2004). Governance styles are, therefore, not a predictive factor for good policies. They emerge from the dynamics between the dimensions of politics and policy. Public policy’s dynamics are attributed institutionally, depending on the political contingency and institutional arrangements.
The theory of governance styles can advance if it considers the connection between politics and policy dynamics in its institutional attributes. Pluralist or populist forms coexist, associated with interactive or noninteractive technocracies. Hierarchies, markets, and networks do not determine governance styles. Connecting the political dimension to the policy dimension makes it possible to understand how governments act in society. Populism and technocracy are not exactly a threat to governance, but rather political dynamics that shape a complex, conflictive, and indefinite relationship with public management (Sörensen, 2020). Policies reflect path dependence conditions in political conflict dynamics contingent upon institutional trajectories that respect a complex interaction between governments and society.
Steering policies are contained in a dimension of conflict and contingency that is not depoliticized “adequately.” Governance theory can gain theoretical and empirical attention if it considers comparative politics of how pluralism, populism, and technocracy can converge in the same political order and design policies in different ways, with different dynamics related to the dimension of political conflict. In this way, populism and technocracy must be considered in conflict dynamics—along with their relationship with hierarchies, markets, and networks—to comprehend policies holistically and how they are inserted within that complexity to steer the boat.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Fernando Filgueiras received fund from Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, Grant number: 303273/2020-8.
