ABSTRACT
Introduction:
The modernization of the State as a public policy has a long history in Argentina. In this paper we analyze the three State Modernization plans launched in 2000, 2007 and 2016, to investigate their content, recover the economic, political, and institutional contexts in which each of these plans was implemented, and understand both the motivations and the political interests that drove them, as their limitations.
Materials and Methods:
To answer these questions, we work with the official documents of the three modernization plans signed by the national government with the funding agency. The documentary corpus is complemented with the reports of the funding agencies for each plan, with the organization charts of the state agencies involved and official budget sources. The historical reconstruction of the state’s modernization initiatives was carried out based on the registration and compilation of laws, decrees and other regulations on modernization and reform of the State at the federal level.
Results:
Our research suggests that, even though the changes in political administrations, there was a clear continuity between the three modernization plans, especially when it refers to the use of a common terminology, inherited from the New Public Management; to the commitment to technology; and the search for transparency as a value to be achieved. The difference found between the plans is that, in the last one, within the presidential administration of Mauricio Macri, modernization itself was presented as a goal, while in the previous ones there was an assumed relationship with the political projects the modernization plans were subsumed to.
Discussion:
These results contribute both to the field of public administration studies and to studies on the Cambiemos’ era and neoliberalism. In the first case, other studies on some modernization initiatives focused their attention on specific plans or initiatives, when here we propose a study in the medium term. The journey through more than twenty years of State reform and modernization projects in Argentina allows to account for the survival of a language and certain management tools over time, since they respond, we understand, to a temporality alien to the politics. Regarding the studies on Cambiemos, this work dialogues with academic production which analyzes the conformation of an individualizing and depoliticized narrative by this political alliance.
Keywords
State Modernization; State Modernization’s Plans; New Public Management; Public Administration; Cambiemos