Agency Loss and the Strategic Redesign of the Presidential Office

Autor principal:
Luis Bernardo Mejia Guinand
Autores:
Angelica Solano
Felipe Botero
Programa:
Sesión 1
Día: jueves, 21 de septiembre de 2017
Hora: 09:00 a 11:00
Lugar: Seminario 0.2.

The literature on presidential politics in Latin America has made little progress in studying the organizational mechanisms in which presidents maintain cabinet and legislative coalitions. That is, the creation or transformation of agencies within the cluster of organizations that directly support the chief of the executive. Weak political support makes presidents prone to use cabinet appointments for political backing. These transactions force Presidents to delegate authority over policy formulation to partisan ministers. Presidents confront the problem of how to get partisan ministers to comply with their policy priorities, instead of prioritizing those of the party to which they belong. The situation described raises the question on how presidents can ensure that ministers remain faithful agents, or at least how to reduce the information asymmetries between Presidents and ministers. One tool in this direction is the strategic redesign of the presidential office. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed 93 organizations established between 1931 and 2015 that constitute the set of agencies under direct control and supervision of the Colombian President. Using time series analysis, we find that Colombian Presidents use structural changes in their offices as a tool to manage their relations with the political environment

Palabras clave: presidential center, information asymmetries, agency loss, organizational strategic redesign, Colombia