The Sources of Bureaucratic Resilience against Executive Attack

• In Event: Comparative Perspectives on Bureaucracy in the Global South

Abstract

In an era of intense political polarization, presidents have attacked expert agencies in a wide range of policy areas. How, then, do bureaucracies fend off those attacks? Others have highlighted the importance of cross-cutting political support, which can help agencies retain their policymaking and regulatory capacity. As the case of Brazil’s Covid-19 vaccine program highlights, however, political support may not be sufficient to protect bureaucracies from attacks on their policy implementation capacity. In this article, we show how economic and societal support can offer bureaucracies additional leverage to help them fend off attacks to policy implementation, protecting them at different stages of the policy process and in ways that political support cannot. Drawing on media and government reports, in-depth interviews, and descriptive statistics, we show how Brazil’s Covid-19 vaccine program successfully overcame executive obstruction through a combination of political, economic, and societal support.

Author

• Jessica Rich, Marquette University