Power and Pesos: Bureaucracy, Expertise and the Politics of Money in Mexico and Argentina

Bureaucratic state elites in central banks and finance ministries play a critical role in the politics of macroeconomic policy. Highly credentialed expert officials in these organizations have come to occupy central locations on the political elites of developing countries, particularly in Latin America. These expert elites are especially influential in policy areas such as monetary and exchange rate management, which are central to economic growth and stability, as demonstrated by the emerging market financial crises of the 1990s. Addressing the cases of Mexico and Argentina from 1982 to the present and drawing on extensive interviews with key elites, this dissertation examines the interaction of evolving debates in the global field of economic policy expertise and national processes of bureaucratic elite competition. The study contributes to the study of bureaucratic state elites and the politics of economic policy in three main ways. First, the empirical chapters demonstrate the influence of bureaucratic experts on policies that include inflation stabilization in the 1980s, exchange rate management in the 1990s, and post-crisis monetary policies in the 2000s. Second, the dissertation develops a new theoretical framework for analyzing the policy preferences of bureaucratic state elites and applies this framework to the empirical cases. Previous research has emphasized the generally pro-market worldview of expert bureaucrats following a "paradigm shift" in the economics discipline during the 1970s. In contrast, the field theoretic framework developed in this dissertation stresses the dynamic and contested nature of economic knowledge and the contingent and strategic character of bureaucrats' policy positions. The framework shows how elite competition within the varying social structures of bureaucratic elites (a highly cohesive elite in Mexico compared with a relatively fragmented one in Argentina) results in very different policy-making processes in the two countries. The dissertation documents the structure of bureaucratic elites using a new relational dataset and network analysis techniques. Third, the dissertation focuses on processes of consensus formation as a means of evaluating the performance of bureaucratic experts. The findings suggest that there were major failures in the global field of policy expertise leading to the currency crises of the 1990s.