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This chapter describes an institutional choice that most Latin American countries have taken in the past 25 years: the creation of national Public Performance Monitoring and Evaluation (PPME) systems. We summarize research assessing their institutionalization, identify their shortcomings, and discuss trends demonstrating a potential – not yet realized – to fulfill their vocation as instruments of political and democratic accountability. Despite remarkable progress in their institutionalization, the evidence suggests that the systems fall short in producing strong results-oriented democratic accountability. Key factors hindering this aspiration include the systems' low credibility, problems associated to their diversification, low institutional coherence, and lack of effective coordination mechanisms to improve information legibility, its quality, its usefulness, and thus its use by both public managers and citizens. We suggest that PPME systems depend on environmental conditions beyond government structures and processes and argue that citizen-oriented mechanisms and entry points for social participation around the systems are required to fulfill their accountability function.

Identifying a single model of public administration in Latin America entails a simplification due to the variety of countries with different governance structures, administrative systems, historical legacies, and ways of addressing public sector reforms over time. Nevertheless, an extended feature among Latin American public administrations is the coexistence of Weberian models with patrimonialism and large-scale patronage practices. Although at first sight public administrations can formally contain all or most of the typical characteristics of a modern bureaucratic system, some of their practices are extraneous to everyday management. In this context, the waves of administrative reforms have sought, with different approaches, to strengthen the public machinery. An important point is that administrative reforms in Latin America largely followed a center–periphery pattern. Firstly, through the imitation of practices of the colonialist countries and later by importing reform packages from the central countries. Thus, this chapter goes over the main historical characteristics in the construction of the Latin American public administration, the reforms paradigms that have marked it and their consequences.