Regulation and business power: the case of public transportation in Santiago Full understanding of regulatory processes requires taking into account their political dimension, until now rarely considered in public administration literature.
The process tracing applied to the case of Transantiago, shows that the inability of the authorities to impose their preferences is mainly due to the structural constraints they faced. The effects of this inability are observed in the bidding process and in the phase of implementation of the regulation process.
The repudiation of captureβ from this perspective any regulation made in concert with or under pressure from economic actors would be considered capturedβis just the reverse face of this bias toward a unilateral focus on the power of authority. Undoubtedly, in a process of regulation the relations between political authorities and certain economic groups carry a risk of the former being captured by the latter Stigler, But the state can also establish a virtuous relationship with private actors, one that generates greater efficiency in the provision of public services while allowing it to preserve its autonomy at the same time Evans, In February , the Transantiago system, involving the creation of a new regulated public transport market, was launched Ureta, Different business units were offered for tender, leaving national and foreign companies in charge of them Maillet, Since the initial crisis in until the unsuccessful new call for tenders in , successive ministers have wanted to modify signed contracts or even declare them to have lapsed.
However, neither continuous media exposure nor the cross-party rejection of the system have been enough to completely reverse its operating problems. How did the operators of Transantiago resist this pressure?
Generically, business power is expressed in two ways. The first, instrumental power, consists of the organized pressure of economic actors on politics. Despite the explanatory potential of this literature, it has still to be considered in public administration and public policy studies.
