12 - The Argentine Congress as an environment for public policy formulation: an analysis of its technical areas

Summary

Introduction

Usually, when talking about public policy formulation, the focus is mainly on the executive branches, and even when it comes to researching the subject, most studies have focused on this branch of government. A few years ago, however, this began to change and the focus began to shift to the legislative branches.

In general terms, most of the studies on the Argentine Congress have dealt with the relations between the executive and the legislative branches, the political career of lawmakers, legislative production, and decrees of necessity and urgency, and have not focused much on the technical areas of Congress, which are those that provide assistance to lawmakers and their teams, mainly in their missions and functions. In this sense, the purpose of this chapter is to summarize a series of aspects related to these technical areas in order to evaluate the existing capacities, and to think about strengthening policies for the legislative branch, taking into account the factors that limit the Congress as an area for the formulation of public policies.

The technical areas of the Congress

The following is a brief analysis of the functions of the technical areas that we consider strategic for the legislative work, and for the state capacity building, in terms of their potential for public policies formulation. These areas are: the committees, the Parliamentary Information Office, the Library of Congress, the Budget Office and the research and training sectors of Congress.

The committees

We can assert, without fear of mistake, that the parliamentary committees are the heart of the legislative work in the formulation of public policies, since it is in them where the political forces with parliamentary representation, debate and reach agreements, or not, on the presented projects.

There are different types of parliamentary committees: on one hand, there are permanent advisory committees, on which we are going to focus; on the other hand, special committees, which are created for a specific purpose during a period of time, such as, for example, an investigative or follow-up committee; and, finally, the bicameral committees.

The guidelines for the organization and functioning of the committees are established in the rules of procedure of each Chamber.