Exceptional Argentina Di Tella, Glaeser and Llach - Thomas Piketty

analysis of the Argentinean and Chilean Police Forces, to enlighten the potential causes of the
current problems in Argentina. More than a mere benchmarking, we believe that this
comparison could partially unpack the black box of institutional performance problems in the
Argentinean public organizations overall. Section 4 explores the root of the Chilean success
with the Police, while section 5 explores the Argentinean case.
4. What things does Chile do differently and why?
This section explores the potential causes of the better perception of the Chilean Police. In a
nutshell, we observe that Argentineans cops have less schooling and training, despite no
obvious differences in compensation with the Chileans. We also find that Chilean cops are
rotated geographically with more frequency. The rest of the section details these and other
differences.
1. Chileans cops are more educated and have longer training than Argentinean
ones
To start with, Carabineros de Chile is able to select people with a higher level of schooling
than the Argentinean Police Forces. More than 90% of the Organization has at least a high
school diploma. In contrast, a 1995 report by the Argentinean Ministry of Interior identified
that at least a third of the policeman did not complete primary school (Hinton, 2006). Of
course, the possibility of making this selection is constrained by the status that the profession
has . Even in the 1960s the CIA attributed “the low popularity of the Police as a career [... ] to
not only [... ] low wages, but also [... ] a decrease in the social and professional prestige of the
Police among the general public”. Several references to the police in Argentina today 1 show
that this relatively low status has not improved. Prendegarst (2007) argued that the pure
compensating differential of a bureaucratic job can select both the best agents for the position,
but also the worst; impatient people that do not intrinsically value to be a policeman, and are
eager to abuse from the conferred discretion. Thus, a military style and a long duration of
training are important factors helping to self select in the most suitable agents and select out the
less intrinsically motivated. The Chile-Argentina gap in the duration of initial training is much
less marked in the Officer ranks 2 , but very large for the Enrolled personnel, which constitutes
roughly 80% of the force (and shapes the street level relationship with the public). In Chile,
Enrolled personnel has at least 1 year of training - recently moved to one and a half years -. In
Argentina training is shorter and, anecdotally, less hard. For agents of the Argentinean Federal
Police (PFA), the minimum training period is 6 months, while for agents of the Police of the
Province of Buenos Aires it is generally no longer than 3 months (Córdoba and Pastor, 2003).
After acceptance in the Police Academy, preferences of people can change through
indoctrination and training. Akerlof and Kranton (2000) remark that the process of
transformation is crucial for bureaucracies with high level of discretion and mission
orientation, like Police Forces. In general, the longer and more coherent the training with the
rest of the organization, the more successful this preference change can be. As mentioned,
training is twice as long in Chile than in Argentina. Other source of transformation is the
continuous education of personnel, which is certainly higher in Chile. For example, there, the
Enrolled personnel is required to participate in many workshops, events and even allowed to go
to a Sub-officers school. In contrast, the Argentinean experience is less intensive in continuous
training. It seems that once enrolled as policeman in Argentina, education is only to officers
that are likely to be promoted. Other sources of selection may well be related to the family. On
1 See Córdoba and Pastor (2003), Burzaco (2001 and 2004)
2 Four in chile and three in Argentina’s federal police