The avatars of power and interests in the cycle of public policies [Los avatares del interés definido en términos de poder en la formulación de las políticas públicas]

The objective of this article is to analyze the importance of the variables of interest and power in the formulation of public policies. It is an exercise of extreme complexity that can only be solved by an analytic-synthetic method; it consists on a process of reasoning that tends to deconstruct and reconstruct a whole, from its units of analysis. It is a methodical explosion of public policies, considered as a differentiated structure (totality), with its own identity (autonomy). Although the article is limited to a theoretical-conceptual analysis, it allows the realization that public policies are a cycle that responds to a type of structure in operation as a result of a combined action of several actors. The social, political, practical and empirical implications underlying this approach indicate that if interest is not assisted by power and vice versa, both are indisputably inoperative and useless. That is to say, if the interest lacks resources of power, it is not possible to establish the rules of the game in the public policy decision-making stages and still less to impose or implement them because public policies are not medium-end mechanisms, Of automatic execution, in which the decision in the formulation phase is or should be what gives them meaning. © 2017 Centro Universitario de Brasilia. All rights reserved.

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