How do bureaucrats influence in the policy formulation process? Do they influence the most political stages of this process, or is their influence restricted to policy implementation? The relationship between bureaucracy and policy formulation has been studied mainly from political science and public administration. However, existing studies rather address the role of bureaucracies in public policy implementation, principally from an organizational approach, describing topics related to efficiency and effectiveness of the bureaucracy. In the same way, a line of researches analyze how street level bureaucrats change, in the implementation stage, the objectives defined by politicians (Lipsky 1980).
However, there are few researches that analyze how bureaucrats influence the most political phases of the policy process, as agenda setting, policy formulation, and.
