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Constructing Weberian Bureaucracies in the Age of New Public Management? Starting with a broad review of the literature devoted to administrative reforms in a process of democratization, the article identifies the various political uses these reforms involve: appropriation of the apparatus for exercising power, organizational streamlining to produce collective goods, control of administrative resources according to a clientelistic rational, concern for legitimation with respect to international funding and development organizations. As it analyzes the conditions in which the three competing repertoires of reform (“Weberian” bureaucratic model, decentralized state, new public management), the article examines the ambiguities of these recipes and examines the issues, the limits and the effects of manipulating them. It especially points up the institutional entrenchment of the reforms and their dependence on administrations inherited from authoritarian regimes that shape and constrain attempts to transform administrative systems in a democratic context.