The analysis on policy evaluation tends to emphasize the need to build technical capacity among officials and robust information systems. However, they have not put enough focus on the highly political nature of this process. This paper analyzes, through the Uruguayan case, a set of political and institutional dimensions associated with bureaucracy, civil society and their links with political parties in an attempt to contribute to the understanding about the consolidation of the monitoring and evaluation systems in the Latin American public administrations. Two main arguments are developed: on the one hand, the existence of factors associated with the country's institutional construction of the public sector influence the development of the evaluation system, and on the other, paradoxically, we ask if the good levels of transparency and confidence by citizens to the state reduce the incentives for evaluating public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]