Decentralization’s Non-democratic Roots:
Military Reforms of Subnational Institutions in Latin America
Kent Eaton
Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs
Princeton University
July 2003
Paper presented at the annual meetings of the
American Political Science Association,
Philadelphia, PA, August 28-31, 2003
Abstract:
Though democratization has set into motion decentralizing changes in much of Latin
America, this paper argues that the roots of the contemporary wave of decentralization lie in
the pre-democratic period. Toward the goal of encouraging dialogue between the older
literature on authoritarianism and the emerging literature on decentralization, this paper
focuses on Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, the three countries in Latin America that have
received the most scholarly attention by students of military government. According to the
dynamic I explore in this paper, the replacement of democratically-elected subnational
officials with appointed individuals from the center enabled military governments to
contemplate a subsequent expansion in the roles played by subnational governments.
Having asserted tight political control over subnational officials, de facto authorities at the
national level no longer had cause to worry that subnational spheres of government could be
used in ways that would challenge or undermine their objectives. In each case, the generals
designed reforms in subnational institutions in the service of ambitious attempts to remake
their countries’ economies and polities. The paper closes with the argument that military-era
reforms at the subnational level profoundly shaped subsequent events in the democracies
that re-emerged in the 1980s and 90s.
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