28
the conservative legacy of political abdication that had brought on the era of populist
politics” and were thus deemed a “threat to the Proceso’s mission of radical political
transformation” (Gibson 1997, 81 and 82). In the early years of the regime, with hardliners
in the ascendant, provincial dynamics were mostly irrelevant (Sawers 1996). As seen in
Gibson’s study of the military’s attempt to forge a “conservative transition,” the subnational
realm became more important with the initiation of a political opening in the late 1970s and
with the replacement of Videla with Roberto Viola in 1981.
17
As in the 1960s military
regime, however, the attempt to design and institutionalize a new political order that would
favor conservative provincial parties over Peronist and Radical politicians proved to be a
failure. According to Gibson, conflict among conservative politicians in the provinces over
neoliberal economic policies proved to be as important an obstacle in this design process as
the notorious factionalism within the armed forces (Gibson 1997, 77).
While the sub-national dimension was largely absent from the traumatic retreat of
the military from power in 1983, the caretaker government of General Reynaldo Bignone did
issue a decree-law that would have important implications for politics and policy making in
the contemporary democratic period. Specifically, this law raised to five the minimum
number of representatives that each province could send to the federal chamber of deputies
(Porto 1990, Sawers 1996). Thus, like its counterpart in Brazil, the military government in
Argentina sought to ensure that political society in the more traditional and conservative
interior would enjoy enhanced leverage within national decision-making arenas in the new
democratic systems that replaced the generals. In a dynamic that is pervasive but difficult to
document, raising the minimum number of deputies per province can be linked to a series of
costly policies, including cheap credits for unviable investment projects and regulations that
17
See Botana (2001, 11) for the argument that “political elites managed to participate in the governments of
Convention