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officials. I explore this middle ground by investigating the subnational reforms that
authoritarian governments introduced in Latin America in the second half of the 20
th
century. In the cases included in my research, military-led governments at the center
canceled subnational elections and then proceeded to re-engineer subnational institutions in
ways that went far beyond bureaucratic deconcentration.
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
fact, rather than see subnational governments as obstacles, military authorities enlisted these
levels of government as tools that could help them implement a variety of far-reaching
economic and political goals. Given that these authorities chose to strengthen the capacities
of un-elected subnational governments, rather than rely exclusively on the efforts of central
government bureaucrats placed in subnational jurisdictions, neither devolution nor
deconcentration successfully captures the logic of these military-led reforms. The decision
by the military to do more than deconcentrate power within the central bureaucracy is not
merely of academic interest; when democracy was restored at the subnational level with the
withdrawal of the generals, newly elected officials were returned to subnational offices
whose capacity had been extended in new directions.
In the attempt to generate additional analytical leverage on the subnational
dimensions of military rule, this paper integrates insights from the older literature on
comparative authoritarianism with newer scholarship on decentralization. Toward this end,
Convention