Democracy, Authoritarianism and Conservative Power in Provincial Territories: Asynchronies, Tensions and Articulations in a Federal State

Abstract

The election in 1983 was the first national election, which inaugurated what political science bibliography calls transitions to democracy from authoritarian rule. The political and theoretical weather of the time that elections and transition open left vacant the question of the construction of a democratic political regime can spoil all national space. So, as time goes by, political scientists and also politicians surprised themselves by the heterogeneous institutionalisation of democracy in the country, organised as a federal State, in which the provincias got their own constitutions, local actors and particular forms of the exercise of power. The aim of this text is to study the difficult reciprocation between the building of the national political regime in Argentina and the democratic political form in a few territorial spaces (call provincias: Catamarca, La Rioja, Santiago del Estero, Tucumán, San Luis, Corrientes). These territorial spaces were theorised by the specialised bibliography as non-democratised governments, most of the time with the existing of right and far-right actors inside the political regime. At the same time they were analysed as feudal governments, with the leader or clientelism domination, nepotism regimes, and more recently subnational authoritarianism. Those names and concepts are still used in different ways: the living of the ancient right, the personalism of the governors, the absence of the change and rotation of the ruling class and candidates although there are competitive and free elections, the division and balance of power, the life of liberties and the guarantees associated with the rule of law.