This article critically evaluates hypotheses that attribute decentralisation in Latin America to democratisation and economic liberalisation. It examines these hypotheses in historical perspective by looking at the experience over time with revenue decentralisation and recentralisation in Argentina, one of Latin America's early decentralisers. Because neither the democratic election of subnational officials nor the pursuit of economic liberalisation is unique to the contemporary period in Argentina, the Argentine case represents an opportunity to gain analytical leverage on the theories emerging in the contemporary period. The paper presents qualified support for the argument that democratisation drives decentralisation and confounding evidence for the liberalisation hypothesis.

This article attempts to fill the void in research on the Justicialista Party (PJ) organisation. Challenging accounts of the contemporary PJ as a weak, personalistic organisation, it argues that the party maintains a powerful base-level infrastructure with deep roots in working- and lower-class society. This organisation has been understated by scholars because, unlike prototypical working class party structures, it is informal and highly decentralised. The PJ organisation consists of a range of informal networks – based on unions, clubs, NGOs and activists' homes that are largely unconnected to the party bureaucracy. These organisations provided the government of Carlos Menem with a range of benefits in the 1990s, particularly in the realm of local problem-solving and patronage distribution. Yet they also constrained the Menem leadership, limiting its capacity to impose candidates and strategies on lower-level party branches.

This article focuses on the political and institutional process by which the privatisation policy was approved in Argentina during the 1990s. It concentrates mainly on the relationships that the President maintained with Congress and the political parties sitting in it. By looking through the lens of the privatisation case-study, the article aims to analyse the institutional capacity of Argentine democratic presidents to enact policy reforms. The article shows that the Presidency's constitutional resources in combination with the President's strong base of partisan support permitted the adoption of the innovative privatisation policy at an institutional level. However, the article also explains that the political and institutional resources of the Presidency were not invariable and permanent. Rather, the approval of the privatisation policy shows that policy-making processes involve a dialogue between President and Congress, an institutional interchange that can serve either to enhance or to constrain the powers of the President. By showing that congressional intervention should not be underestimated, this article claims that the Argentine presidential regime is better characterised as one of limited centralism than as an example of hyper-presidentialism. The first characterisation not only acknowledges the complexity of the institutional relations, but also the fact that, given a situation of presidential centralism, institutional relations are variable and, most importantly, contingent upon political conditions.

This article is a case study that shows the difficulty and complexity of structural adjustment by examining in great detail the reform of a single programme, the promotion of industrial investment in the less developed regions of Argentina. The article describes how the programme grew after 1956 when industrial promotion was first implemented so the reader can fully understand its intricate complexity. The reform process is described in detail, from the time that officials first became aware that the program was costing several percent of GDP to the present. Changing the system was an elaborate process of thrust and parry and counterthrust by government reformers and entrenched supporters of the old regime. The Congress, the Supreme Court, provincial officials and various international institutions were all able to exert considerable influence over the pace and nature of reform. The reform effort also illustrates the role of a free press and public opinion. A cadre of economists working within the government and in private research institutes carried out an effective campaign to inform the public about the programme's excesses. The end result is a precarious and far from simple or transparent, though decidedly less expensive, set of compromises that pleases no one.

O'Donnell's diagnosis regarding the delegative nature of the new Latin American democracies has won wide acceptance in current debates on institutional consolidation. Through the analysis of the Argentine case this commentary challenges the delegative democracy argument as one-sided. The delegativeness hypothesis, it will be argued, turns a blind eye to the truly innovative processes that have taken place within Argentine society and make this democratising wave distinctive.