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Law-Making and Federalism in Argentina’s Last Dictatorship

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The Argentinian Dictatorship and its Legacy

Part of the book series: Studies of the Americas ((STAM))

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Abstract

Political institutions under Argentina’s last dictatorship are understudied beyond the factionalization of politics. The literature assumes that dictators had ultimate power to override the legislative and federal institutions they had set up. This chapter shows the opposite: that Argentina’s collective dictatorship had designed a horizontal and vertical division of power that enabled both the legislature and the provincial governors to block and amend the Executive’s policies. Building on data from the archives of the legislative body active during the period, the Legislative Advisory Commission, and case studies of federal legislation, we demonstrate that the interplay between institutional design and factional politics resulted in high rejection and amendment rates of Executive bills, and in substantial changes to federal legislation against the Executive’s original intent.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Estatuto del Proceso de Reorganización Nacional and Reglamento para el Funcionamiento de la Junta Militar, el Poder Ejecutivo Nacional y la Comisión de Asesoramiento Legislativo.

  2. 2.

    The partial exception concerned the provincial governorships. See below.

  3. 3.

    Factionalism was actually concentrated in the Army, for which Novaro and Palermo (2006) identify four factions by 1978. While the Navy and the Air Force remained fairly cohesive throughout the regime, the Army always had at least two factions in conflict. Still, neither the Navy nor the Air Force were perfectly aligned with any Army faction (ibid., also Fontana 1987).

  4. 4.

    Audio interview with Gral José Villarreal, Secretary General of the Presidency (1976–1978), Archivo de Historia Oral, Programa de Historia Política, Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, University of Buenos Aires.

  5. 5.

    “Each minister, in theory, was [under] the President’s [authority], but in fact they took their orders from their respective Commander” (Audio interview with Gral J. Villarreal, Archivo de Historia Oral, Programa de Historia Política, Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, University of Buenos Aires).

  6. 6.

    Reglamento para el Funcionamiento de la Junta Militar, el Poder Ejecutivo Nacional y la Comisión de Asesoramiento Legislativo.

  7. 7.

    This principle was only abandoned between 1 July and 21 September 1982, when the Junta was temporarily dissolved and the Army ruled alone, thus controlling all the CAL’s sub-commissions.

  8. 8.

    Reglamento para el Funcionamiento de la Junta Militar, el Poder Ejecutivo Nacional y la Comisión de Asesoramiento Legislativo.

  9. 9.

    The data set and the scripts used to perform the analysis on R and R Studio are available on request.

  10. 10.

    In the few cases where there was a draw, we attributed control to the service that held its chairmanship—as the chairman’s signature was required for any report made by the sub-commission and he was the one to which every communication to the sub-commission was addressed.

  11. 11.

    The results were robust to the use of other proxies such as the number of sub-commissions a proposal was referred to or the number of sessions in which a proposal was treated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CONICET, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Alejandro Bonvecchi

  2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Emilia Simison

Authors
  1. Alejandro Bonvecchi
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  2. Emilia Simison
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Correspondence to Alejandro Bonvecchi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of International Development, King’s College London, London, UK

    Juan Grigera

  2. Research Associate (SOAS) and Postdoctoral Fellow (CONICET), Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (IdIHCS), Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), La Plata, Argentina

    Luciana Zorzoli

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Bonvecchi, A., Simison, E. (2020). Law-Making and Federalism in Argentina’s Last Dictatorship. In: Grigera, J., Zorzoli, L. (eds) The Argentinian Dictatorship and its Legacy. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18301-1_5

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