Argentine Government and Politics

Even long before its last democratic restoration in 1983, Argentina has been a salient case for comparative political analyses. Several relevant concepts and events—such as the bureaucratic-authoritarian state and the presence of an impossible game developed by O’Donnell; the paradox of underdevelopment compared to Australia or Canada, as explained by Platt, Martin, and Di Tella; the emergence of a rara avis called Peronism in the work of Gino Germani and others; or the path of transition by collapse depicted by O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead—kept the profile of this country high in the consideration of academic scholarship. History helped to bring about this high profile in an undeniable manner. Within a century, Argentina hosted multiple military coups and further democratic restorations, successive calls for elections where the plurality party was banned from competition, an almost never-ending cycle of economic crises, and even a war against a NATO member that triggered the last return to democracy in 1983. Throughout the more than three straight decades of contemporary democracy, different dimensions of politics and government in Argentina have been analyzed by the literature. The complex interactions among actors and institutions in a country characterized by presidentialism, federalism, political mobilization, interruptions of executive mandates, a wide middle class, redistributive claims, a past of repression, and cyclical economic shocks, among others, forged substantive political dynamics. Most of these dimensions will be reviewed in this chapter, whose contributions have been published in the most relevant journals and presses, especially in the areas of institutions, subnational politics, and clientelism and patronage.