In the late 1970s, the Argentine military regime (1976–1983) initiated a program of postdevelopmental decentralization. It was part of a larger project of “national reorganization” and guided by the notion that “to shrink the State is to aggrandize the Nation.” As in Brazil, postdevelopmental decentralization began in the context of a military regime. But unlike Brazil, where the decentralization of government was advanced by the political opposition and tightly linked to societal demands for democratization, in Argentina, the decentralization of government was single-handedly imposed by the military as a means of off-loading central government responsibilities onto the provinces. Thus, the first reform to be implemented was the unfunded decentralization of primary education in 1978.

The process of postdevelopmental decentralization continued during the democratic period beginning in 1983. Among other decentralizing (and recentralizing) policies, fiscal and political decentralization took place in 1988 and 1994, respectively. However, despite the enactment of these policies, the intergovernmental balance of power remained practically intact. At the end of the twentieth century, Argentina's intergovernmental fiscal and political institutions were essentially the same as before the military intervened in 1976 (Burki et al. 1999, 11). Why, despite the implementation of decentralization policies in the administrative, fiscal, and political arenas, did the institutions that regulate intergovernmental relations remain largely intact in Argentina?