Argentine Republic. Politics of Argentina

One-third of the constituencies are renewed every two years. In 2001 the whole senate was renewed.

As set forth by the 1994 constitution, Argentina has a federal, republican and representative form of government.

Executive power is vested in one citizen, the President of the Argentine Nation, directly elected by universal suffrage for a term of four years. The president and the vice-president, who may be re-elected (although only two terms can be consecutive), are chosen by the runoff voting system. If the candidate formula with the largest number of votes does not attain either at least forty-five percent of the vote in the first round of voting, or at least forty percent of the vote and a ten percent lead over the formula arriving in second place, a second round is held between the two formulas with the largest number of votes, in which the candidates from the formula that obtains a majority of valid votes are deemed elected.

If one of the two formulas with the largest number of votes withdraws from the second round, the remaining formula shall be proclaimed the winner. In the 2003 presidential election, the formula of Carlos Menem and Juan Carlos Romero - which had won the largest number of votes in the first round - decided not to take part in the runoff vote. Therefore, Néstor Kirchner and Daniel Scioli - who had finished in second place - were elected president and vice-president, respectively.

 

Legislative power is exercised by the National Congress, which consists of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

Each one of Argentina's twenty-three provinces plus the City of Buenos Aires is an electoral constituency. Chamber seats are distributed among the constituencies in proportion to their population. Parties and electoral alliances submit closed lists of candidates. The lists are closed, so electors may not choose individual candidates in or alter the order of such lists. Electors cast a ballot for a single list. The seats in each constituency are apportioned according to the largest average method of proportional representation (PR), conceived by the Belgian mathematician Victor D'Hondt in 1899. However, in order to participate in the allocation of seats, a list must receive at least three percent of the electoral register in the constituency.

 

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3.3 Political Participation. Policy

 

Political participation in Argentina, while close to being “competitive” in nature, still suffers from factional tendencies. Personality-based factions and social movements, rather than political parties per se, continue to define much of the political arena in Argentina. Since 1946 Argentina has been a country divided between Peronist and anti-Peronist (and allies of each in the armed forces) coalitions. However, despite this fundamental factional division in Argentine politics, intense political rivalries inside the Peronist movement have long dominated and shaped political competition in this country. Neither left-wing nor right-wing in orientation, Peronism is more like a political club with a diverse membership and decentralized centers of political loyalties than a unified party sustained by a common ideology and command structure. While the Peronist presidential administrations of Alfonsin (1983-89), Menem (1989-99) and Kichner (2003-2007) have sought to weaken the party’s traditional ties with the military and have moved away from the central role of the state in the economy (both key elements of Peronist governance in the past), nevertheless, factional struggles inside the Peronist party persist. These internal struggles within the Peronist movement were vividly demonstrated in October 2006 when some 40 people were injured in clashes during a ceremony transferring the remains of three-time president Juan Peron to his country estate. This violence was reminiscent of Peron’s return from exile in 1973 in which over 400 people died in fighting between Peronist factions.

Despite the electoral loss of the Peronist candidate for President in the 1999 elections, Personism continues to be the dominant political force in this country. The legacy of Peronism as a hegemonic political movement still shines through in the manner in which it organizes and mobilizes its followers and in its treatment of opposition forces. The electoral success of the opposition Alliance coalition in 1999 offered some promise that we might see a gradual change toward institutionalized two-party competition in Argentina. However, economic mismanagement and internal factionalism within this coalition quickly led to its collapse. Just as the Peronist Party is plagued by internal factional struggles, the Alliance, which was composed of the middle class-based Radical Civic Union (UCR) and the left-wing Front for a Country in Solidarity (Frepaso), had tenuous institutional foundations at best and could not weather the country’s deep financial and political crisis of 2001. In the wake of President de la Rua’s resignation in late 2001, Argentina witnessed a procession of four interim presidents in the span of two weeks (all four were members of the Peronist party).

Early elections were held on 27 April 2003 and revealed the deep fissures within the Peronist party. In these elections PJ-candidate Kirchner was named president when rival PJ-candidate Menem withdrew from the runoff election scheduled for 18 May 2003. President Kirchner immediately instituted a purge of the high command of the armed forces, senior command of the federal police force, as well as the Supreme Court.

 

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The 2005 legislative elections solidified the dominance of the Kirchner faction within the Argentine political system as his allies came to control the Senate and became the largest political block in the lower house. The Kirchnerists continued to consolidate their control of the party with their victory in October 2007 general elections; anti-Kirchner factions of the Peronist party held only nine seats in the Chamber of Deputies and four seats in the Senate.

Further contributing to the consolidation of the dominance of the Kirchner faction in Argentine politics is the fact that none of the non-Peronist opposition parties that emerged in the wake of the UCR’s collapse possess a national organization or a significant activist base. The dearth of an effective national opposition has produced an increasingly relevant rural-urban political divide in the country. The political activities of the non-Peronist opposition tend to be confined largely to urban centers, leaving the Kirchner faction free to control the rural vote in the country. In 2007 Cristina Kirchner lost in Buenos Aires, Cordoba and Rosario, the three largest cities in the country, but won the presidency by a considerable margin.

The aim of the policies currently in place is to deepen ongoing reforms to achieve economic growth with social equity and solidify the public finances. They address such areas as social security reform, negotiation of a new federal tax revenue sharing arrangement, health insurance reform, rules and standards to protect consumers, and putting the new telecommunications and ports regulatory frameworks into practice. A keynote of the government’s strategy is a commitment to erase the fiscal deficit at all levels of government in the medium term, steadily lowering the ratio of public debt to GDP. The government is endeavoring to shore up investors’ confidence in Argentina through an IMF-coordinated international financial support package.

 

Each administration had different priorities. President Alfonsín took office on the giving up of power by the last military junta, and his main task was to ensure a peaceful transition. In the end he was overcome by an economic crisis that led to a bout of hyperinflation.President Menem first had to control inflation and stabilize the economy, which he did by adopting a series of radical measures including fixed parity between the Argentine peso and the U.S. dollar. He then engaged in a program to move Argentina's economy towards a liberal model. This plan included the privatization of the previously state-owned telecommunications company, oil conglomerate (YPF), airline (Aerolíneas Argentinas), railroads and utilities. As a result, large foreign direct investment flowed into Argentina for a short time, improving in some isolated cases the infrastructure and quality of service of those companies. His policies culminated in the highest unemployment rates of Argentine history and the doubling of external debt.

In the social arena, Menem pardoned military officers serving sentences for human rights abuses of the Dirty War. To balance the unpopular decision, he also pardoned some of the insurgents convicted of guerrilla attacks in the 1970s. The public scandal after the assassination of the soldier Omar Carrasco forced Menem to end compulsory military conscription.

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Menem's administration was regarded by many as corrupt and frivolous. Many members of his administrations have been indicted for profiteering while in office. Despite the large amount of evidence that Menem had personally profited illegally from his administration, he has never been legally convicted. The executive had a visible influence on the decisions of the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, and displayed a certain contempt for political minorities. Moreover, it did nothing to reduce political corruption and inefficiency, one of the most important and oldest problems in the Argentine government (Argentina's Corruption Perceptions Index for 1999 was 3 out of 10, ranking 71st in a survey of 99 countries).

  Fernando de la Rúa's term was notoriously ineffective on many accounts. Elected with a popular mandate to reinvigorate the economy and crack down on the corruption of the Menem administration, de la Rúa was unable or unwilling to perform these tasks. He continued on the same economic course of Menem, which ultimately led to the 2001 economic crash and de la Rúa's resignation. The FrePaSo ministers of the administration, elected on a wave of hope for social changes, also disappointed with a perceived lack of investment in social schemes.

 

Eduardo Duhalde's interim term was strongly limited by a highly mobilized society. It was marked by the need to pacify the country and soften the impact of the crisis after the forced devaluation of the local currency, the peso, which had lost three quarters of its value in a matter of months. Duhalde employed a mixture of traditional Peronist politics (in the form of a monetary subsidy for heads of families) and neo-Keynesian economic principles to stabilize the economy and bring peace to the streets.

 

Néstor Kirchner, who belongs to the moderate center-left wing of Peronism (rooted in the leftist Peronist factions of the 1970s), continued Duhalde's measures (even keeping his Minister of Economy, Roberto Lavagna) and added some heterodox economics. Heavy taxes on exports have served to keep local prices of valuable commodities in check, while collecting huge revenues (especially from oil products and agricultural exports like soybeans). The restrictive monetary policy of the 1990s has become aggressively expansive; the Central Bank has injected large amounts of cash into the economy and bought dollars from the free currency market in order to accumulate reserves. The fiscal policy is also expansive; the government has raised private and public salaries by decree on several occasions, and has encouraged negotiations between the private sector and the labor movements. Inflation has again become a concern. The government has struck price-freezing agreements with certain sectors of the economy (producers of milk, some foods, natural gas, etc.) and put heavy pressure on others. Failure to comply on the part of Argentine beef producers has been met with a punitive suspension of exports, starting March 2006, intended to increase domestic supply (this was then softened to a quota system).

 

 

 

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3.4 Political divisions. Provinces of Argentina

 

Argentina is composed of twenty-three provinces and one autonomous city, Buenos Aires. The administrative divisions of the Provinces are the departments, and the municipalities, except for Buenos Aires Province, which is divided into partidos. The City of Buenos Aires is divided into communes. The provinces are organized as a federation, each one with a local constitution. They hold all the power that is not specifically delegated to the national government.

During the Argentine War of Independence the main cities and their surrounding countrysides became provinces, though the intervention of their cabildos. The anarchy of the year XX completed this process, shaping the original thirteen provinces. Jujuy seceded from Salta in 1834, and the thirteen provinces became fourteen. After seceding for a decade, Buenos Aires accepted the Constitution of Argentina of 1853 in 1860. Buenos Aires was made a federal territory in 1880.

A 1862 law determined that the territories under control of Argentina but outside the frontiers of the provinces would be called national territories. This allowed in 1884 to establish the governorates of Misiones, Formosa, Chaco, La Pampa, Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego. The agreement about a frontier dispute with Chile in 1900 created the national territory of Los Andes, whose territories were incorporated into Jujuy, Salta and Catamarca in 1943. La Pampa and Chaco became provinces in 1951. Misiones did so in 1953, and Formosa, Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut and Santa Cruz in 1955. The last national territory, Tierra del Fuego, became a province in 1990.

 

Each province has also its own government, with a provincial constitution, a set of provincial laws and justice system, a supreme court, a governor, an autonomous police force (independent of the Federal Police), and a congress: in eight provinces the parliament is constituted by an upper chamber (senate) and a lower chamber (deputies), while in the remaining fifteen provinces and in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires the congress has just one chamber. On occasion the national government intervenes in a province under internal instability or after a corruption scandal, designating an intervenor to replace the local government until the situation is normalized: since the return of democracy to the country in 1983, four provinces were intervened, namely Catamarca, Corrientes (twice), Santiago del Estero (twice) and Tucumán.

During the 20th century, some provinces have had governments traditionally controlled by a single family (i.e. the Saadi family in Catamarca, or the Sapag family in Neuquén); in one case, it is still the situation as of 2009: the Province of San Luis was ruled almost without a break by the Rodríguez Saá family since December 1983.

The internal products of the provinces are merged into the national product when the national budget is decided. The share of the budget given to each province is decided based on each province's individual contribution to the national budget. Provinces are free to choose their own utilization of their assigned percentages of the national product.

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Chapter 4: Economy. Industry

 

The economy of Argentina is Latin America's third-largest, with a Very High Human Development Index and a relatively high GDP per capita. It is classified as an upper middle-income economy by the Wold Bank.

The country benefits from rich natural resources, a highly literate population, an export-oriented agricultural sector and a diversified industrial base. Historically, however, Argentina's economic performance has been very uneven, in which high economic growth alternated with severe recessions, particularly during the late twentieth century, and income maldistribution and poverty increased. Early in the twentieth century it was one of the richest countries in the world and the richest in the Southern hemisphere, though it is now an upper-middle income country.

Argentina is considered an emerging market by the FTSE Global Equity Index, and is one of the G-20 major economies.

High inflation has been a weakness of the Argentine economy for decades. Officially hovering around 9% since 2006, inflation has been privately estimated at over 30%, becoming a contentious issue again. The government has manipulated inflation statistics.  The urban income poverty rate has dropped below the numbers of the 2001 economic crisis, income distribution, having improved since 2002, is still considerably unequal. Argentina began a period of fiscal austerity in 2012.

Argentina ranks 100th out of 178 countries in the Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index for 2011. Reported problems include government corruption, lack of judicial independence, huge taxes and tariffs, and regulatory interference that undermines efficiency and productivity growth. The Kirchner administration responded to the Global financial crisis of 2008–2009 with a record public-works program, new tax cuts and subsidies, and the transfer of private pensions to the social security system. Private pension plans, which required growing subsidies to cover, were nationalized to shed a budgetary drain as well as to finance high government spending and debt obligations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Manufacturing is the largest single sector in the nation's economy (19% of GDP), and is well-integrated into Argentine agriculture, with half the nation's industrial exports being agricultural in nature. Based on food processing and textiles during its early development in the first half of the 20th century, industrial production has become highly diversified in Argentina. Leading sectors by production value are: Food processing and beverages; motor vehicles and auto parts; refinery products, and biodiesel; chemicals and pharmaceuticals; steel and aluminum; and industrial and farm machinery; electronics and home appliances. These latter include over three million big ticket items, as well as an array of electronics, kitchen appliances and cellular phones, among others. The country's auto industry produced 829,000 motor vehicles in 2011, and exported 507,000 (mainly to Brazil, which in turn exported a somewhat larger number to Argentina). Beverages are another significant sector, and Argentina has long been among the top five wine producing countries in the world; beer overtook wine production in 2000, and today leads by nearly two billion liters a year to one.

 

 

Other manufactured goods include: glass and cement; plastics and tires; lumber products; textiles; tobacco products; recording and print media; furniture; apparel and leather. Most manufacturing is organized around 280 industrial parks, with another 190 slated to open during 2012. Nearly half the industries are based in the Greater Buenos Aires area, although Córdoba, Rosario, and Ushuaia are also significant industrial centers; the latter city became the nation's leading center of electronics production during the 1980s. The production of computers, laptops, and servers grew by 160% in 2011, to nearly 3.4 million units, and covered two-thirds of local demand. Another important rubric historically dominated by imports – farm machinery – will likewise mainly be manufactured domestically by 2014.

Construction permits nationwide covered nearly 19 million m² (205 million ft²) in 2008. The construction sector accounts for over 5% of GDP, and two-thirds of the construction was for residential buildings.

Argentine electric output totaled over 122 billion Kwh in 2009. This was generated in large part through well developed natural gas and hydroelectric resources. Nuclear energy is also of high importance, and the country is one of the largest producers and exporters, alongside Canada and Russia of cobalt-60, a radioactive isotope widely used in cancer therapy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                               

 

 

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Chapter 5: Foreign relations

 

Argentina is a full member of the Mercosur block together with Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Since 2002 Argentina has emphasized the role of Latin American integration and the bloc, which has some supranational legislative functions, as its first international priority. Argentina is a founding signatory and permanent consulting member of the Antarctic Treaty System and the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat is based in Buenos Aires. Argentina is also a full member of the Union of South American Nations. The former president of Argentina Néstor Kirchner was the first Secretary General of this organization. Argentina is part of the G-20 as well.

Argentina claims sovereignty over the Falkland Islands (Spanish: Islas Malvinas), and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, which are administered by the United Kingdom as British Overseas Territories, as well as almost 1,000,000 square kilometres (390,000 sq mi) in Antarctica, between 25°W and 74°W and south of 60°S. The Antarctic claim overlaps claims by Chile and the United Kingdom, though all claims to Antarctica fall under the provisions of the Antarctic Treaty of 1961. Since 1904, a scientific post has been maintained in Antarctica by mutual agreement.

Argentina and Brazil remain major trading partners in the Southamerican region. In addition, these countries work together in making satellites orbiting over South America performing different jobs.

 

Argentina is currently participating in major peacekeeping operations in Haiti, Cyprus, Western Sahara and the Middle East.

Within the term of President Néstor Kirchner, from 2003 onwards, Argentina suspended its policy of automatic alignment with the United States and moved closer to other Latin American countries. Argentina no longer supports the UN Commission on Human Rights resolution criticizing the "human rights situation in Cuba" and calling upon the Government of Cuba to "adhere to international human rights norms", but has chosen instead to abstain. In the 2006 United Nations Security Council election, Argentina supported, like all Mercosur countries, the candidacy of Venezuela (a Mercosur member) over Guatemala for a non-permanent seat in the Security Council.

The Mercosur has become a central part of the Argentine foreign policy, with the goal of forming a Latin American trade block. Argentina has chosen to form a block with Brazil when it comes to external negotiations, though the economic asymmetries between South America's two largest countries have produced tension at times.

In 2009, Argentina assumed again the two-year non-permanent position on the UN Security Council.

As of 2010, Argentina entered into 294 bilateral agreements, including 39 with Venezuela, 37 with Chile, 30 with Bolivia, 21 with Brazil, 12 with the People's Republic of China, 10 with Germany, 9 with the United States and Italy, and 7 with Cuba, Paraguay, Spain and Russia.

 

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                                                   CONCLUSION

 

The main conclusion of the paper is that politics and political institutions matter for government reform. In order to better understand political outcomes in each country, it is necessary to look into the details of its polity. We have to undertake such a remarkable transformation, through a series of concessions in terms of content, timing, sequencing, and signaling.

 

Argentina is moving to a better future. It has all the pieces to become a first-world economically and politically developed country. However, Argentina need to exercise their political will to make the changes necessary to do so. Furthermore, it has to affect on their government actions by the set of political incentives and resources in order to gain success on the political agenda, as well as influence on the details of implementation (or non-implementation) of reform in each specific area of policy.