Redes políticas y distribución de recursos públicos a nivel subnacional: Las relaciones provincia-municipios en el caso Córdoba, Argentina

In the post-decentralization context, the central-local intergovernmental relationships (IGRs) have acquired great relevance for understanding the process of distributing public resources. High local autonomy in the province of Cordoba, Argentina, makes it an appropriate case for examining the complexity of factors involved in the distribution of resources from provincial government to local government and, in this way, for developing a heuristic approximation of those processes at the regional level. In this article we (a) point out the coexistence of two IGR subsystems by which the local government tries to access public resources that are subject to discretion of the provincial government--one of which is formed by formal political networks and the other by a diversity of informal political networks--(b) find a systematic effect of the two networks on the likelihood of the local government getting the resources from the provincial government; and (c) report that the local governments implement a combined strategy that joins both networks, giving priority to the mechanism of cohesion in the formal networks and to the mechanism of intermediation in the informal networks.