The purpose of this paper was to develop an analysis of the differences produced by federal/unitary constitutions in relation to the provision of “infrastructural powers” in 19 Latin American countries. The region has 4 cases of Federations (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela) and 15 unitary states: Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, and Uruguay ^[1].

This paper seeks to develop a comparative analysis of governments in Latin America, examining the administrative structure of multilevel governance (federal/central, state/provincial and local/municipal government), and levels of political autonomy in subnational governments. For this purpose will be used the Regional Authority Index (RAI) by Hooghe et al. ^[2], built to measure institutional prerogatives of subnational governments and structured in two dimensions: Self-rule (institutional authority, policy scope, fiscal autonomy, borrowing autonomy, representation); and Shared-rule (Law making, Executive control, fiscal control, borrowing control, Constitutional reform). In parallel, indicators of administrative decentralization—and fiscal decentralization—will be considered. Infrastructural power corresponds to “the capacity of the state to actually penetrate civil society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm” ^[3] (p. 113). To penetrate and promote centralized coordination in the provision of public services, “infrastructural” state institutions have (a) specialized administrative structures, (b) subnational civil service trained to implement policies, measured through the proportion of civil service in local/municipal governments, (c) availability of information through census and public records (d) communication and transportation resources, € proportion of revenues in local governments, (f) indicators of violence and public security, as proxies of the state’s capacity to reach the territory.

To achieve this objective, the work is structured as follows: the theoretical section was organized into two parts. The first reconstructs the debate in the literature on federalism, decentralization, and multilevel governance, starting from the analytical efforts to refine the categories used to classify types of vertical intergovernmental relations. The second part of the theoretical section takes as its starting point the concept of “infrastructural power” ^[3] and its recent developments, considering the capacity for territorial penetration through local political authority, civil servants, revenue, infrastructure, services, and public policies ^[4][5]. The second section analyses “Comparative Analysis of Governments in Latin”, and, finally, “Discussion” systematizes the findings, comparing them with the propositions in the literature. Similarly, this section also presented indications for future research agendas.

The main findings indicate that constitutional prerogatives of regional autonomy do not automatically guarantee greater territorial penetration. Cases such as Brazil and Chile demonstrate that, regardless of whether they are federations or unitary states, the development of robust infrastructural powers is more strongly linked to path-dependent historical extractive capacity (since the beginning of the 20th century) and the early professionalization of the bureaucracy than to contemporary institutional arrangements.