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Take or Make Power? The Legacies of Military Regimes on Decentralization in Argentina and Brazil In the last quarter of the twentieth century, both Argentina and Brazil decentralized their governments. Both countries also started this process with similar institutions of intergovernmental relations and in the context of military regimes. However, whereas the military in Argentina took an administrative decentralization measure first (i.e. the transfer of primarylevel education from the central government to the provinces), the Brazilian military began the process of decentralization with a political measure (the reinstallation of the direct popular election of governors). The article shows that different types of militarism, in particular the different ways in which the military occupied the state apparatus and controlled the political system, explain the occurrence of opposite initial steps in the decentralization process. Such different beginnings led ultimately to varying degrees of autonomy for governors and mayors. Thus, by the end of the century, Brazilian governors and mayors had gained significantly more autonomy than their counterparts in Argentina.