Formally Obeyed, Materially Unfulfilled: Selective Constitutional Secession, the Doubly Captured Renewer, and Double Caudillismo in Argentine Federalism

This theoretical working paper introduces selective constitutional secession as a strategy by which a subnational government retains the benefits of federal membership while selectively neutralizing constitutional constraints in implementation. It connects this mechanism to provincial influence over national legislative careers, the doubly captured renewer, and a hypothesized equilibrium of double caudillismo. It extends the model to the municipal level under Articles 5 and 123 of the Argentine Constitution. Formosa serves as a theory-generating case; education and a 2025 press-freedom alert are treated as distinct leads within a broader fiscal, partisan, bureaucratic, and legislative ecology. The paper distinguishes constitutional doctrine, documented evidence, causal hypotheses, evolutionary stabilization, and normative remedies, and proposes a comparative research design. It reports no original empirical study and has not undergone independent peer review or specialist mathematical review. The author is an attorney with a master’s degree in business administration. The research questions, legal analysis, institutional hypotheses, and conceptual model are his. Generative AI assisted with editorial drafting and expressing parts of his model in mathematical notation. The author reviewed that formulation for fidelity to his argument. The equations are heuristic, not estimated models, formal proofs, or independently validated mathematical results. The author is responsible for the paper’s claims and conclusions.