Differential geometry, Palatini gravity and reduction

The present article deals with a formulation of the so called (vacuum) Palatini gravity as a general variational principle. In order to accomplish this goal, some geometrical tools related to the geometry of the bundle of connections of the frame bundle $LM$ are used. A generalization of Lagrange-Poincar'e reduction scheme to these types of variational problems allows us to relate it with the Einstein-Hilbert variational problem. Relations with some other variational problems for gravity found in the literature are discussed.