Enumerating bases of self-dual matroids

We define involutively self-dual matroids and prove that an enumerator for their bases is the square of a related enumerator for their self-dual bases. This leads to a new proof of Tutte's theorem that the number of spanning trees of a central reflex is a perfect square, and it solves a problem posed by Kalai about higher dimensional spanning trees in simplicial complexes. We also give a weighted version of the latter result.We give an algebraic analogue relating to the critical group of a graph, a finite abelian group whose order is the number of spanning trees of the graph. We prove that the critical group of a central reflex is a direct sum of two copies of an abelian group, and conclude with an analogous result in Kalai's setting.