Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 04/2010

Elections and the Origins of an Argentine Democratic Tradition, 1810–1880

Eduardo Zimmermann

December 2009

The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies

Abstract

The present paper addresses several issues raised by the evolution of the electoral institutions and practices developed in nineteenth-century Argentina, and the role they played in the country’s further political development. On the basis of the pioneering works of a new political history, two features of that historical process are considered in particular: first, an early consolidation of democratic principles born out of a widely shared perception of egalitarian social conditions prevalent in the River Plate provinces; second, the development of political and electoral practices that over time were to militate against the establishment of “classical” institutions of political representation. Many of the features of nineteenth-century Argentine electoral life, which would shape a particular democratic culture in the twentieth century, are thus seen as the result of a particular historical combination of early egalitarian politics with weak institutions rather than as a reflection of a strategy of exclusion and control by ruling elites or some vague “antidemocratic” cultural legacy.