Presidential Leadership in the Americas Since Independence by Guy Burton Ted Goertzel

Author:Guy Burton,Ted Goertzel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

Argentina

Radical Hegemony, 1916–1929

After the long period of economic growth and social development known as the Golden Age, Argentina had Latin America’s largest urban working class and was ready to move into era of state development. In 1912, President Sáenz Peña, recognizing a need to make the electorate more inclusive, led a reform of the Argentine election system, making voting secret, universal and compulsory for male citizens over 18. The reform, supported by the conservative-dominated Congress, was intended to build an alliance with the middle-class Radical Civic Union (UCR) and to undercut extra-parliamentary pressures from the emerging socialist left. However, the measure was more successful than they anticipated: the number of voters increased from 190,000 in 1910 to 1.4 million by 1928.

In the 1916 election, Hipólito Yrigoyen of the UCR drew on this larger electorate to win with 46 percent of the popular vote against 26 percent for the combined conservative vote (Manzetti 1993, 31). Yrigoyen had the presidency, but the Senate was appointed by the provincial legislatures which were controlled by his opposition and which resisted his efforts to bring his supporters into government. He retaliated by declaring a state of emergency and intervening in the provinces.

Yrigoyen’s government began a decade and a half during which UCR governments dominated Argentina, between 1916 and 1930. The base of the these governments’ political support was in the middle class, even though the leadership remained dominated by older elite interests in the commercial and landowning class. Although some efforts were made to bring the working class into the UCR by introducing labor legislation, its implementation was relatively patchy. In addition, despite a promise of cleaner government, Yrigoyen and his successor, Marcelo Alvear, relied on patronage and corruption similar to that used by previous conservative governments (Manzetti 1993, 31–32).

At the end of his tumultuous first term in office, Yrigoyen observed the constitutional prohibition against re-election and allowed a less provocative member of his party, Marcelo Alvear, to run as candidate in the 1922 election. Alvear’s personal style made him more acceptable to the country’s establishment, but he appealed less to the frustrated middle and working classes. In 1928, Yrigoyen was overwhelmingly re-elected, but he was aging, and when the world depression hit in 1929 his aides protected him from reports on its impact.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.