Dirigentes conservadores, comicios competitivos y realineamientos partidarios (Córdoba, 1912)

Abstract

From the consideration of a specific situation, which includes the first election of national deputies carried out under the validity of the Sáenz Peña law at the beginning of 1912, and the first gubernatorial elections held, at the end of that year, after the adaptation of the provincial constitution to the new national provisions, we propose to contribute to the analysis of the relationships that were established, in the province of Córdoba, between the processes prior to the electoral reform, the impact of the new regulations on the scenarios in which the disputes were developed by political power, and the adaptive strategies of those segments of the leadership - whom we will call conservatives in the absence of a more appropriate concept to define them - who had participated in the ruling alliances in the past and now had to face the radicalism at the polls. To do this, we will focus on the political forces that brought together the conservatives in both elections, paying attention to the sectors that acted within them; to their previous trajectories in parties and cliques; to the reasons that explain their disputes; to the resources they had to resolve them. From the treatment of these issues we will try to reach some preliminary conclusions regarding the changes and continuities in political practices, especially at the level of survival of factionalism and the flexibility of the leadership to reach more or less unstable agreements with other forces. policies, even with bitter ideological rivals.