Los católicos argentinos ante la cuestión electoral y la democracia entre el otoño del orden conservador y los inicios de la “república verdadera”, 1900-1919

In spite of the distrust that modern political structures could produce among Catholics and how often they resorted to hostile rhetoric towards liberalism, the Catholic leadership in Argentina at the end of the Conservative Order (in a similar way to their European and Latin American counterparts) showed a “negative integration” with the political systems before the Great War. The enacting of the 1912 Electoral Law – which, apart from universal male suffrage, also adopted the compulsory and secret vote – and the emergence of “new” parties meant an increase in the importance of the debate among the old conservative elite and among Catholics about the benefits of electoral reformism, the desirable types of political representation and the pertinence of universal suffrage. This article proposes to study the way in which the press and Catholic intellectuals reacted to that debate and briefly explore the views of three leaders and intellectuals (Emilio Lamarca, Gustavo Franceschi and Arturo M. Bas) regarding the political organization of Catholics and the importance of suffrage in the political order before and after the 1912 electoral reform