Clase social y voto en la ciudad de Buenos Aires: 1864-1910

Abstract

The authors use data from seven Registros Cívicos (list of voters and their occupations), six of them from the nineteenth century, starting with the initial one in 1864. The occupational categories have been considered as “proxy” for social class. In order to explore the class-vote relationship, different statistical analyses —correlations, regression equations, etc.— are carried out. The study is based on “competitive” elections, those where the parties involved reaches a threshold of at least 20 percent of the vote.
They conclude that for the entire 1864-1910 period, there is a polarized, dichotomic pattern between the Partido Autonomista Nacional and different political forces that could be labeled “mitrismo”: popular support for the first and middle-upper support for the second one. This research questions the notion that elections in the city of Buenos Aires were characterized by low turnout, and/or that nonvoters were mainly middleupper class people (“the best” people). In their final conclusions, the authors stress that in considering the political and electoral evolution of the city of Buenos Aires in the latter half of the nineteenth century, class counts.