Los nudos del sufragio: un problema de gobernabilidad republicana

This article examines the attempts made in Peru during the presidency of Manuel Pardo (1872-1876) at reforming the existing electoral system, whose serious shortcomings were continuously stigmatized on the floor of the Parliament. The bill failed to be passed for disparate reasons. Conversely, the first general census of the population in the republican era was taken in 1876. It eventually enabled Congress to have the data that were necessary to apportion the number of second-degree electors to which each province was entitled. The events of the war against Chile made the actual outcome of the census ineffective, but they could not conceal its political meaning. Consistently with Pardo’s political project, the main purpose of the census had been to assert the necessity for the construction of a national political space that let the state and its laws exert their sovereignty and caused social actors to distance progressively from their traditionally corporatist attachment and merely municipal loyalties.