. . Prevented The Evolution Of The Liberal Regime Into A Stable

. . prevented the evolution of the liberal regime into a stable constitutional democracy'. These historians further argue that the post-1852 failure of the liberals to balance individual liberty with public order was rooted in the intractable problems inherent in constitutional experiments conducted across Latin America even since the days of Simon Bolivar. Numerous Latin American liberal governments, from Argentina to Colombia to Mexico, had sought to imitate the constitutional models of foreign governments such as that of the United States, but to no avail. Thus, the great difficulty of rooting liberalism and democracy in Argentina lay not in cutting government away from its authoritarian or colonial past, but in adjusting existing foreign constitutional models to the particular circumstances of Argentina.
Moreover, in the pursuit of these aims, Negretto and Aguilar-Rivera argue that the liberal elites had more success than is usually afforded them by traditional historians. Principally, the elite liberals did indeed come to affect the mental and cultural world that they had inherited from the dictators and the Spanish. For instance, in terms of electoral development and extension, much was actually achieved. Francois-Xavier Guerra has thus spoken of '. . . the precocious adoption (in post-1852 Argentina) of modern forms of representation when restrictions to vote were predominant in Europe'. In other words, the Argentine appetite for the extension of voting rights to wider non-elites was evident in Latin America even before it was in Europe. Likewise, Hilda Sabato has corroborated this revised interpretation of the eliteness of Argentine voting, investigating elections between 1850-1880, and reaching the conclusion that the scale of non-elite election participation 'challenges the usual depiction of (Argentine) elections as an exclusive elite affair'.

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Finals reflections upon the subject of the aims of Argentina's liberal elites post-1852 may be given succinctly. Firstly, it is evident to nearly all historians that the principal aims of these elites was this: to bring greater individual liberty to a greater number of Argentines, and to form a centralized national government with a suitable constitution to engender this. It seems clear that most liberal elites knew that if the Argentine constitution were to succeed, it would have to be moulded to Argentina's particular economic and cultural circumstances more closely than had most other Latin American constitutions of a similar kind. What the liberals did not aim for, what they did not perceive in their plans, and what, if one sides with Negretto and Aguilar-Rivera, ultimately led to the failure of their enterprise, was the ossification and hardening of the central government institutions that were created by this centralization and this constitution. Nonetheless, despite its failures, a 'not negligible' residue of achievement remained.