Voter Participation in the Colombian Election of 1856 Author(s): David Bushnell Source: The Hispanic American Historical Review,

Vol. 51, No. 2 (May, 1971), pp. 237-249 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2512474 . Accessed: 06/10/2013 23:31
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Voter Participation in the Colombian Election of 1856

*DAVID BUSHNELL

CENTRAL THEME IN CURRENT DISCUSSIONS

of Colombian

political behavior and in assessments of the viability of the National Front regime has been the degree of voter participation. ITe high rate of abstention in recent national elections has been frequently cited as evidence of political malaise and has been a source of growing concern to Colombian leaders themselves. Yet clearly this is not a new phenomenon: What was exceptional was the pattern of the earliest National Front elections, which showed an extremely high participation rate (e.g., 72% in the plebiscite of December, 1957). In any event, the question of electoral participation in all its ramifications is one of obvious importance, not only because of the common use of such participation as an indicator of political modernization, but also because the Colombian case appears to present an intriguing paradox: a generally low rate of participation in elections in a country that has long been noted for a high rate of party identification among the general populace.1 Unfortunately, the concrete examples that have been cited of past abstention/participation in Colombian elections normally refer to the twentieth century and especially to the period since 1930, for which complete official returns have been regularly published. Nineteenth-century data have been lacking, except for the occasional mention of isolated statistics of uncertain significance; and the lack is a
* The author is a Professor of History at the University of Florida. 1. The literature on electoral abstention in Colombia is far too vast to be

described in a footnote. A representative example, referring to the Congressional election of i968, is "Por que no vota el 70% del electorado?," Encuentro Liberal (Bogota'), May 25, g968. See also Robert H. Dix, Colombia: The Political Dimensions of Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, L967), in which "Electoral abstention" forms a separate index entry. (The 1957 figure in the text is taken from a table of abstention data, given by Dix, p. 162.) Although the rate of participation showed a modest recovery in the elections of April, 1970, the main beneficiary was not the traditional parties but the Alianza Nacional Popular (ANAPO) of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. It appears, therefore, that high abstention was not an unmixed evil for the National Fronthowever much National Front leaders may have lamented it in the preceding elections.

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serious one, since the last century was the formative period of the present Colombian party system. It is unlikely that the lack of nineteenth-century data can ever be wholly remedied. From independence through 1852, not only was the suffrage limited by social-economic qualifications but elections were indirect, and only electoral vote totals are readily available. Totals for "popular"voting, by the legal electorate, could probably be obtained in many cases from local archives, but the number of individuals qualified to vote could be calculated only very roughly. A somewhat comparable situation obtained at the end of the century, for the Constitution of 1886 in its original wording established both a legally restricted suffrage and indirect voting.2 And from 1863 to 1885, under the ultrafederalist Constitution of Rionegro, both suffrage regulations and the certification of election results were decentralized. For some of the individual states it presumably would be possible to derive reasonably accurate rates of voter participation, but probably not for all nine of them. Nor would the rates be wholly comparable, because of differences in electoral legislation.3 There is nevertheless one interval for which meaningful data on electoral participation are relatively easy to obtain. The Constitution of 1853 introduced universal manhood suffrage throughout the Republic of New Granada and provided that offices should be filled by direct popular vote. The same system was preserved by the Constitution of 1858,4 although the outbreak of nationwide civil warfare soon interrupted normal electoral processes. The official results of all national elections from 1853 through the end of the decade are
2. William M. Gibson, The Constitutions of Colombia (Durham: Duke Unirelevant constitutional provisions. The discussion of availability of election results, here and elsewhere in this article, is based on the author's personal experience in preparing a compilation of Colombian election returns. "Ready" availability, in the case of nineteenth-century returns, means publication in the official Gaceta or Diario and/or the presence of ms. electoral registros in the Archivo del Congreso, Bogota. But even the officially published figures should be checked, when possible, against the records in the Archivo. 3. The Constitution of 1863 contained no provisions concerning the right to vote, and in practice there was an increasing tendency for the individual states to restore at least a literacy requirement. See, e.g., Codigos legislativos del estado de Santander (3 vols., Bogota', 1870), I, 23; Los doce co'digos del estado soberano de Cundinamarca (3 vols., Leipzig, 1879), I, 17; Recopilacio'n de actos legislativos del estado soberano del Tolima (Bogota', 1879), pp. 22, 86, 218, 272, 465, 88i. During this period, moreover, the sovereign states merely reported the outcome of presidential and congressional balloting to Bogota; they did not transmit detailed registros as in previous years, on the basis of which the national Congress made the final certification of results.
4. Gibson, Constitutions of Colombia, pp. 204, 227, 241. versity Press, 1948), pp. 43-46,
119-122,

162-165,

201,

204, 341-342 gives the

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available in print and/or in a single central repository, the Archivo del Congreso at Bogota'. And, as long as universal manhood suffrage remained in effect, the potential electorate was identical with the adult male population minus such standard exceptions as the mentally infirm. More precisely still, the right to vote was given to all male granadinos who were 21 years of age or who were or had been married. In practical terms, of course, the electorate was not quite so wide, for it was necessary that a citizen be enrolled on a list of qualified voters by the local authorities. If mistakenly omitted he was entitled to appeal,5 but it can scarcely be doubted that both inadvertent and intentional omissions occurred without being corrected. Since not only the presidency and vice-presidency and two houses of Congress but provincial governorships and even the Supreme Court were to be filled by direct popular vote-with elections for all these positions, including the vice-presidency, to be held on separate dates6 -New Granada in the mid-i85os was seldom without an election campaign in progress. The very first election that involved nationwide voting on a single group of candidates was held in October, 1853, to choose a Procurador General de la Naci6n and Supreme Court magistrates; though held under a Liberal Party administration, it resulted in a decisive Conservative victory.7 However, the one strictly presidential contest of the nineteenth century to be conducted by universal manhood suffrage and under conditions of relative normalcy was that of i856, in which the Conservative candidate Mariano Ospina
5. Laws of June i6, 1833, June 14, 1855, and June i8, i856, Codificacion Nacional (Bogota, 1924), XV, 523-524, XVI, 284-288, and XVII, 82-87. The next general election law, of April 8, 1858, placed the registration of voters under centralized control, but retained the procedure whereby a citizen was in principle enrolled automatically and then had the right to appeal if his name was improperly omitted (Ibid., XViii, 264-269). 6. Codificacion Nacional, XV, 528-534, 538; XVI, 293; XVII, 9L-92; XVIII, comprising the relevant sections of the electoral laws cited in the 273-274, preceding footnote. The law of 1858 did not, however, indicate a separate date for election of the vice-president, since that post had meanwhile been abolished. 7. Gaceta Oficial, February 28, 1854; Jose Manuel Restrepo, Historia de la Nueva Granada (2 vols., Bogota: Editorial Cromos, 1952-1963), II, 302-303. The procedure in this case was for each voter to cast his ballot for four men. The one receiving the largest number of votes throughout the nation was to become Procurador General, with the three runners-up considered elected to the Supreme Court. The leading candidate (with 64,491 votes to 51,997 for his nearest competitor) was Florentino Gonzalez, who had once been known as a radical zealot and was certainly no orthodox Conservative; he, in fact, had considerable Liberal support. But he had been Minister of Finance in the recent Conservative administration of General Mosquera, and his victory was properly interpreted as a sign of Conservative strength. The three runners-upRufino Cuervo, Jose lgnacio de Marquez, and Jose Maria Latorre Uribe-were men of more conventional Conservative credentials.

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Rodriguez was elected by a popular plurality of 97,407 votes as against 80,170 for the Liberal Manuel Murillo Toro and 33,038 for General Toma's Cipriano de Mosquera, the latter running as candidate of an improvised National Party that contained both Conservative and some Liberal elements.8 The number of votes obtained by each of the candidates has been repeatedly cited in histories of the period, but apparently no attempt has been made to calculate the rate of voter participation. The rate obviously cannot be calculated precisely. The last previous national census was that of 1851, and, quite apart from the general unreliability of nineteenth-century censuses, it did not provide a complete breakdown of population by age and sex. Much less did it indicate how many males under 21 years of age were or had been married. Even so, it does provide the point of departure for estimating the number of eligible voters. The census gave a national population total of 2,243,o54;9 and, with the help of a theoretical model of population structure, Fernando Gomez has indicated that around 473,000 of these would be males 21 years of age or older.'0 Neither Gomez nor the census itself gives any indication of the number of married males under 21, but there can be no doubt that the number was quite low. The most recent Colombian census, that of 1964, provides a basis for estimating that only about 2.5 percent of contemporary Colombian males in the 15-tO-2o age group are
8. See table. The circumstances of the election are succinctly treated by Jose Manuel Restrepo, Diario politico y militar (4 vols., Bogota: Biblioteca de Helguera and Robert H. Davis, eds., Archivo epistolar del General Mosquera (Bogota: Academia Colombiana de Historia, 1966), pp. 256-270. The acting president from 1855 to 1857, Manuel Maria Mallarino, also had been chosen by universal male suffrage, but technically he was only vice-president, completing the unexpired term of Jose Maria Obando. 9. The i851 census figures, with breakdown by provinces, can be found in, e.g., Toma6sC. Mosquera, Memoria sobre la geografia, fisica y politica de la Nueva Granada (New York, 1852), p. 94. The territorial divisions shown in the following table of the i856 election returns are not always identical with those of the census, but normally the changes involved nothing more than the consolidation of two or more of the earlier provinces. The province of Barbacoas, however, had been divided between the two provinces of Pasto and Popaya'n,so that in order to obtain their 1851 populations it was necessary to consult a manuscript table of census figures with breakdown by cantons, in the Archivo Hist'rico Nacional, Ministerio de Gobiemo, Sec. 3a, Vol. 556. lo, Fernando Gomez G., Andlisis de los censos de poblacion del siglo xix en Colombia (tesis de grado, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economia, Bogota', 1969), p. 53. Actually, Gomez's breakdown of age is not by individual years but by five-year groupings; thus to obtain the approximate figure given in the text it was necessary to subtract one-fifth from his total for the 20 to 24-year group.
la Presidencia de Colombia, 1954-1955), IV, 626-627, 629-630. See also J. Leon

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married;" and though one would expect the proportion to have been somewhat higher in the mid-nineteenth century, it presumably was not so much higher as to have a pronounced effect on the size of the electorate. One further uncertainty concerns the operational definition of "married":did it, for example, include those who were simply living in union libre? Quite conceivably, the term may have been interpreted either more or less loosely depending on the eagerness of local officials to maximize the number of available voters in their jurisdiction, but evidence on the matter is wholly lacking. Under these circumstances, one can only guess the size of the under-21 electorate, and 7 percent of the total male population aged 15 through 20-or about 9,ooo persons-is perhaps a good estimate. Such a figure is adequate to make allowance both for a higher rate of early marriage in the past century and for occasional stretching of the definition of "married."12 As of the census of 3851, then, it would seem that approximately 482,00o Colombians met the legal qualifications for voting that were to be established just two years later. By 1856, the potential electorate had grown still larger by natural increase at a rate that appears to have been in the neighborhood of 1.7 percent per year, or close to 9 percent for the entire five-year period.'3 Adding this percentage to the figures already arrived at for 185i, one obtains a total of 525,000 potential electors as of 1856; and when this figure in turn is divided into the number of votes cast for all candidates, a participation rate of 40 percent is obtained for New Granada as a whole. Not surprisingly, some notable variations appear when voter participation is calculated separately (as in the accompanying table) for each of the nation's major political subdivisions. Such estimates are even more subject to error than the calculation offered for the entire nation, if only because there is less room for inadequacies in the basic
31. Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadistica, XIII censo national de poblacion (x5 de julio de 1964); resumen general (Bogota, 1967), p. 48. The census figures showing marital status are again presented by five-year groupings; to obtain the figure for ages 15 through 20, an ascending curve was plotted. 12. Personal consultation with Prof. Alvaro Lopez Toro, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, July, 1969; Gomez, Andlisis de los censos, p. 25. The figure for voters under age 21 could be either halved or doubled, without making much difference in the national rate of voter participation. 13. Gomez, Andlisis de los censos, p. 40, gives the rate of increase between the 1843 and 1851 censuses as 1.87 percent. However, he notes (p. 41) that the 1843 census appears to have underestimated the male population, which would tend to exaggerate the rate of increase to 1851; furthermore, the indicated rate of increase fell off after i851. For these reasons, the growth rate for the period 1851-1856 has been set, somewhat arbitrarily, at 1.7 percent.

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census data to be averaged out. And it is, of course, the gross population and vote totals for each territorial unit that principally account for the apparent variations in voter participation. However, in preparing the table, the separate age data and differential population growth rates that Gomez has derived for nine broad geographic regions of the country have been taken into account as well.14 In this connection it has been assumed, arbitrarily but unavoidably, that the same demographic conditions held true throughout a given region. As one would expect, for determining the size of the potential electorate any regional differences in age structure and population growth often tend to cancel each other out, since areas of rapid natural increase (e.g., Antioquia) normally would have an unusually large under-age population. Even so, these differences do have a small but measurable effect on the end result in many, though not all, of the 1856 territorial units. No doubt the results are even more affected by mere error of one sort or another, whether stemming from the original census data or from any of the subsequent statistical operations. But it is highly unlikely that error could explain all the observed variations in electoral participation from province to province. A full explanation would require detailed analysis of local political and socio-economic backgrounds, which lies outside the scope of this article; indeed most of the data on which to base such an analysis is unavailable in the present state of Colombian historical studies. Nevertheless, tentative observations may perhaps be formulated, at least with respect to certain of the provinces lying at or near the two extremes of the participation spectrum. For example, while the figure of 14 percent for voter participation in Choco may reflect some degree of statistical error, the fact that Choco should have the lowest rate of all is understandable enough,
14. Ibid., pp. 74, 75. The nine regions used by Gomez are the nine Colombian states of the subsequent federal period, of which Antioquia and Panam'a already had been established by 1856; each of the others includes two or more of the 1856 provinces. Gomez did not actually attempt an age distribution for each region in the same manner as the one he elaborated for the entire nation. Instead he used the census category of j6venes y parvulos as a basis for calculating, by region, the proportions of males and females menores de z5 aftos. This is not the same as the total population below voting age, but the figures do suggest where and in what direction the proportion of under-age males differed from the national norm and thus permitted some small and admittedly imprecise adjustments to be made in the size of the electorate. With regard to growth rate, on the other hand, the regional figures given by Gomez were methodologically comparable to the national. Regional differences in rate of early marriage have not been taken into account, since useable data on this point are unavailable; nor could they measurably affect the results even if such were not the case.

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since it was and is still an area of relatively thin population widely dispersed amid the rain forest. That Panama should have the next lowest rate very likely reflects-among other things-the imperfect integration of the Isthmus into the political system of New Granada. The low rates recorded for Bogota' and Antioquia, which rank respectively third and fifth from the bottom, are at first glance harder to explain, particularly if electoral participation is looked upon as a prime indicator of political modernization; surely, these were not less modem politically than some i8 other territorial units. For the province of Bogota, without further detailed research, it would be hazardous even to guess at an explanation. For Antioquia, on the other hand, an attractive hypothesis would be that there is some logical connection with the antioquenio pattern of independent peasant landholding, which might make it more difficult to simply herd the rural masses to the polls than in areas of entrenched latifundismo. In this regard it is probably significant that the province with highest participation was Tunja, in a region where a depressed Indian and mestizo peasantry existed alongside a powerful class of latifundistas.15 As a matter of fact, the level of apparent voter participation in Tunja even raises the suspicion of ballot-box stuffing, which would be a foretaste of the fame for unedifying political practices that the present Department of Boyacai (whose boundaries include the former province) enjoyed until quite recently.16 A further indication of possible electoral malpractice in the case of Tunja will be cited below. Similar suspicions readily attach to the apparent participation rates of such provinces as Casanare and Santa Marta, which ranked second and third from the top. The high voter turnout registered for Casanare is particularly implausible at first glance, because this was another area of thin and widely dispersed population. Indeed, while fraud may have played a part, it is not unlikely that the Casanare census data represented a distinct underenumeration, which would tend to exaggerate the apparent rate of voter participation. (One is then led to ask whether a similar phenomenon would not have occurred in the census data for Choc6, or if not why not. At present no answer can be given.) The high ranking of Santa Marta also might reflect some combination of electoral fraud and census underenumeration. But to the extent that fraud was a factor either in these three or in other provinces, it should be emphasized that both Liberal and Condifferences see Virginia Gutierrez de 15. On these regional socio-economic Pineda, Familia y cultura en Colombia (Bogotat: Tercer Mundo, 1968), pp. and sources cited therein. 30-36, 270-271, i6. Dix, Political Dimensions, pp. 241, 242.

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servative candidates were beneficiaries. In addition, close examination of local-level returns by no means suggests that fraud was a dominant characteristic of the electoral process as a whole.17 A slightly different, though unfortunately incomplete, picture emerges if one attempts to estimate the participation rate of citizens actually enrolled as voters. Nationwide totals of electoresinscritoswere not compiled at the time, and it is probable that local figures could usually be obtained, if at all, only by diligent searching of local archives. Yet in certain cases the participation/ abstention of enrolled voters can be deduced from the official vote totals reported by the juradoselectorates (local election boards). In three cases, in fact, the participation rate was exactly zero: at the jurado #2 of Caldas and at the one juradoof Concordia, both in Antioquia, and at Mutiscua in the province of Pamplona, election officials certified that they had opened the polls, but not one citizen came forth to cast a vote.18 In still other cases, by contrast, participation approximated ioo%. The basic electoral legislation provided that not more than 400 citizens should be registered to vote at a single and it appears that by and large this provision was juradoelectoral,19 respected. In only one case were more than 400 votes reported at a single jurado,although there is another juradofor which documentary evidence exists that more than 400 were registered; yet at least 1367 different juradoswere functioning in the election of 1856.20 And of
17. A formal demonstration that fraud remained within reasonable limits and that it in no way affected the national outcome lies beyond the scope of this study. The conclusion stated in the text is offered as the author's personal opinion, based on continuing research in Colombian electoral history. The mere fact that many polling places reported unanimous or near-unanimous votes for a given candidate-as in one instance that is specifically mentioned later in the article-cannot be taken as prima facie evidence of irregularities. In twentieth-century elections this same phenomenon is evidence of traditional political polarization, residentially reinforced. In the 1850's, it shows the beginnings of such polarization and also, needless to say, the influence of particular political bosses or other local leaders over a generally rural clientele. i8. All references to the voting of individual jurados are based on the detailed reports of the 1856 election which are found in the Archivo del Congreso, Senado 1857, Vols. I-VI. In these volumes the results are grouped by provinces, but there is no apparent order to the listing of individual jurados within
provinces. 19. Codificacion Nacional, XVI, 284; XVII, 82-83.
20. The number of jurado'swhose official reports of the voting are to be found in the Archivo del Congreso is 1367. There were undoubtedly other jurados whose reports were lost or never submitted to Bogota, not to mention localities in which the electoral machinery simply did not function. But the instance of over 400 votes cast-occurring at Chameza in the province of Casanare -represents a single case in that group of 1367. The instance of over 400 citizens known to be registered even though less than 400 voted-which oc-

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these jurados, no less than thirteen reported exactly 400 votes cast, while another eleven reported vote totals of 396 to 399, which would indicate participation of 99% or better if the number of inscritos was in reality 400. Apparent voter turnouts of 98%, 97%, and so forth can also be deduced by the same method, from the reported election results;2' and, since a given jurado may have had substantially less than the legal maximum enrolled, one cannot exclude the possibility of loo% participation even in localities where far fewer than 400 votes were cast. Even if one assumes a high degree of control by local political bosses over those living in their area, such extreme participation rates suggest that sometimes a voter may not actually have cast his ballot in person; a helpful gamonal (political boss) or perhaps the election officials themselves may have cast it for him even in his absence. The unusual number of very high turnouts in the province of Tunja-ten of the 25 cases in which 396 or more votes were recorded at a single jurado-thus tends to strengthen the suspicions already expressed concerning the purity of Tunja electoral procedures. At the very least, it makes more understandable that province's leadership in the over-all participation ranking. The other jurados with vote totals in the vicinity of 400 are likewise to be found, predominantly, in provinces with high over-all participation rates, although nowhere is there such a clustering as in Tunja. Very few are to be found in areas of generally low participation. Appropriately enough, the province that ranks last in over-all participation also ranks last in terms of the maximum number of votes cast at an individual jurado: i.e., Choc6, whose banner precinct (Bebara) had a mere 161-vote tunMout.22 And for Antioquia, the highest total was 306, cast unanimously for Murillo Toro at the jurado electoral #1 of Zaragoza. Naturally the lack of 400-vote or even 307-vote jurados may throw some light on Antioquia's otherwise poor performance in votes per capita. It would even tend to support a hypothesis that antioqtefios adhered somewhat more closely than tunjanos to the letter and spirit of electoral legislation, especially when it is borne in mind that Zaragoza itself, both as an outpost in tierra caliente and as a stronghold of Liberalism, was hardly typical of Antioquia.
curred at Nobsa in the province of Tundama-is a single case out of a smaller sample of 25 jurados for which registration data are known. More will be said later on the latter sample. 21. There is, for example, one jurado with 395 votes cast, two with 394, five with 393, one with 391, and just five more down to the 380-vote level. 22. But Panama',which ranked next to lowest in over-all participation, did
have one 400-vote precinct-the jurado #1 of Herrera.

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It must be emphasized, finally, that vote totals approaching and conceivably at times exceeding loo percent of the electores inscritos were clearly the exception not the rule. They appear to have been the exception, though a rather sizeable one, even in the province of Tunja. They were far more common than the opposite extreme, in which no one voted even though the polls were open, but if they had been a truly frequent occurrence one might expect the national participation rate in terms of theoretically qualified adult males to have been significantly higher than it was. Even though direct documentary evidence regarding the number of electores inscritos is generally lacking, as stated above, there does exist one exception in this matter. It is a sample of 25 jurados, representing at most 1.8 percent of the national total of jurados and accounting for 1.5 percent of the votes cast. These are jurados whose officials either specified the number of registered voters (inscritos) in the report they submitted on the outcome of the voting or else submitted a separate list of electores inscritos.23 The jurados were not normally required to do anything of the sort, and one can only speculate why some did and others did not.24 For this reason, if for no other, it would be hazardous to assume that this group of jurados is a true random sample. Indeed, in at least two respects it clearly is not representative of the nation as a whole. Geographically, it includes only one locality in western or southern New Granada (Boquia, which was then contained in the province of Cauca but now forms part of the Department of Quindio), none from Panama, and a relative overrepresentation of localities in the two provinces of Bogota and Cartagena (six and seven jurados respectively). Politically, it includes almost exactly the right proportion of Liberal strongholds (so that Murillo Toro receives 36 percent of the vote in the sample as against 38 percent nationwide), but it tends to favor Ospina Rodriguez (for whom the figures are 56 percent and 46 percent) at the expense of Mosquera (who obtains 8 percent as against 16 percent nationwide). At first glance the lack of mosquerista strength might
23. It may be that more jurados reported the number of electores inscritos than those indicated, since the author does not claim to have read every word of every document in the six archival volumes containing the detailed results of the 1856 election; he can vouch only for having transcribed the outcome of the voting in the 1367 jurados whose reports were contained in those volumes. But there is little likelihood that any appreciable number of registration figures was missed. 24. In certain cases, including two jurados whose results were later nullified, it is probable that the additional information was provided in connection with a pending investigation of alleged irregularities. Elimination of those two jurados would not significantly alter the picture presented by the sample.

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248

HALIR

MAY

DAVID BUSHNELL

be attributed to the absence of jurados from Mosquera's home province of Popayan or from such outlying Mosquera strongholds as Panama, but Mosquera also won a plurality in the province of Cartagena, whereas in the Cartagena jurados of the sample he finished third. Nevertheless, the general picture that emerges from the data of the sample does seem plausible enough. The over-all participation rate of 46 percent of electores inscritos-which represents the voting of all those registered in the 25-jurado sample-does not seem appreciably out of line with the national participation rate of 40 percent as calculated in terms of citizens theoretically qualified, in view of the practical improbability of registering everyone who should have been registered. Perhaps the indicated spread of only six percentage points between the two rates is just a bit too narrow, but in that case either the 40 percent or the 46 percent figure (or both) could be at fault. Within the sample itself, the participation of electores inscritos at individual jurados ranges from i8 percent (at two different jurados, Marla la Baja and Tacamocho, in the province of Cartagena) to an impressive 94 percent at the jurado #2 of Buenavista in Mariquita. This is about what one might expect in a small sample taken from a larger "population" of jurados whose individual participation rates range from o percent to ioo percent or more as deduced from vote totals alone. And the relative concentration of participation rates for jurados of the sample from 26 to 47 percent, which might be termed the "modal"range (12 of the 25 cases), is once again what one could expect, particularly when allowance is made for the effect of a small number of very high rates in raising the average score. Whether the national rate is taken as 40 percent of qualified males or 46 percent of registered voters-with allowance for a generous margin of error in either case-the figure would not be considered unusually high today. For the middle of the last century, however, a different conclusion is probably in order. New Granada in 1856 was still overwhelmingly rural, with roads from peasant hut to polling place generally bad or nonexistent. Moreover, the sheer frequency of popular elections under the Constitution of 1853 was such that the possible novelty appeal of voting among the newly enfranchised must have been wearing thin already. All things considered, therefore, the rate of voter participation in the presidential election of 1856 must strike the observer as a remarkably high one. This is not to say that it can be taken as clear proof of precocious political modernization, for the separate provincial figures constitute a further warning against

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VOTER PARTICIPATION

IN THE COLOMBIAN

ELECTION

249

the uncritical use of voter participation as an index of modernization. In certain societies an exceptionally high rate, as well as a very low rate, may instead be an indicator of a lag in modernization. Whatever may be the exact relationship between voting and modernization, the rate of voter participation underwent a sharp decline in Colombia during the interval of unbroken Liberal domination from i86i to 1885, when citizens were either excluded from voting by the reimposition of suffrage restrictions at state level or discouraged from making the attempt by the advent of large-scale electoral manipulation.25 But one may hypothesize that the experience of the 1850's-marked by suffrage extension, frequent campaigns, and an absence of election irregularities of sufficient magnitude to rob the process of its meaning-played an important part in the development of the Colombian party system. The two major parties, Liberal and Conservative, had only recently taken shape as more or less cohesive national forces; and they were now compelled to build a mass following for electoral purposes.26 Citizens responded to the summons to the polls in satisfactory if not overwhelming numbers, and their identification with their respective parties was thus being hardened by electoral combat even before it was further reinforced by the traumatic cycle of civil warfare that marked the period from i86o to 1903.
25. On the reimposition of suffrage restrictions, see e.g., sources cited in footnote 3. The widespread presence of electoral irregularities has been noted by most writers on the period in question, but they have treated it for the most part impressionisticallyand anecdotally. Nevertheless, the frequency with which areas shown to be Conservative in the 1850's returned solid Liberal majorities over the next two decades is perhaps evidence enough; in fact there never were more than two of the nine states voting Conservative in a presidential election from 1863 through 1883. The official returns of the elections held during this period were published only sporadically, but at least the statewide presidential totals are included more often than not in the messages submitted by the federal states, announcing for which candidate their unit votes were cast; these can be found in the Archivo del Congreso, Senado 1864-1884, passim. Official municipal-level results are seldom included but were at times printed in state
Gacetas.
26. The importance of electoral contests in the development of the Colombian party system is perceptively discussed by James L. Payne, Patterns of Conflict and in Colombia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 123-129 passim.

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