When the cultural frame for political authority vanishes, the establishment of trustworthy government structures becomes the ultimate political success. Such an outcome, however, is not foreordained. Success or failure will depend on a society's “inheritance” and on the “agency” of its political actors. After the disappearance of the royal arbiter in 1821 and the collapse of the Mexican Empire in 1823, Central Americans seemed to succeed on this score, if only for a moment.

To begin with, they adopted a foreign model of government without excessive controversy. In a mimetic exercise focused on the U.S. experience, they created a Central American Republic constitutionally grounded in the principle of election and the self-regulating principle of the checks-and-balances mechanism. Moreover, the constituent assembly managed to resolve the main points of contention by ratifying the keenly federalist project championed by liberals and opposed by conservatives.

In accordance with the federalist project (1824), the member states of the republic retained a high degree of autonomy; each would raise its own army, and each would reproduce in miniature the union's broader institutional framework. That is, each state would have its own tripartite government and electoral processes. The formula, impeccable on paper, proved disastrous in practice.