The notion that governments bound by the rule of law are less likely to expropriate private wealth has been a prominent idea since the publication of North and Weingast's seminal article on public borrowing in seventeenth-century England. This view has been challenged recently; however one of the main shortcomings of these contributions is that they have tried to settle the debate by looking at evidence on sovereign borrowing from the same pair of countries (England and France). This article seeks to overcome such limitation by focusing on the link between representative government and public borrowing in Argentina. I present an analytic narrative of the country's rags-to-riches story in the nineteenth century. First, I use historical evidence to document the relationship between absolute government, the absence of long-term borrowing, and the use of money creation to finance public deficits in the period between 1820 and 1862. Next, I examine public finance in the period between 1863 and 1913, when constitutional checks and balances were finally set up. I complement the historical narrative with an econometric analysis using time-series data on monetary policies and public borrowing as well as Argentine presidents' electoral support and their ability to control the legislative agenda. The Argentine experience suggests that constitutional checks and balances were a necessary but not a sufficient condition to create a credible commitment. More importantly, the findings in this paper underscore how political fragmentation and multiple sovereignty are correlated with the cost of borrowing. In particular, I show that agenda control rather than partisan compromises allowed Argentine presidents to carry out the necessary reforms to enhance the country's creditworthiness.