Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-05-20
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian institutional legacies within formally democratic political systems represents one of the most consequential and under-examined phenomena in comparative politics. Across Latin America and beyond, transitions from authoritarian rule have frequently produced hybrid arrangements in which competitive elections coexist with deeply entrenched networks of patronage, clientelism, and party machine politics that predate democratization itself. Mexico presents perhaps the most instructive case of this dynamic, given the extraordinarily long tenure of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the profoundly uneven character of the country's democratic opening. The question of how governors — once virtually omnipotent regional satraps under the PRI's hegemonic system — have adapted to competitive electoral environments, and whether electoral success in the post-transition era reflects genuine accountability or the enduring power of organizational infrastructure, goes to the heart of debates about democratic quality in emerging democracies worldwide.
The article under review, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, addresses precisely this question by examining gubernatorial elections in Mexico in the period following the country's democratic transition. The authors argue that the decentralization of political authority that accompanied democratization paradoxically strengthened the hand of incumbents and heir apparent candidates backed by established party machines, rather than producing the accountability-enhancing competition that reformers anticipated. The core finding is that electoral success in Mexican gubernatorial races is better explained by access to organizational resources, machine networks, and the structural advantages conferred by incumbency than by any straightforward assessment of gubernatorial performance. In other words, voters in subnational Mexican elections have not rewarded good governance in any systematic way; rather, winning candidates have tended to be those who could most effectively mobilize the organizational sinews of their party apparatus. This is a damning finding for theories of electoral accountability that posit democratic competition as a mechanism for aligning the incentives of office-holders with the preferences of ordinary citizens.
To appreciate the full significance of this argument, it is necessary to understand the peculiar character of Mexico's authoritarian legacy. For most of the twentieth century, the PRI governed Mexico through a system of controlled competition, co-optation, and selective repression that was notable for its institutional sophistication. The party did not rely on outright coercion alone but rather constructed elaborate networks linking peasant organizations, labor unions, business associations, and regional political brokers into a system of managed patronage distribution. Governors were central to this architecture — they were simultaneously representatives of federal authority and managers of local clientelistic networks. When democratization arrived, particularly with the pivotal 2000 presidential election that brought Vicente Fox and the PAN to power, these subnational networks did not dissolve. They were instead contested, inherited, and in many cases adapted by new political actors, including opposition parties that learned to operate machine politics in their own right. The article's insight is that decentralization, by transferring fiscal and administrative resources to the states, actually deepened the organizational advantages of whoever controlled the governorship, regardless of partisan affiliation.
This finding connects to broader theoretical and empirical debates about the relationship between decentralization and democratic quality. The literature on fiscal federalism has long assumed that bringing government closer to citizens would enhance responsiveness and accountability. But a competing body of scholarship, drawing on cases from Brazil, Argentina, and India as well as Mexico, has demonstrated that subnational political economies can be sites of intense elite capture, where the combination of resource control and organizational incumbency advantage effectively insulates governors from accountability pressures. The Mexican case illustrates a variant of what scholars have termed "subnational authoritarianism" — a condition in which national-level democratic norms coexist with sub-national political environments that remain closed, machine-dominated, and unresponsive to citizen preferences. The persistence of these dynamics well into Mexico's democratic era, and their extension beyond the PRI to parties that originally arose as vehicles of democratic opposition, suggests that the organizational logic of machine politics is more deeply embedded in Mexico's political economy than partisan identity alone.
From a policy perspective, the implications of this research are both sobering and clarifying. Development practitioners and democracy-support organizations operating in Mexico and similar post-transition contexts have frequently focused attention on electoral reform, judicial independence, and anticorruption mechanisms as levers for improving governance quality. These are not unimportant interventions, but they may be insufficient if the underlying organizational infrastructure of machine politics remains intact. The authors' emphasis on party machines over performance implies that reforming formal institutions without attending to the informal networks through which resources, loyalty, and electoral mobilization flow will leave the fundamental dynamics of subnational politics unchanged. For researchers, the article underscores the importance of disaggregating democratic transitions spatially and institutionally — national-level transitions can mask enormous variation in the character of political competition at the subnational level, and gubernatorial elections are a particularly important arena given the fiscal weight and administrative authority that Mexican governors command.
Looking forward, the trajectory of Mexican subnational politics will be shaped in significant part by the continuing transformation of the national party system. The rise of Morena under Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now Claudia Sheinbaum has introduced a new organizational force with its own machine-building ambitions and patronage networks, challenging the PRI and PAN not by transcending the logic of party machine politics but by constructing a new version of it. Whether Morena's dominance at the gubernatorial level will produce different patterns of accountability than those documented for the earlier post-transition period remains an open empirical question — but the theoretical priors established by this research suggest considerable continuity. The deeper challenge for Mexico's democracy, and for transitional democracies more broadly, is whether the organizational infrastructure of machine politics can be gradually displaced by forms of political competition that reward policy performance and genuine responsiveness. The evidence from this article suggests that such displacement requires more than competitive elections alone; it demands sustained attention to the institutional conditions — fiscal transparency, civil society monitoring capacity, media independence, and intra-party democratization — that might, over time, erode the incumbency advantages that authoritarian legacies have bequeathed to Mexico's subnational politics.