Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-05-21
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian institutional legacies within formally democratic systems represents one of the most consequential challenges facing transitional democracies in the contemporary era. Across Latin America, Eastern Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa, the formal adoption of competitive multiparty elections has not automatically dismantled the organizational infrastructure — patronage networks, machine politics, clientelist linkages — that authoritarian regimes cultivated over decades. Mexico offers a particularly instructive case for understanding this paradox. Following the Institutional Revolutionary Party's (PRI) historic loss of the presidency in 2000, which ended more than seven decades of single-party dominance, scholars and practitioners alike anticipated a broad democratization of political competition at all levels of government. What has unfolded instead, as this recent contribution to the Journal of Politics in Latin America compellingly argues, is a far more ambiguous story in which the structural advantages embedded in the era of authoritarian rule — particularly at the subnational level — have continued to shape electoral outcomes in ways that defy simple narratives of democratic consolidation.
The central argument advanced in this paper concerns the relative weight of party machines versus gubernatorial performance in determining electoral success in Mexico's state-level elections during the post-transition period. The authors contend that democratic competition, when combined with the process of political decentralization, did not neutralize incumbency advantages inherited from the authoritarian period but rather transformed and in some cases reinforced them. Governors, as the inheritors of powerful subnational party organizations originally constructed under PRI hegemony, were able to leverage organizational capacity, resource distribution, and clientelist mobilization to sustain electoral dominance even as national-level competition intensified. This finding directly challenges performance-based theories of electoral accountability, which predict that voters in newly democratic systems will reward competent incumbents and punish poor performers. Instead, the evidence from Mexico's gubernatorial elections suggests that organizational and structural advantages — the machinery of party mobilization — frequently overwhelm the accountability signal that performance records might otherwise transmit to the electorate. The implication is sobering: democratic transitions, even genuine ones, do not automatically generate the accountability mechanisms that normative democratic theory anticipates.
This analysis speaks directly to a broader regional pattern that has attracted increasing scholarly attention over the past two decades. The concept of subnational authoritarianism, developed most influentially by Edward Gibson and subsequently applied across Latin American cases, captures the phenomenon whereby national democratization coexists with entrenched authoritarian enclaves at the provincial or state level. Mexico's federal structure, which grants governors substantial fiscal and administrative autonomy, created the conditions under which subnational political machines could reproduce themselves even as the national political environment shifted. Decentralization, often championed by international development organizations and bilateral donors as a pathway to more responsive, accountable governance, carries a deeply ambivalent record in transitional contexts precisely because it can transfer not only resources and responsibilities but also the organizational advantages of incumbent political machines. The Mexican case thus adds empirical weight to a growing scholarly consensus that the sequencing and institutional context of decentralization matters enormously for its democratic effects — a lesson with direct relevance for ODA programming that conditions aid on governance reforms without attending carefully to the subnational political economy in which those reforms are embedded.
From a policy and research standpoint, the findings carry significant implications for how external actors — donor governments, multilateral institutions, and transnational civil society organizations — conceptualize and design democracy support programming in transitional settings. Much democracy assistance in Latin America during the 1990s and 2000s focused on strengthening electoral management bodies, supporting civil society organizations, and promoting transparency legislation, operating on the assumption that removing formal barriers to competition would progressively erode incumbent advantages. The persistence of machine-based gubernatorial dominance in Mexico suggests that these interventions, while not without value, systematically underestimated the durability of organizational infrastructure as a determinant of electoral outcomes. Civil society organizations, for all their importance in monitoring elections and advocating for accountability, face a fundamental asymmetry when confronting party machines with decades of organizational investment, territorial reach, and resource distribution capacity. This does not render civil society interventions futile, but it does suggest that democracy support strategies need to grapple more directly with the organizational and resource dimensions of electoral competition, including how public resources are mobilized for partisan purposes at the subnational level.
Looking forward, the dynamics documented in this paper will likely be tested by several converging pressures. The rise of Morena under Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and the party's rapid nationalization of electoral support, represents a structural disruption of the PRI's subnational machine in many states — but it also raises the question of whether Morena is constructing its own machine politics rather than transcending the organizational logic that the paper identifies. The deepening fiscal constraints facing Mexican states, exacerbated by commodity dependence and federal transfers contingent on central government priorities, will reshape the resource base available to gubernatorial machines, potentially altering the competitive calculus in ways that make performance records more or less relevant to voters. For researchers, the paper opens productive avenues for comparative inquiry: to what extent do the mechanisms identified in Mexico — organizational inheritance, decentralized resource control, clientelist mobilization — explain gubernatorial or provincial incumbency advantages in other Latin American federations such as Brazil, Argentina, or Bolivia? And for practitioners engaged in ODA and governance work, the central lesson is that electoral competition alone is an insufficient metric of democratic consolidation; the organizational and institutional subsoil from which electoral outcomes grow demands sustained analytical and programmatic attention if the promise of democratic accountability is to be meaningfully realized at the subnational level where most citizens most directly experience the consequences of governance.