Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-05-22
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian institutional logics within formally democratic settings represents one of the most consequential and underexamined puzzles in comparative politics. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in Latin America, where democratic transitions of the 1980s and 1990s dismantled formal one-party or military regimes while leaving intact the organizational sinews of authoritarian governance: patronage networks, clientelistic party machines, and subnational political fiefdoms that continue to shape electoral competition in ways that formal democratic rules alone cannot explain. Mexico offers a particularly instructive case. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governed the country uninterruptedly for over seven decades, constructing during that period a layered system of political control that operated as much through territorial party organization and selective material distribution as through outright coercion. When formal democratization arrived — symbolized most dramatically by the PRI's loss of the presidency in 2000 — the inherited infrastructure of machine politics did not dissolve. It adapted. The article under review in the Journal of Politics in Latin America engages this enduring problem directly, asking what actually explains electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial contests after the democratic transition, and to what extent governors themselves have been the architects of their own political fortunes. The answer it advances is both analytically rigorous and politically sobering: party machines, rooted in the organizational legacies of the authoritarian era, outperform individual gubernatorial performance as predictors of electoral outcomes.
The paper's core argument centers on the interaction between democratic competition and political decentralization — two processes that were widely expected to discipline elected officials by making them accountable to voters rather than to national party hierarchies. The theoretical promise of subnational democratization was that governors who delivered public goods, managed fiscal resources prudently, and responded to citizen preferences would be rewarded electorally, while those who failed would be punished. Decentralization, which transferred significant fiscal resources and administrative responsibilities to Mexico's thirty-one states, seemed to create the structural conditions for this kind of performance-based accountability. Yet the research suggests that this optimistic reading was substantially wrong, or at least incomplete. Instead of rewarding competent governors, electoral outcomes in gubernatorial races continued to reflect the organizational capacity of party machines — their ability to mobilize voters, distribute targeted benefits, and coordinate local political networks — rather than measurable improvements in governance quality. This finding resonates with a growing body of comparative literature demonstrating that the mere existence of elections is insufficient to generate accountability when incumbent parties control the organizational infrastructure through which political information is filtered, material incentives are distributed, and voter loyalties are cultivated.
This research speaks to broader structural patterns across Latin American subnational politics that have attracted increasing scholarly attention over the past two decades. The concept of "subnational authoritarianism," developed most influentially by Edward Gibson and later extended by scholars like Allyson Benton and Kent Eaton, captures precisely the phenomenon this paper analyzes: the survival of authoritarian enclaves within nationally democratic systems, sustained by territorial party organizations that insulate incumbent politicians from competitive pressures. Mexico's case is particularly instructive because it illustrates how decentralization, rather than simply empowering citizens vis-à-vis the state, can also empower incumbents by giving them greater control over resource flows and patronage channels that underpin machine politics. The transfer of fiscal authority to states did not, in this reading, democratize subnational politics so much as it enriched the material resources available to whoever controlled the state apparatus. Where authoritarian-era party organizations remained intact, decentralization amplified machine capacity. Where they had eroded — in competitive urban districts or in states where opposition parties had broken through — the effects were more ambiguous. The article's attention to variation across Mexican states thus captures something important about the conditional nature of institutional legacies: they are powerful but not uniformly so, and their effects depend on the degree to which organizational infrastructure has been maintained or allowed to atrophy across the democratic transition.
The policy implications of this analysis extend well beyond Mexico's borders and carry direct relevance for development practitioners, ODA architects, and governance reformers working across Latin America and in analogous post-authoritarian contexts in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the post-Soviet world. A central lesson is that formal institutional design — the introduction of elections, the devolution of fiscal authority, the creation of horizontal accountability mechanisms — is necessary but insufficient for generating genuine democratic accountability at the subnational level. International development actors have frequently invested in governance reforms premised on the assumption that decentralization would automatically strengthen citizen-state linkages and reduce the scope for patronage politics. This research challenges that assumption directly. Decentralization in the presence of organizational legacies from authoritarian rule may entrench rather than displace machine politics, particularly when civil society organizations lack the density and independence needed to monitor incumbents, generate credible performance information, and sustain collective action around accountability demands. For ODA programming, this suggests a need to invest more systematically in the organizational capacities of independent civil society actors at the subnational level — not as a secondary complement to institutional reform, but as a precondition for those reforms to function as intended. Without countervailing organizational power, the machines win.
From a scholarly standpoint, the paper contributes to an important methodological and theoretical conversation about how to study the weight of the past in shaping present political outcomes. Authoritarian legacies are notoriously difficult to operationalize: they are not simply the residue of old policies but are constituted by relational networks, organizational routines, and political identities that were built over decades and continue to structure behavior long after the formal regime that produced them has disappeared. By focusing on party machine capacity as a distinct variable, separable from gubernatorial performance metrics, the research develops a more precise causal architecture than much of the existing literature, which tends either to treat legacies as undifferentiated background conditions or to conflate them with current institutional configurations. The emphasis on governors as political agents — actors who both inherit and reproduce organizational resources across electoral cycles — also opens productive questions about the mechanisms through which legacies are perpetuated or disrupted. Under what conditions do competitive elections eventually erode machine capacity? Does the rise of new political parties, such as MORENA under Andrés Manuel López Obrador, represent a genuine rupture with machine politics or a transfer of organizational logic into a new partisan vehicle? These questions, which the current research raises but does not fully resolve, define an important frontier for future comparative work.
Looking forward, the trajectory of Mexican subnational politics in the post-AMLO era will offer a crucial test of whether the institutional legacies documented in this article are genuinely durable or whether they can be disrupted by sustained programmatic competition. The extraordinary expansion of MORENA's subnational presence since 2018 — the party now governs a majority of Mexican states — has reorganized the political landscape in ways that could either reinforce the machine logic by giving a new party control of the same organizational resources, or introduce novel accountability dynamics if MORENA's social movements and community organizations sustain genuine pressure on elected officials from below. For researchers and practitioners alike, the most urgent analytical task is to identify the conditions under which the cycle documented in this research — where machine capacity trumps performance regardless of partisan affiliation — can be broken. The answer is unlikely to lie in any single institutional reform, but rather in the slow and often contentious construction of the civil society density, independent media capacity, and informed electoral behavior that turn formal democratic institutions from legitimating facades into genuinely accountability-generating mechanisms. The stakes of getting this right extend far beyond Mexico: they concern the broader question of whether democratic transitions can, over time, generate the substantive political accountability they formally promise.