Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-05-30
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian legacies within formally democratic systems represents one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics, particularly in regions where the structural architecture of single-party rule outlasted the formal end of that rule itself. Mexico offers a paradigmatic case. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by its Spanish acronym PRI, dominated Mexican political life for over seven decades through an intricate web of patronage networks, corporatist bargaining, and territorial control that extended from the federal center down to the most granular levels of subnational governance. When Mexico's democratic transition gradually consolidated through the 1990s and into the early 2000s — marked most symbolically by the PRI's loss of the presidency in 2000 — the academic and policy communities greeted the moment as a watershed. Yet scholarship has increasingly revealed that the formal opening of electoral competition did not dissolve the organizational sinews of machine politics. Understanding how authoritarian organizational legacies translate into durable electoral advantages in subnational arenas remains not merely an academic question but a deeply practical one for civil society actors, development practitioners, and governance reformers working across the Global South.
The article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America engages this question with particular attention to Mexico's gubernatorial elections in the post-transition period, asking what actually explains electoral success at the state level and, crucially, to what degree governors themselves shaped those outcomes. The central argument is illuminating: rather than performance-based accountability — the intuitive expectation of democratic theory, in which voters reward competent governors and punish incompetent ones — it is party machine capacity that proves the decisive variable. Democratic competition, the paper contends, interacted with decentralization in ways that empowered governors as political actors but did not fundamentally transform the logic by which electoral coalitions were assembled and maintained. The incumbency advantage that characterizes Mexico's gubernatorial landscape is not primarily a product of policy success or public satisfaction with service delivery; it is instead the product of organizational continuity, resource mobilization, and the durable institutional infrastructure that authoritarian parties built across decades and that outlasted the transition itself. This finding challenges liberal democratic optimism about how electoral competition disciplines political elites and redirects attention toward the organizational substrates that shape what competition actually means in practice.
The decentralization dimension of this argument deserves particular attention, as it connects the Mexican case to a much wider global conversation about the unintended consequences of governance reform. Throughout the 1990s, decentralization was championed by international financial institutions, bilateral donors, and development scholars as a mechanism for improving accountability by bringing government closer to citizens. Mexico, like many countries in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, undertook significant transfers of fiscal and administrative authority to subnational governments during this period. The assumption embedded in these reforms was that proximity would enhance accountability and that local competition would erode entrenched political monopolies. The evidence from Mexico's gubernatorial elections complicates this story considerably. Decentralization gave governors access to expanded budgetary resources, patronage opportunities, and political visibility — all of which could be deployed not to improve public services in ways that would attract performance-based voter support, but rather to deepen and extend the machine politics that produced incumbency advantages in the first place. Where party infrastructure was already strong, decentralization functioned as an amplifier of existing organizational power rather than as a leveling mechanism that opened political space to challengers.
This finding has significant implications for how development institutions, ODA frameworks, and civil society organizations approach governance programming in transitional democracies. Much of the international support for democratic consolidation in Latin America has focused on electoral administration, constitutional design, and civil society capacity-building on the assumption that institutional reform at the formal level will gradually erode informal authoritarian practices. The Mexican case suggests that this approach systematically underestimates the durability of party organizational infrastructure and the degree to which subnational elites can adapt machine politics to the new formal rules of democratic competition. If incumbency advantage is driven primarily by machine capacity rather than governance performance, then anti-corruption programming, transparency initiatives, and voter education campaigns — while valuable in their own right — may be insufficient to shift the fundamental electoral logic that sustains political monopolies at the state level. What may matter more is the organizational capacity of opposition parties, the independence of civil society actors from partisan patronage networks, and the degree to which local media environments permit genuine accountability journalism to reach voters.
Looking forward, the research agenda opened by this article points toward several analytically productive directions. Comparative work that examines whether similar dynamics obtain in other post-authoritarian contexts — ranging from the former Soviet republics to dominant-party systems in East Africa — would help to establish the conditions under which authoritarian organizational legacies are most durable and the mechanisms by which they can be eroded over time. There is also a need for closer attention to variation within Mexico itself: not all states had equally strong PRI machines, not all experienced decentralization in the same ways, and the gradual emergence of alternative party organizations — including Morena, which displaced the PRI at the federal level in 2018 — raises important questions about whether new political movements replicate the machine logic of their predecessors or represent genuinely different modes of electoral mobilization. For practitioners working in development and governance reform, the most immediate takeaway is a call for greater realism about the timescales involved in democratic deepening and greater attention to the organizational, rather than merely institutional, dimensions of political change. Electoral democracy can coexist for prolonged periods with the substantive logic of machine politics, and acknowledging that coexistence clearly is the necessary first step toward designing interventions that might eventually transform it.