Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-02
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The Persistence of Party Machines: Authoritarian Legacies and Electoral Continuity in Post-Transition Mexico
Mexico's democratic transition, widely celebrated as a landmark in Latin American political development, did not simply dissolve the institutional architecture of seven decades of one-party rule. The gradual dismantling of the Institutional Revolutionary Party's (PRI) hegemony through the 1990s and its culmination in the 2000 presidential handover to Vicente Fox of the PAN was interpreted at the time as a decisive rupture with an authoritarian past built on patronage, clientelism, and machine politics. Yet a growing body of comparative electoral research has begun to complicate this narrative, demonstrating that the organizational sinews of the old regime retained considerable vitality well into the democratic era. The article under review, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, addresses this persistence directly through the lens of subnational politics, asking what accounts for electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial races after the democratic transition and examining the degree to which governors themselves shaped these outcomes. The findings challenge optimistic accounts of democratic consolidation and raise enduring questions about the relationship between electoral competition, institutional legacies, and accountability in transitional democracies.
The paper's central theoretical argument is that the combination of democratic competition and fiscal decentralisation — rather than producing the performance-based accountability that liberal democratic theory anticipates — instead empowered incumbent governors to entrench party machines that operated largely independently of their governance records. This is a significant and counterintuitive claim. Conventional democratic theory would predict that competitive elections create incentives for officeholders to deliver public goods, because voters can punish poor performers at the ballot box. The Mexican subnational case, however, appears to invert this logic: governors who controlled expanded fiscal resources following decentralisation could direct those resources toward machine-building activities — clientelistic transfers, patronage networks, and mobilization infrastructure — that produced electoral dividends irrespective of measurable developmental outcomes. In other words, the resources meant to improve service delivery were repurposed as instruments of electoral retention. This dynamic reflects what scholars of hybrid and transitional regimes have termed "competitive authoritarianism" at the subnational level, where formal democratic procedures coexist with deeply asymmetric access to resources and organization.
The temporal context of this analysis is crucial. Mexico's federalist decentralisation during the 1990s transferred substantial revenue-sharing funds and administrative authority to state governments. While this was nominally designed to enhance local governance capacity and democratic responsiveness, it also dramatically increased the material resources at the disposal of state executives. The paper appears to find that this resource expansion disproportionately benefited incumbent parties — particularly, though not exclusively, the PRI — by giving governors the financial means to sustain patronage networks that had been developed over decades. Crucially, the paper argues that this incumbency advantage was not primarily a function of performance, meaning that states with better developmental indicators or more effective public administration did not systematically produce more durable electoral coalitions. What mattered more was the organizational capacity inherited from the authoritarian period, now refueled by decentralised fiscal flows. This "authoritarian legacy plus decentralisation" mechanism offers a compelling explanation for why PRI governors continued winning in many states long after the national-level democratic breakthrough, and why opposition governments in some states struggled to translate administrative stewardship into durable electoral coalitions of their own.
From a comparative and global perspective, the Mexican case resonates with a broader literature on the durability of authoritarian organizational legacies in post-transition settings. Research on Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia has similarly documented how successor parties to hegemonic regimes — even those that lose power nationally — retain competitive advantages through organizational continuity, elite networks, and institutional knowledge. What the Mexican gubernatorial case adds to this comparative picture is the specific mechanism of fiscal decentralisation as an amplifier of existing organizational advantages. This has significant implications for how development institutions design decentralisation reforms. International donors, including bilateral ODA agencies and multilateral development banks, have long promoted decentralisation as a pathway to improved governance and democratic accountability. The Mexican experience suggests that decentralisation in contexts where patronage-based organizational structures remain intact can produce outcomes antithetical to these goals — reinforcing rather than eroding machine politics and weakening the link between public sector performance and electoral accountability. ODA practitioners working on governance reform in transitional democracies would do well to treat decentralisation not as a neutral technical intervention but as a political economy intervention whose effects depend heavily on the pre-existing configuration of party organizations and informal institutional arrangements.
Looking forward, the research presented in this article has implications both for scholars of comparative politics and for practitioners engaged in democratic deepening and governance reform across the Global South. For scholars, the findings deepen the case for taking subnational variation seriously as an analytical unit, recognizing that national democratic transitions do not uniformly penetrate subnational political systems, which can continue to operate under qualitatively different logics. For practitioners, the study underscores the importance of sequencing in governance reform — specifically, that decentralisation without prior or concurrent investment in civil society capacity, independent electoral monitoring, and transparent fiscal accountability mechanisms risks producing the perverse outcomes observed in Mexico's gubernatorial elections. As many developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia continue negotiating the terms of their own decentralisation processes, often with significant ODA support, the Mexican experience offers a sobering illustration of how institutional legacies shape the political economy of reform. The absence of performance-based accountability at the subnational level is not merely an academic puzzle; it represents a structural impediment to the equitable distribution of public goods and the genuine deepening of democratic governance — a challenge that deserves sustained attention from both researchers and the international community of development actors.