Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-03
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 and underexamined problems in comparative politics today. Across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Southeast Asia, countries that underwent democratic transitions in the late twentieth century continue to exhibit electoral patterns that resist straightforward liberal-democratic explanations. Incumbents win at rates that defy competitive logic, opposition parties struggle to translate policy discontent into electoral gains, and subnational political machines often operate according to rules entirely distinct from those observed at the national level. Mexico offers one of the most analytically rich cases for investigating these dynamics. Its transition from single-party hegemony under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) to multiparty electoral competition in the late 1990s and early 2000s was widely celebrated as a breakthrough moment for democracy in Latin America. Yet decades after that transition, questions about the depth and durability of democratic consolidation at the subnational level remain deeply relevant — both for scholars of comparative politics and for practitioners engaged in democratic governance and civil society development.
The article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America takes up this challenge by examining what actually explains electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial elections in the post-transition period, and particularly the degree to which incumbent governors shaped those outcomes. The central argument is that democratic competition, combined with the process of decentralization that accompanied Mexico's political opening, did not straightforwardly dismantle the infrastructural and organizational advantages that parties with authoritarian roots had accumulated under the old regime. Instead, decentralization often amplified incumbency advantage by transferring fiscal and administrative resources to the subnational level without simultaneously establishing robust accountability mechanisms capable of constraining how those resources were deployed. The paper's framing is significant: it foregrounds party machines — that is, the organizational networks, clientelistic linkages, and patronage systems that parties build and maintain over time — as more predictive of electoral outcomes than gubernatorial performance on measurable dimensions such as economic growth, public service delivery, or security. This is a finding with considerable theoretical weight, because it directly challenges the performance-based models of electoral accountability that underpin much of the mainstream democratic theory applied to developing-country contexts.
To appreciate the broader significance of this argument, it is worth situating it within the wider literature on authoritarian legacies and democratic quality. Scholars such as Levitsky and Way have long argued that the organizational strength of former ruling parties is a decisive variable in determining the trajectory of post-authoritarian regimes. Where incumbents retain dense party organizations with deep roots in civil society, state bureaucracies, and local economic networks, democratic competition tends to be systematically skewed even in the absence of overt repression. Mexico's PRI — and to varying degrees the successor parties and regional machines that inherited its organizational infrastructure — exemplifies this dynamic. The decentralization of power to state governors during the 1990s and 2000s created what some analysts have described as subnational authoritarian enclaves: jurisdictions where competitive elections exist on paper but where incumbents exercise quasi-monopolistic control over political resources, patronage networks, and media access. The article's contribution lies in systematically demonstrating that this organizational advantage, rather than performance outcomes, continues to drive electoral results in gubernatorial contests — a finding that complicates both optimistic narratives of Mexican democratization and simplistic prescriptions for democratic deepening.
The policy implications of this research are substantial and should be of direct concern to development organizations, international donors engaged in governance programming, and civil society advocates working in Mexico and analogous contexts. If electoral success at the subnational level is primarily a function of machine organization rather than performance, then standard accountability-enhancement tools — transparency legislation, audits, participatory monitoring, and even free and fair electoral administration — may be insufficient on their own to generate the competitive pressures needed to improve governance quality. The deeper problem is structural: as long as decentralization transfers resources without transferring genuine accountability, governors will continue to have strong incentives and ample means to invest in machine maintenance rather than public goods provision. This has direct implications for how international donors and multilateral institutions design governance reform programs. Capacity-building initiatives that focus on public financial management, anti-corruption monitoring, or civil society strengthening may yield limited returns if they are not simultaneously addressing the political economy of subnational machine politics — including the incentive structures that allow machine-building to remain more electorally rational than performance-based governance. The research therefore implicitly calls for a more politically informed approach to governance programming, one that takes seriously the organizational logic of subnational political competition rather than assuming that better information or stronger formal institutions will automatically translate into electoral accountability.
Looking forward, the dynamics documented in this research are unlikely to diminish in salience. The election of Claudia Sheinbaum as Mexico's first female president in 2024 and the continued dominance of Morena — itself a movement with significant machine-building tendencies — suggests that the organizational logic of Mexican subnational politics is being reproduced rather than transcended, even as the specific party benefiting from incumbency advantage has shifted. For researchers, this underscores the importance of moving beyond national-level analyses of Mexican democracy and investing in subnational comparative work that can track variation across states in machine strength, resource mobilization, and accountability quality. For civil society organizations and their international partners, the findings reinforce the importance of strengthening horizontal accountability institutions — local legislatures, independent audit bodies, investigative journalism — that can impose real costs on non-performing incumbents even in the absence of strong electoral competition. The study also speaks to a broader global moment in which the resilience of illiberal political practices within formally democratic frameworks is generating renewed scholarly and policy attention. Mexico's gubernatorial politics, examined through this lens, are not an exceptional case but rather an instructive instance of a much wider pattern — one in which the organizational inheritance of authoritarianism continues to shape democratic practice long after formal transitions have been completed. Understanding the mechanisms through which this persistence operates is among the most urgent tasks facing comparative political science today.