Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-05
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian organizational structures within formally democratic systems represents one of the most consequential and underappreciated challenges in the comparative study of political transitions. Decades of scholarship on democratization have focused heavily on institutional design — electoral rules, judicial independence, federalism — while paying comparatively less attention to the informal networks, clientelistic relationships, and machine politics that outlast regime change and quietly shape electoral competition long after founding elections have passed. Mexico offers a particularly instructive case. Its protracted transition from seven decades of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) hegemony to multiparty competition was celebrated internationally as a model of gradual, negotiated democratization. Yet the persistence of subnational authoritarian enclaves, the durability of machine-based mobilization, and the incumbency advantages that governors continued to exercise well into the democratic era suggest that electoral outcomes in post-transition Mexico cannot be adequately understood through a purely institutionalist or performance-based lens. The article under review, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, advances this argument systematically, examining gubernatorial elections and making the case that party machines rather than government performance have been the decisive factor in explaining electoral success.
The central analytical contribution of this research lies in its explicit challenge to retrospective voting models as applied to Mexico's subnational context. Conventional theories of democratic accountability assume that voters punish incumbents for poor performance and reward those who deliver economic goods and public services effectively. This logic presupposes a relatively informed electorate operating in a competitive information environment, with electoral outcomes serving as meaningful signals that discipline political elites. The Mexican case disrupts these assumptions. The paper argues that democratic competition, when combined with decentralization processes that transferred significant fiscal and administrative resources to the states, did not straightforwardly produce performance-based accountability. Instead, decentralization empowered governors to deploy expanded state resources in the service of machine politics — sustaining patron-client networks, rewarding political loyalty, and structuring the incentives of local political intermediaries in ways that reproduced incumbency advantage independent of programmatic delivery. This is a finding with important theoretical implications: it suggests that decentralization, often promoted by international donors and development institutions as a tool of democratic deepening, may in certain contexts reinforce precisely the informal power structures it was meant to displace.
The concept of authoritarian legacies is central to understanding the mechanisms the paper identifies. Mexico's transition did not involve a rupture with the organizational infrastructure of the PRI regime. Unlike transitions following military defeat or sudden collapse, Mexico's gradual opening preserved much of the PRI's subnational apparatus even as national-level competition became genuinely contested. State governors, who had long functioned as the institutional pillars of PRI hegemony, retained access to public employment, infrastructure spending, social program administration, and informal networks of local brokers even after multiparty competition formally arrived. The paper's focus on gubernatorial elections is thus well-chosen: it is at this level that the interaction between formal democratic rules and inherited authoritarian organizational capacity becomes most visible. Governors with strong machine organizations could deploy selective benefits to mobilize core supporters, suppress defection among local intermediaries, and shape the terms on which opposition competed — all without necessarily governing well by any objective metric. This decoupling of electoral success from performance is not merely a normative concern about accountability; it has material consequences for the quality of public goods provision and the development of programmatic political competition.
These findings connect to a broader regional and global literature on the limits of third-wave democratization. Across Latin America, Africa, and parts of Southeast Asia, scholars have documented the persistence of subnational authoritarianism, the resilience of machine politics, and the ways in which formal democratic frameworks coexist with deeply entrenched informal power. Gibson's work on boundary control and subnational authoritarianism in Argentina and Mexico established an influential framework for understanding how national-level democracy can coexist with highly restricted political competition at the provincial or state level. More recent contributions have examined how social policy, conditional cash transfers, and targeted infrastructure spending are instrumentalized in ways that blur the line between programmatic governance and clientelistic mobilization. The present article advances this literature by offering a gubernatorial-level analysis that disaggregates the Mexican transition experience and demonstrates that incumbency advantage was not uniform but was structured by the inherited organizational strength of the party machine. This granularity is methodologically valuable: it allows the paper to move beyond the national narrative of democratization and engage with the heterogeneous subnational realities that aggregate statistics often obscure.
The policy and research implications of this work are significant, particularly for international actors engaged in governance reform and ODA programming in middle-income democracies. Development institutions and bilateral donors often invest in electoral administration, voter education, and anti-corruption mechanisms as mechanisms for improving democratic quality, proceeding from the assumption that freer and fairer elections will, over time, produce performance-based accountability. The evidence from Mexico's gubernatorial elections complicates this logic considerably. If machine organizations can maintain incumbency advantage across competitive electoral cycles not by winning on performance but by deploying organizational resources to structure voter and broker behavior, then electoral reform alone is insufficient to break the cycle. Strengthening the supply side of accountability — civil society organizations, independent media, investigative journalism, and subnational legislative oversight — may be at least as important as improving the formal integrity of elections. For civil society researchers and practitioners, the paper's findings underscore the importance of mapping informal power at the subnational level, rather than assuming that national-level democratic transitions automatically diffuse downward.
Looking ahead, Mexico's political landscape has been substantially reshaped since the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018 and the subsequent consolidation of the Morena movement under Claudia Sheinbaum. The dynamics the paper analyzes — PRI machine politics, incumbency advantages built on decentralized resource control — have in many states been superseded or reconfigured rather than straightforwardly dismantled. Morena has in some cases replicated the organizational logic it criticized in the PRI, building its own networks of social program administrators and local intermediaries whose electoral activities blur the line between public service and partisan mobilization. Whether this represents a genuine transformation of Mexican subnational politics or a replication of machine logic under a new partisan banner is a question of urgent empirical and normative importance. Researchers working on Mexican politics, Latin American democracy, and the political economy of development more broadly would do well to engage seriously with the analytical framework this paper offers — not as a counsel of pessimism about democratic prospects, but as a rigorous account of the structural conditions that shape political competition and the kinds of interventions, both domestic and international, that might meaningfully alter them.