Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-08
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian political structures long after the formal end of authoritarian rule is one of the most consequential and understudied phenomena in comparative politics. Across Latin America, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a sweeping wave of democratic transitions, yet the institutional legacies of decades-long authoritarian governance did not simply dissolve with the introduction of competitive elections. Mexico's case is particularly instructive. The country underwent a protracted, negotiated transition away from hegemonic single-party rule under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), culminating in the landmark 2000 presidential election won by Vicente Fox of the center-right PAN. Yet even as national-level politics became genuinely competitive, subnational arenas — particularly governorships — retained many of the features that had defined the old authoritarian order: clientelism, machine politics, selective distribution of public goods, and incumbency advantages that bore little relationship to policy performance. Understanding why voters continued to reward incumbents and ruling parties in these contexts, long after the formal architecture of competitive democracy was in place, is not merely an academic curiosity. It speaks directly to the quality and durability of democratic consolidation across the developing world.
The article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America addresses this question with focused attention on Mexico's gubernatorial elections during the post-transition period. Its central argument is that electoral success in these subnational contests has been shaped far more by the organizational capacities of party machines — the networks of brokers, clientelistic linkages, and mobilization infrastructure inherited from or modeled after the PRI apparatus — than by governors' actual policy performance. This is a theoretically significant claim because it challenges a central assumption in democratic accountability literature: that elections function as mechanisms through which voters reward competent incumbents and punish poor performers, thereby incentivizing good governance. If incumbency advantage in Mexico's states is driven primarily by machine capacity rather than performance, then elections are serving a very different function — one that consolidates elite control and perpetuates the organizational advantages of established parties rather than transmitting citizen preferences into governing behavior. The paper's argument gains further traction from its engagement with decentralization, noting that the transfer of fiscal and administrative authority to state governments under democratic reform paradoxically enhanced governors' capacity to deploy public resources for electoral purposes, deepening rather than attenuating the structural advantages of incumbency.
This finding situates Mexico within a broader and deeply troubling pattern visible across post-authoritarian states in Latin America and beyond. Scholars of comparative democratization have long recognized what Guillermo O'Donnell termed "low-intensity citizenship" — the formal presence of electoral procedures without the substantive conditions for democratic accountability. In states where party organizations control access to services, employment, and social transfers, the costs of voting against the machine can be substantial for ordinary citizens, while the organizational capacity of challengers remains stunted. Brazil's experience with coronelismo and the persistence of machine politics in the Northeast, Argentina's Peronist territorial networks, and Venezuela's Chavista social missions all illustrate variations on this theme: party organizations that leverage state resources to reproduce political loyalty regardless of governance outcomes. Mexico's governors, particularly those from states where the PRI maintained organizational depth well into the 2000s and 2010s, exemplify this logic most clearly. The finding that party machines outperform policy delivery as predictors of electoral success is not an indictment of Mexican voters; it is a structural observation about the incentive environments within which those voters make decisions. When the costs of defection are high and the credibility of challengers is low, machine loyalty is often a rational response to genuine material constraints.
The policy implications of this research are considerable, particularly for international development actors and bilateral donors engaged in democratic governance programming in Latin America and in analogous post-authoritarian contexts across sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and the post-Soviet states. A great deal of official development assistance has been directed toward electoral administration, judicial reform, anti-corruption measures, and decentralization initiatives on the premise that improving governance quality will, over time, translate into electoral accountability. If Mexico's experience suggests otherwise — that machine capacity rather than performance shapes outcomes even after significant institutional reform — then donor strategies require serious recalibration. Decentralization in particular must be evaluated not only as a technical reform but as a political process that redistributes resources and, in contexts of weak horizontal accountability, may enhance the patronage capacity of subnational elites. This does not counsel against decentralization per se, but it does demand that such reforms be accompanied by robust civil society monitoring, independent media, and institutional checks that can constrain the conversion of public resources into partisan capital. Without these complements, administrative decentralization risks reproducing at the state level precisely the dynamics that reformers sought to dismantle at the national level.
Looking forward, the research opens several important avenues for both scholarly inquiry and practitioner reflection. One concerns the conditions under which machine politics eventually loses its grip — the question of when, if ever, performance voting displaces organizational loyalty as the primary driver of subnational electoral outcomes. Comparative evidence from other Latin American states suggests that the erosion of machine politics tends to accompany the rise of credible opposition organizations, increased media penetration and information availability, urbanization, and the generational turnover of voters whose political socialization occurred outside the authoritarian period. Mexico's own trajectory, particularly in states that experienced extended PAN or PRD governance, may offer within-country variation that illuminates these dynamics. A second avenue concerns the relationship between machine politics and democratic backsliding. The global resurgence of competitive authoritarianism over the past decade — visible in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, and, with greater nuance, in certain subnational contexts across Latin America — suggests that the organizational infrastructure of machine politics is not merely a legacy of the past but a resource actively cultivated by incumbents seeking to insulate themselves from accountability pressures. Mexico's current political moment, under the MORENA movement's consolidation of both executive power and territorial reach, raises pointed questions about whether the machine politics dynamic documented in earlier gubernatorial elections is being reproduced under new partisan auspices rather than transcended. For researchers at the intersection of electoral politics, state capacity, and democratic theory, this work offers an essential empirical anchor for debates that will only become more pressing as the global democratic recession continues to unfold.