Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-10
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian institutional legacies within formally democratic political systems represents one of the most consequential and underexplored dynamics in comparative politics. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in Latin America, where a wave of democratic transitions beginning in the 1980s and 1990s dismantled authoritarian regimes on paper while leaving intact the organizational infrastructures, clientelistic networks, and subnational power arrangements that had sustained those regimes for decades. Mexico's political trajectory exemplifies this paradox with particular clarity. The country's transition away from single-party rule under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) was celebrated internationally as a milestone for democratic consolidation in the hemisphere, yet the empirical record of electoral politics at the subnational level consistently reveals that the formal opening of competition did not straightforwardly translate into accountability, voter responsiveness, or performance-based electoral outcomes. This article by examining Mexico's gubernatorial elections after democratic transition offers a rigorous entry point into understanding how authoritarian organizational legacies interact with newly competitive electoral environments to produce incumbency advantages that are structurally rooted rather than merit-based.
The central argument of this research — that democratic competition combined with decentralization produced conditions in which party machines rather than gubernatorial performance explain electoral success — challenges some foundational assumptions in the democratization literature. Much of that literature, drawing on retrospective voting theory and the logic of electoral accountability, predicts that as competition becomes genuine, voters will increasingly discipline underperforming incumbents and reward those who deliver public goods. Mexico's post-transition gubernatorial politics, however, appears to confound this expectation. The decentralization reforms that accompanied democratic opening, far from dispersing power and enhancing accountability, appear to have concentrated resources at the subnational level in ways that incumbents could exploit to entrench themselves organizationally. Governors who inherited or rebuilt PRI-era machine politics were able to leverage control over patronage networks, public employment, and local media ecosystems to secure electoral advantages that were largely insulated from their actual governance records. This finding resonates with a broader comparative literature on subnational authoritarianism and what scholars like Edward Gibson have called "boundary control" — the ability of subnational elites to manage political competition within their jurisdictions independently of national-level democratization processes.
The implications of this research connect to larger debates about the quality of democracy across Latin America. The region's democracies have been characterized by scholars as exhibiting a persistent gap between procedural electoral competition and substantive accountability. In country after country — from Argentina's provincial bosses to Brazil's state-level oligarchies to the cacicazgos of Central America — subnational political machines have proven remarkably resilient even as national-level political competition has intensified. What Mexico's case illustrates with particular force is the mechanism by which this resilience operates: it is not simply that machine politicians win through fraud or outright coercion, but that they structurally reshape the incentive landscape facing voters, party organizations, and potential challengers in ways that make performance-based accountability a secondary consideration at best. When governors control the material conditions of life for a significant portion of the electorate — through employment, welfare transfers, infrastructure contracts, and informal patronage — the vote becomes embedded in a dense web of reciprocal obligations that rational voters navigating material scarcity cannot easily disentangle from their electoral choices.
From a development and ODA policy perspective, these findings carry important implications for how international donors and civil society organizations approach subnational governance reform in transitional democracies. A significant portion of development assistance in Latin America over the past three decades has been premised on the assumption that democratization and decentralization are mutually reinforcing processes — that devolving authority and resources to subnational governments would bring governance closer to citizens and enhance accountability. Mexico's experience suggests that without deliberate attention to the organizational and institutional conditions that enable machine politics to persist, decentralization can paradoxically strengthen the hand of incumbents at the expense of responsive governance. For civil society organizations working in this space, the research underscores the importance of investing not merely in electoral observation or anti-corruption monitoring at the national level, but in building the organizational capacity of opposition parties, independent media, and civic associations at the state and municipal levels where machine politics actually operates. The analytical frame of authoritarian legacies also challenges development practitioners to take seriously path dependency in political institutions — the recognition that the organizational forms developed under authoritarianism do not simply dissolve when electoral rules change, but require active, sustained countervailing efforts to displace.
Looking forward, this research opens productive avenues for both comparative scholars and policy practitioners. The study of incumbency advantage in subnational elections has gained significant momentum as a subfield, and Mexico offers one of the richest empirical settings for such inquiry given the country's federal structure, its varied subnational political histories, and the gradual but uneven erosion of PRI dominance across different states. The rise of Morena and President López Obrador's recentralization agenda introduced a new variable into this equation, raising questions about whether the displacement of PRI machine politics at the national and in many subnational arenas represents a genuine dismantling of authoritarian organizational legacies or merely their reconstitution under a new partisan banner. Comparative research examining whether Morena has replicated, transformed, or broken with the structural logic of machine-based incumbency advantage would be a valuable next step. More broadly, for researchers working on democratic quality, electoral accountability, and the political economy of development assistance, the Mexican case serves as a sobering reminder that electoral competition is a necessary but far from sufficient condition for the kind of responsive, performance-based governance that democratic theory promises and that development practitioners rightly seek to support.