Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-12
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 puzzles in comparative politics. As scholars and practitioners continue to grapple with the global democratic recession — a period marked not only by outright backsliding in established autocracies but by the quiet erosion of democratic substance in transitional states — the Mexican case offers a particularly instructive laboratory. Mexico's long democratic transition, culminating in the historic defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the 2000 presidential election after more than seven decades of single-party dominance, has long been celebrated as a landmark moment for Latin American democratization. Yet, as recent scholarship published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America makes clear, the formal transfer of power at the apex of the political system obscured remarkably durable structures of political control at the subnational level. The question of what actually explains electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial contests after the transition — and the degree to which sitting governors actively shaped those outcomes — carries implications that extend far beyond Mexico's borders.
The central argument advanced by this research cuts against the grain of conventional performance-based theories of electoral accountability. Standard democratic theory holds that incumbents who govern well — who deliver public goods, maintain economic stability, reduce violence, or expand social services — should be rewarded at the ballot box, while those who fail should be punished. This is the foundational logic of electoral democracy: voters as rational evaluators of government performance. The Mexican subnational evidence, however, tells a more complicated and ultimately more troubling story. The paper argues that democratic competition, combined with the process of political decentralization that accompanied Mexico's transition, did not necessarily produce accountability of the kind democratic theory predicts. Instead, it empowered incumbent governors to leverage pre-existing party machine infrastructure — the patronage networks, clientelistic linkages, and organizational resources inherited from the PRI era — to sustain electoral advantage largely independent of their actual governing performance. This is a finding of considerable analytical weight: the machinery of authoritarianism, it appears, proved highly adaptable to the new competitive environment.
This finding connects to a broader and growing body of scholarship on what might be called the "subnational authoritarian enclave" phenomenon, a concept developed most influentially by Edward Gibson and subsequently elaborated by scholars of Latin American, Eastern European, and Sub-Saharan African politics. The core insight is that national-level democratization frequently leaves untouched, or even inadvertently reinforces, authoritarian power structures within provinces, states, or municipalities. Decentralization, in particular, has a deeply ambiguous relationship with democratic deepening. While transferring resources and authority to subnational units can theoretically bring government closer to citizens and enhance responsiveness, it can equally empower local strongmen who use newly acquired fiscal and administrative discretion to entrench themselves against electoral competition. In the Mexican context, gubernatorial decentralization under the transition gave state executives greater control over public employment, contracting, and social program distribution — precisely the levers of patronage that party machines depend upon. The irony is stark: the institutional reforms designed to democratize Mexico may have simultaneously furnished its subnational political bosses with expanded tools for machine-based control.
The policy implications of this research are significant for development practitioners, ODA architects, and civil society organizations operating in transitional political environments. International development assistance directed at democratic consolidation has frequently operated on the assumption that formal institutional reform — establishing electoral commissions, guaranteeing multiparty competition, decentralizing governance — is sufficient to produce accountable democratic governance. The Mexican gubernatorial case challenges this assumption directly. If incumbency advantage in subnational elections is driven primarily by inherited organizational infrastructure rather than performance, then capacity-building programs and governance reform initiatives that ignore political economy at the local level risk generating what might be called "accountability without accountability" — the formal structures of democratic competition coexisting with political outcomes that reflect machine power rather than citizen preferences. Civil society organizations working in such environments face particularly difficult terrain, because the patronage networks that sustain machine advantage often reach deep into civil society itself, co-opting community organizations, labor unions, and social movements into the logic of clientelistic exchange. Development actors need to take seriously the possibility that decentralization, absent robust mechanisms for horizontal accountability and active civil society autonomy, may consolidate rather than dismantle authoritarian legacies.
Looking forward, the research agenda opened by this study is substantial and practically urgent. As several Latin American countries — including, but not limited to, Mexico under the current political configuration — experience what analysts have variously described as democratic backsliding, competitive authoritarianism, or majoritarian populism, the subnational dimension of political competition becomes even more analytically critical. The 2024 Mexican general elections, which produced a landslide victory for Claudia Sheinbaum and the Morena-led coalition with historically strong performance in gubernatorial contests, raises fresh questions about whether a new form of machine politics is being assembled under a different partisan banner — one that may reproduce the organizational logics of the PRI era under the ideological signifiers of the Fourth Transformation. For researchers, the challenge is to develop more granular subnational data and comparative frameworks that can distinguish among varieties of incumbency advantage: those rooted in genuine performance, those sustained by machine infrastructure, and those that combine both in ways that make disentanglement methodologically difficult. For practitioners, the imperative is to design interventions that actively disrupt clientelistic circuits rather than assuming that formal democratic competition will do this work automatically. The Mexican case reminds us, with considerable force, that the distance between democratic form and democratic substance can be vast — and that understanding the mechanisms which sustain that distance is among the most important tasks facing scholars of political development today.