Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-13
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 phenomena in comparative politics. Across Latin America, the collapse of single-party regimes and the installation of competitive electoral frameworks have not uniformly produced the accountability relationships that democratic theory predicts. Mexico offers perhaps the most instructive case in this regard. For seven decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governed through a sophisticated apparatus of clientelism, cooptation, and controlled political mobility, building organizational networks that penetrated every layer of territorial governance. When Mexico's democratic transition accelerated through the 1990s and culminated in the historic 2000 presidential alternation, many observers anticipated a corresponding transformation of subnational politics. The article under review challenges that optimism with empirical rigor, demonstrating that the structural inheritances of authoritarian governance — particularly at the gubernatorial level — have proven far more durable than the formal institutional changes that accompanied Mexico's democratization.
The paper's central argument is both precise and theoretically significant: electoral success in Mexico's post-transition gubernatorial elections is explained less by gubernatorial performance than by the organizational capacity of party machines rooted in the authoritarian era. This finding cuts against a dominant strand of democratic accountability literature, which holds that competitive elections incentivize incumbents to deliver public goods and punish poor performers at the ballot box. In Mexico's states, decentralization — a reform often celebrated as a vehicle for democratizing fiscal and administrative power — paradoxically reinforced the political leverage of governors by giving them expanded resource bases without a commensurate increase in institutional oversight. Governors who inherited or reconstructed PRI-style party machines were able to mobilize voters, manage local opposition, and secure electoral continuity not through policy achievement but through organizational reach. The research therefore contributes to a growing body of scholarship that distinguishes between formal democratic procedures and the substantive democratic practices they are intended to produce, a distinction of enormous importance for development practitioners and governance reformers working across post-authoritarian contexts.
The Mexican case resonates with broader regional and global patterns that scholars of comparative democratization have increasingly emphasized. Throughout Latin America, transitions from authoritarian rule during the 1980s and 1990s created what political scientists have termed "hybrid regimes" — systems in which free elections coexist with enduring practices of patronage, selective repression, and elite capture of state resources. In Guatemala, Honduras, and Paraguay, subnational strongmen have consistently leveraged local organizational networks to insulate themselves from national electoral volatility. In Brazil, the literature on coronelismo and its democratic successors illustrates how territorial bosses adapt to multiparty competition without abandoning the extractive logics they inherited. What distinguishes the Mexican case, and what the article captures with particular clarity, is the extent to which decentralization itself served as a mechanism for reconfiguring rather than dissolving these inherited power structures. When fiscal transfers to states expanded substantially in the post-1997 period, governors — many of whom maintained continuity with PRI organizational networks even as their formal partisan affiliations shifted — acquired new instruments for sustaining patronage networks. The argument thus speaks directly to a broader comparative puzzle: why has fiscal and administrative decentralization, widely promoted by international development institutions including the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank as a democratizing reform, so frequently produced entrenched subnational authoritarianism rather than enhanced local accountability?
The policy implications of this analysis are considerable and extend well beyond Mexico's borders. For international development actors and civil society organizations engaged in democratic governance programming, the findings suggest that electoral competition alone is an insufficient metric of democratic consolidation. Programs that measure democratic quality by the regularity and competitiveness of elections, without attending to the organizational and material substrates of electoral mobilization, risk misreading political trajectories in ways that have real consequences for program design. If incumbents can sustain electoral advantage through machine politics rather than performance, then accountability-focused governance interventions — civic education campaigns, transparency initiatives, anti-corruption frameworks — face structural constraints that technical assistance alone cannot resolve. The research also has implications for how development organizations approach decentralization programming. The assumption that devolving resources and responsibilities to subnational governments enhances responsiveness and accountability needs to be conditioned on a prior assessment of the party system ecology and organizational capacities that will mediate those resources. Where party machines with authoritarian roots remain dominant, decentralization may deepen rather than attenuate existing accountability deficits, a finding that should prompt more careful sequencing in governance reform strategies.
Looking forward, the analytical framework developed in this research opens important avenues for both scholarly investigation and practitioner reflection. The relative weight of authoritarian legacies versus performance-based accountability in subnational elections is likely to vary across Mexico's thirty-one states in ways that correlate with the depth and duration of PRI organizational entrenchment, the robustness of civil society networks capable of generating information and mobilizing voters around policy outcomes, and the degree to which alternation in office has created genuine organizational discontinuities at the state level. Longitudinal tracking of these variables could yield more fine-grained insights into the conditions under which machine politics begins to lose its electoral premium — a question of significant interest for researchers seeking to understand democratic deepening and for activists working to strengthen accountability mechanisms at the subnational level. More broadly, as a new wave of autocratization and democratic backsliding reshapes the global political landscape, understanding how authoritarian organizational logics persist and adapt within formally democratic institutions becomes an urgent priority. Mexico's gubernatorial politics, situated at the intersection of democratic transition, fiscal decentralization, and inherited party structures, provides a rich and theoretically generative laboratory for these inquiries — one that scholars of comparative politics, development studies, and civil society would be well served to engage with more systematically.