Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-14
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian structures within formally democratic systems represents one of the most consequential and underexamined phenomena in comparative political science. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in Latin America, where waves of democratization during the 1980s and 1990s dismantled nominal authoritarian regimes while leaving intact the organizational sinews through which those regimes had exercised power. Mexico offers perhaps the most instructive case: a country that achieved a celebrated democratic transition — symbolized by the PRI's loss of the presidency in 2000 — yet carried into its new democratic era a vast infrastructure of subnational party machines, clientelistic networks, and gubernatorial authority that had been forged across seven decades of single-party rule. A recent article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, "Authoritarian Legacies and Incumbency Advantage in Mexico's Gubernatorial Elections: Party Machines Over Performance," confronts these tensions directly and advances an argument of considerable analytical importance: that electoral success at the gubernatorial level in post-transition Mexico owes more to the enduring organizational capacities of party machines than to any metric of government performance. This finding matters not only for understanding Mexico but for the broader theoretical project of explaining why democratic consolidation so often stalls at the subnational level.
The central puzzle the paper addresses is deceptively straightforward but theoretically rich: what explains incumbency advantage in Mexico's gubernatorial elections following the democratic transition? The intuitive answer, consistent with classic models of electoral accountability, would locate success in performance — governors who deliver public goods, manage fiscal resources prudently, and maintain security should enjoy a mobilization advantage at the ballot box. The paper's argument runs precisely counter to this expectation. Instead, it contends that democratic competition, combined with the decentralization processes that accompanied Mexico's federal reforms in the 1990s, empowered governors not as accountable executives but as political entrepreneurs capable of leveraging inherited organizational assets. The decentralization of fiscal resources and administrative authority gave governors the material means to sustain and expand clientelistic networks originally built under PRI hegemony. Party machines, in this reading, functioned as durable institutional resources that outlasted the authoritarian regime that created them and were repurposed to serve electoral competition in a formally pluralist environment. The implication is sobering: democratic procedures were grafted onto authoritarian organizational substrates, producing a hybrid form of competitive politics in which incumbency advantage derives less from accountability than from machine capacity.
This argument connects to a substantial body of comparative literature on democratic backsliding, subnational authoritarianism, and what scholars like Edward Gibson have termed "boundary control" — the capacity of provincial or subnational elites to insulate their domains from national-level democratizing pressures. Mexico's subnational landscape has long been recognized as uneven in its democratic development. While federal-level electoral competition became genuine and consequential after 2000, many states retained what analysts describe as "electoral authoritarian" dynamics: contests that were formally competitive but structured by asymmetric access to resources, media, and organizational infrastructure that systematically advantaged incumbents. The present paper adds empirical depth to this picture by focusing specifically on the gubernatorial level and demonstrating that incumbency advantage is better explained by machine politics than by performance differentials. This is theoretically significant because it challenges the assumption that decentralization, often promoted by international donors and development agencies as a mechanism for improving governance and accountability, will automatically generate the conditions for meaningful democratic competition. Where decentralization transfers resources to governors embedded in machine networks, it may instead entrench subnational incumbency advantages that undermine the very accountability norms democratic transitions are supposed to inaugurate.
From a development and ODA policy perspective, these findings carry direct and uncomfortable implications. International development organizations — including the World Bank, UNDP, and bilateral donors — have invested heavily in decentralization reforms across Latin America and the Global South on the premise that bringing government closer to citizens enhances responsiveness and reduces corruption. Mexico was in many respects a model case for this agenda: the late 1990s fiscal decentralization substantially increased the share of federal transfers flowing to state governments. Yet if those transfers were captured by governors who then deployed them through machine networks to sustain electoral dominance rather than improve service delivery, the developmental logic of decentralization is severely compromised. Civil society organizations operating in this environment face a structural challenge: they must engage with subnational governments that have strong incentives to maintain opaque resource allocation systems, weak incentives to respond to performance-based citizen demands, and the organizational capacity to marginalize or co-opt civil society actors who pose a challenge to machine operations. For ODA practitioners designing governance support programs, the paper's findings suggest that fiscal transfers and administrative decentralization must be accompanied by robust investments in electoral competition, civil society capacity, and independent media — the countervailing forces capable of translating democratic procedures into genuine accountability.
The paper also raises important questions about temporal dynamics: specifically, how authoritarian legacies decay or persist across successive electoral cycles. One of the more nuanced questions in the literature concerns whether party machine advantages represent durable equilibria or transitional phenomena that erode as democratic norms deepen, new parties build competing organizational infrastructures, and citizens become more sophisticated electoral actors. Mexico's experience since 2018 — with the rise of Morena as a nationally dominant force and AMLO's project of recentralizing political authority while simultaneously deploying new forms of social program mobilization — complicates the picture. Morena has in many respects reproduced machine-like dynamics under a different ideological banner, suggesting that the organizational logic identified in the paper is not PRI-specific but reflects deeper structural features of Mexican federalism and the incentives it generates for governors. This raises the possibility that what scholars have attributed to PRI's authoritarian legacy may be better understood as a more general property of Mexican gubernatorial politics that any dominant party will exploit once it controls the executive at the state level. Future research would benefit from disaggregating incumbency advantage by party family and electoral era to test whether the machine-over-performance dynamic is unique to PRI successor politics or has migrated across the partisan landscape.
Looking forward, the findings from this article are particularly timely as Mexico's political landscape enters a period of significant flux. The 2024 elections returned Morena to the federal executive with a supermajority that has enabled constitutional reforms consolidating presidential authority, while simultaneously weakening the independent electoral institutions that had been essential to the credibility of Mexico's democratic transition. At the subnational level, the intersection of party machine politics, gubernatorial incumbency, and federal resource flows will likely intensify as the balance between central and subnational power shifts. For researchers studying democratization and authoritarian resilience, Mexico in this moment is a crucial laboratory: a case where institutional regression at the national level interacts with persistent subnational machine dynamics in ways that may accelerate or transform incumbency advantage across gubernatorial contests. For civil society practitioners and international partners committed to democratic governance in the region, the article's core message — that party machines outlast regimes and reshape the meaning of democratic competition — is a necessary corrective to optimistic narratives of linear democratic consolidation. Understanding how authoritarian organizational legacies are reproduced, adapted, and transferred is not merely an academic exercise; it is a prerequisite for designing interventions capable of making democratic procedures more than a legitimating veneer over enduring structures of machine power.