Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-18
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
Mexico's democratic transition, formally consolidated through the watershed 2000 presidential election that ended seven decades of PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) dominance, has long served as a touchstone case for scholars of democratization in Latin America. Yet the persistence of authoritarian-era political structures at the subnational level has complicated celebratory narratives about democratic consolidation in the country. The question of how electoral outcomes are determined in Mexico's thirty-two states — and whether democratic competition has genuinely altered the logic of political power — remains one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics today. At a moment when democratic backsliding is being documented across Latin America and beyond, understanding how authoritarian legacies translate into durable electoral advantages illuminates not only Mexico's specific trajectory but also the broader challenge of building meaningful democratic accountability in post-authoritarian societies.
The article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America directly confronts this puzzle by examining what drives electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial elections following the transition to democracy. Its central argument is striking in its clarity and its implications: it is party machines, not gubernatorial performance, that explain incumbency advantage in these contests. This finding cuts against a fundamental premise of democratic theory — the idea that voters reward or punish incumbents based on policy outcomes, economic management, or public service delivery. If governors who perform poorly face no greater electoral risk than those who govern well, then the accountability mechanism that gives democracy its normative weight is effectively disabled at the subnational level. The paper further argues that decentralisation, rather than strengthening local democracy as reformers intended, has in practice empowered governors to entrench themselves by controlling the distribution of resources, patronage networks, and political appointments. Decentralisation transferred significant fiscal and administrative authority to states without simultaneously building the institutional infrastructure — independent judiciaries, robust civil society, free local media — needed to ensure those resources would be used in the public interest.
The mechanisms through which authoritarian legacies shape contemporary electoral competition deserve close attention. Mexico's PRI-era state was built on an elaborate architecture of corporatist control, in which political loyalty was cultivated through selective resource distribution, cooptation of civil society organizations, and the systematic subordination of subnational politicians to the national party hierarchy. When the national PRI's grip weakened, state-level political elites did not simply inherit a weakened set of institutions — they inherited the networks, the organizational templates, and the political culture of machine politics. Governors and their parties could draw on these inherited structures to mobilize voters, distribute benefits to core constituencies, and deter potential challengers. The paper's emphasis on party machines as the decisive variable points to a dynamic that scholars of democratization have increasingly recognized: formal regime change at the national level does not automatically dismantle the informal power structures that sustained the old regime at lower levels of the political system. Mexico thus offers a crucial case study in what political scientists have termed "subnational authoritarianism," a phenomenon also documented in Russia, India, and Brazil, where formally democratic national institutions coexist with deeply illiberal political practices at the regional or state level.
These findings carry significant implications for debates about the relationship between decentralisation and democratic quality in the developing world. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, international development organizations — including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and bilateral donors operating through official development assistance channels — promoted fiscal and administrative decentralisation as a governance reform capable of bringing government closer to citizens, improving public service delivery, and deepening democratic participation. Mexico was a significant recipient of this advice and, in important respects, a model reformer. The evidence presented in this article suggests that decentralisation's democratic dividends have been uneven at best. When central oversight mechanisms are weakened before local accountability institutions are strengthened, the primary beneficiaries of decentralisation may be entrenched local elites rather than ordinary citizens. For ODA practitioners and governance reformers, this finding reinforces the importance of sequencing — building the conditions for accountability before devolving authority — and raises hard questions about how external support can avoid inadvertently consolidating power for political machines rather than expanding democratic participation.
Looking forward, the trajectory of subnational democracy in Mexico will be shaped by at least three converging forces. First, the ongoing transformation of the national party system — particularly the consolidation of Morena under the leadership of figures associated with the Lopez Obrador and Sheinbaum administrations — will test whether a new dominant party at the national level reproduces, disrupts, or reformulates the machine politics of the PRI era at the state level. Early evidence suggests that Morena has absorbed many of the organizational logics it nominally opposed. Second, demographic and social change, particularly the growth of an urban middle class less embedded in traditional clientelistic networks, may gradually erode the electoral effectiveness of party machines in some states, even as they remain robust in others. Third, civil society organizations, investigative journalism, and social media have expanded the information environment available to Mexican voters, potentially increasing the reputational costs of poor governance in ways that earlier decades of machine politics could suppress. Whether these structural trends are sufficient to break the link between authoritarian legacies and incumbency advantage — or whether they merely modify its form — is a question that future research will need to pursue with the same methodological rigor this article brings to the historical record. For scholars and practitioners alike, Mexico's subnational politics remain a laboratory for understanding the resilience of inherited power structures in the face of formal democratic change, and the lessons drawn from it speak to democratic consolidation challenges well beyond Latin America's borders.