Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-20
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. Nowhere is this more sharply illustrated than in Latin America, where democratic transitions of the 1980s and 1990s dismantled formal one-party rule while leaving intact many of the sub-national power structures, patronage networks, and organizational capacities that had sustained those regimes for decades. Mexico is a paradigmatic case. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by its Spanish acronym PRI, governed the country for over seven decades through a sophisticated machinery of corporatist control, electoral manipulation, and selective resource distribution. The formal democratic opening that culminated in the 2000 presidential election of Vicente Fox did not erase these structures — it reoriented them, pushing them downward into state-level politics where governors and their party organizations continued to exercise the kind of embedded dominance that had once characterized the national regime. The article under review in the Journal of Politics in Latin America directly addresses this persistence, asking what actually explains electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial elections after the transition to democracy, and how much individual governors, as opposed to party organizational capacity, shaped those outcomes.
The central argument advanced by the article is both analytically provocative and empirically grounded: democratic competition combined with decentralisation did not dismantle authoritarian electoral advantages but instead restructured them around sub-national incumbency. The paper argues that party machines — the organizational networks capable of mobilizing voters, distributing selective incentives, and coordinating local elites — matter more than gubernatorial performance in explaining electoral outcomes at the state level. This is a significant challenge to the conventional accountability narrative of democratic theory, which posits that voters reward competent incumbents and punish poor performers, thereby inducing governments to deliver public goods. If party machines systematically insulate incumbents from performance-based accountability, then the electoral connection that undergirds democratic theory is substantially weakened in practice. The Mexican case suggests this insulation is not merely a residual phenomenon from the authoritarian era but has been actively reproduced under competitive democratic conditions, with governors leveraging fiscal decentralisation to build and sustain the organizational capacity that secures their party's continued dominance at the state level.
This finding connects to a broader literature on what scholars have variously termed competitive authoritarianism, subnational authoritarianism, and hybrid regimes. Work by Edward Gibson on "boundary control" and by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way on competitive authoritarianism has long established that national democratic transitions can coexist with deeply illiberal sub-national politics. In Mexico, decentralisation — often prescribed by international financial institutions and development donors as a mechanism for bringing government closer to citizens and improving service delivery — paradoxically enhanced the resources available to entrenched sub-national machines. Fiscal transfers from the federal government to states gave governors unprecedented budgetary autonomy, which in the absence of strong horizontal accountability mechanisms could be channeled into patronage networks, public employment, and the strategic construction of local coalitions. The article thus joins a growing body of scholarship demonstrating that institutional reforms designed with democratic intentions can be captured and repurposed by actors with the organizational capacity to exploit them. This is a sobering lesson for development practitioners and ODA actors who design governance reform programs around decentralisation without adequate attention to the pre-existing power structures they may inadvertently strengthen.
The policy implications of these findings deserve sustained attention from both scholars and practitioners engaged in democratic governance programming. International donors, including bilateral aid agencies and multilateral development banks, have invested heavily in electoral capacity building, judicial independence, and anti-corruption initiatives across Latin America over the past three decades. Yet if the primary driver of electoral outcomes at the sub-national level is organizational machine capacity rather than performance, these interventions may be addressing symptoms rather than structural causes. Strengthening electoral management bodies, for instance, may reduce fraud at the margin while leaving intact the broader ecology of clientelistic exchange that shapes voter behavior well before election day. The research suggests that meaningful electoral accountability requires not only procedural integrity but also the development of civil society organizations capable of monitoring and publicizing gubernatorial performance, alternative party organizations with the capacity to compete on a level organizational footing, and media ecosystems that can translate performance information into politically salient narratives. These are longer-horizon investments that do not lend themselves to the typical project cycles of ODA programming, raising important questions about the design and time horizons of democratic governance assistance.
Looking forward, the Mexican case carries particular salience given the consolidation of Morena as the dominant national political force under Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his successor Claudia Sheinbaum. There is a genuine risk that the organizational and electoral advantages documented for the PRI and its successors in the post-transition period are now being reconstructed around a new hegemonic party, raising the possibility not of competitive authoritarianism's dissolution but of its renewal under different ideological coloration. For researchers, the article opens productive avenues of inquiry: comparative analysis of which institutional configurations — strong legislative oversight, robust local civil society, independent fiscal audit bodies — most effectively disrupt machine politics at the sub-national level; longitudinal study of whether the weakening of the PRI's national machine eventually produced genuine performance-based accountability in states where organizational competition increased; and closer examination of the micro-level mechanisms through which party machines actually secure electoral advantages, distinguishing between coercion, material exchange, and genuine partisan loyalty. For the international scholarly and practitioner community, the deeper lesson is that democratic consolidation is not a threshold event but an ongoing structural contest between the organizations of accountability and the organizations of machine control — a contest in which the latter have, in Mexico's gubernatorial politics, long held the advantage.