Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-23
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian institutional patterns within formally democratic systems represents one of the central puzzles of comparative politics, and nowhere is this tension more visible than in Latin America's post-transition landscapes. Mexico's gradual but profound democratization, culminating symbolically in the 2000 defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) after seven decades of uninterrupted rule, offered scholars a rare natural experiment: a country retaining the organizational skeletal structures of hegemonic rule while opening electoral competition to genuine contestation. Yet the question of whether democratic competition translated into performance-based accountability — or whether it merely grafted competitive elections onto inherited machines — has remained underexplored at the subnational level. The article under review in the Journal of Politics in Latin America addresses precisely this gap, examining what drives electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial elections following the democratic transition and interrogating the degree to which sitting governors were able to shape outcomes through party organizational resources rather than policy performance. The findings carry broad implications not only for Mexican political science but for how we understand democratic consolidation in contexts scarred by decades of machine politics.
The paper's central argument is that democratic competition, when combined with political decentralization, did not dismantle the party machines inherited from the authoritarian period — it empowered them at the subnational level. Mexico's federalist restructuring through the 1990s and 2000s transferred considerable fiscal and administrative authority to states, giving governors access to patronage resources and bureaucratic leverage that, in prior decades, had been concentrated in the federal executive. The PRI's organizational infrastructure at the state level proved remarkably adaptive: rather than collapsing under electoral competition, it reconstituted itself around the new resource flows that decentralization enabled. The paper finds that incumbency advantage in gubernatorial races is better explained by the strength of party organizational capacity — measured through candidate recruitment networks, local broker systems, and resource mobilization — than by governors' policy records, approval ratings, or development outcomes. This is a striking result because it suggests that the accountability mechanism at the heart of democratic theory — voters rewarding good governance and punishing poor performance — remained weakly operative in Mexico's subnational politics long after the formal transition.
This argument fits within a rich and evolving comparative literature on authoritarian legacies and democratic quality. Scholars including Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have long argued that the organizational depth of ruling parties under authoritarianism shapes the character of post-transition competition, often producing hybrid regimes or competitive authoritarianism rather than consolidated liberal democracy. Mexico's case adds nuance to this framework: the PRI lost national power, which prevented the reproduction of full federal hegemony, but its subnational tentacles retained functional coherence precisely because decentralization gave state-level actors new resources to dispense. This mirrors dynamics observed in other post-hegemonic party systems — the post-communist parties of Eastern Europe, for instance, or the ruling parties of sub-Saharan Africa that survived multiparty reforms — where organizational inheritance conferred durable electoral advantages disconnected from programmatic performance. The Mexican case is particularly instructive because the PRI's losses at the national level created strong incentives for opposition parties, particularly the PAN and later Morena, to adopt similar machine-building strategies when they captured governorships, normalizing broker-mediated electoral mobilization as a cross-partisan norm rather than a PRI-specific pathology.
The policy implications of these findings extend beyond academic interest into the practical domain of democratic assistance and governance reform. International development actors, including bilateral ODA agencies and multilateral institutions such as the UNDP and the Inter-American Development Bank, have invested substantially in Mexico's subnational governance through anti-corruption initiatives, public financial management reforms, and civic education programs. If electoral success is decoupled from performance, however, these investments face a structural accountability problem: governors who govern poorly but maintain strong machines will be rewarded electorally, weakening the demand-side incentives for reform. Civil society organizations and local NGOs that depend on subnational governments for operating space or co-funding relationships also face heightened vulnerability in machine-dominated states, since their political viability may depend less on the quality of their advocacy than on their accommodation to the incumbent's organizational interests. The research thus raises difficult questions about the conditions under which performance-based accountability can be built in systems where informational and organizational advantages remain concentrated in the hands of incumbents with inherited party infrastructure.
Looking forward, the electoral rise of Morena at both the federal and subnational levels introduces a new variable into the dynamics this paper identifies. Morena's success under López Obrador and Claudia Sheinbaum represents not merely a partisan shift but a reorganization of machine politics around a new hegemonic center, raising the question of whether Mexico is undergoing a reconcentration of political authority that reverses some of the decentralizing tendencies of the 1990s. For researchers and practitioners engaged in Mexico and comparative Latin American politics, the article's framework — emphasizing organizational capacity over performance as the decisive variable — provides a lens for evaluating whether Morena's subnational expansion replicates PRI-era machine dynamics under new ideological branding, or whether it represents a genuinely transformative political force. The answer will matter enormously for the quality of democracy in a country of 130 million people and for the broader theoretical proposition that transitions from authoritarianism can produce genuine programmatic accountability rather than merely competitive machine politics. Subnational electoral analysis of the kind advanced here is essential to answering that question rigorously.