Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-24
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian institutional legacies within formally democratic systems remains one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics, particularly in regions that underwent rapid elite-led transitions rather than transformative ruptures with the old order. Mexico's democratization trajectory offers an especially instructive case, as the country's transition from seven decades of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) single-party rule unfolded incrementally across the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in the landmark 2000 presidential election that ended PRI dominance at the federal level. Yet the dismantling of federal authoritarian control did not translate automatically into genuinely competitive, accountability-driven subnational politics. The article under review, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, directly engages this tension, asking what explains electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial elections after the democratic transition — and how far governors themselves shaped those outcomes. The question carries significance well beyond Mexico's borders, illuminating broader dynamics of democratic consolidation, patronage politics, and the enduring organizational power of incumbency in contexts where formal rules change faster than informal power structures.
The paper's central argument is that democratic competition, when combined with decentralization, did not simply replace machine politics with performance-based accountability. Instead, it empowered governors to become the primary brokers of political resources, allowing incumbency advantages rooted in the old authoritarian playbook to persist and in some cases intensify under the new institutional architecture. This is analytically important because standard democratization theory would predict that competitive elections expose poor-performing executives to electoral punishment, encouraging responsiveness and programmatic policy. The Mexican subnational experience challenges that expectation. Governors who inherited or cultivated extensive party machines — networks of mobilizers, local brokers, and resource distributors — appear to have converted those organizational assets into durable electoral advantages that outpaced any punishment voters might have wished to administer on the basis of governance performance. Decentralization, rather than empowering citizens as the principal theoretical beneficiaries, appears to have primarily empowered governors by expanding fiscal and administrative resources that could be channeled through clientelistic networks.
This finding resonates with a growing body of comparative literature on what scholars call subnational authoritarianism or "electoral authoritarianism at the margins," documented in contexts ranging from the Russian Federation's regional politics to India's state-level politics and the persistence of machine politics in sub-Saharan African democracies. What distinguishes the Mexican case is the specificity of the historical legacy: the PRI's territorial organization was one of the most sophisticated patronage architectures in twentieth-century Latin America, and its decomposition at the federal level left these organizational structures available for appropriation by whoever held gubernatorial office — whether that successor was a PRI incumbent, a defecting PRI operative running under a new banner, or an opposition figure who learned quickly that governing without machine resources was an electoral liability. The implication is that the organizational infrastructure of authoritarian rule can survive, and even thrive, through regime transition, precisely because it embeds itself in informal social relations and economic dependencies that formal institutional reform cannot easily reach.
From a development and ODA research perspective, these findings carry significant implications for how international donors and civil society organizations conceptualize democratic assistance programs. Much of the democracy promotion literature of the 1990s and early 2000s assumed that institutional engineering — competitive elections, constitutional reforms, decentralization — would generate accountability as a natural byproduct. The Mexican subnational evidence suggests that without sustained attention to the intermediate organizations that mediate between citizens and the state, particularly political parties and civil society actors capable of independent voter mobilization, institutional reforms may simply redistribute the tools of machine politics to a new set of incumbents. For ODA practitioners working on governance programs in transitional contexts, this implies that measuring democratic quality at the level of electoral competitiveness statistics is insufficient; the organizational infrastructure of political competition deserves equal analytical and programmatic attention. Programs that strengthen independent local media, support civic voter education, or build the organizational capacity of opposition parties may matter as much as, or more than, formal electoral administration improvements.
Looking forward, the trajectory of Mexico's subnational politics under the MORENA-led federal government of the post-2018 period adds a further layer of complexity to the dynamics described in this research. MORENA's rapid expansion into gubernatorial offices across the country — including historic victories in traditionally PRI-dominated states — suggests that the machine politics logic may be transferring once again, with new incumbents deploying familiar organizational and resource advantages in the service of a nominally transformative political project. Researchers and practitioners concerned with democratic consolidation in Mexico and analogous settings should track whether MORENA's subnational incumbency translates into the same pattern of performance-insulated electoral durability documented in the pre-2018 period, or whether the party's distinct social base and populist legitimation strategies alter the underlying dynamic. For the broader field of civil society studies, the article ultimately reinforces a sobering but necessary corrective: democratic transitions are necessary but not sufficient conditions for accountability politics, and the organizational sinews of the old order deserve as much scholarly and practical attention as the formal institutions that nominally replaced it.