Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-26
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The question of how democracies are built — and why they so often fall short of their promise — sits at the center of comparative politics. Nowhere is this tension more vivid than in Latin America, where formal democratic institutions have coexisted, sometimes uneasily, with inherited structures of political control rooted in decades of authoritarian rule. Mexico's experience is among the most instructive cases on the continent. After more than seven decades under the dominance of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Mexico completed its democratic transition with the landmark presidential election of 2000, widely heralded as a turning point for one of the hemisphere's most durable single-party systems. Yet the persistence of old patterns of electoral mobilization, clientelist networks, and machine politics at the subnational level has continued to complicate the picture of what genuine democratic consolidation might look like. A new contribution to the Journal of Politics in Latin America, examining incumbency advantage in Mexico's gubernatorial elections in the post-transition period, speaks directly to these complications and offers a theoretically grounded account of why authoritarian legacies continue to structure electoral competition long after the formal institutional architecture of democracy has been established.
The paper's central argument is both intuitive and analytically demanding: democratic competition, combined with the decentralization of political authority, did not dissolve the organizational advantages built up by subnational political machines under the old regime. Instead, it may have reinforced them. Governors — especially those affiliated with parties that had long operated in a given state — were able to leverage control over public resources, patronage networks, and local party infrastructure to achieve electoral outcomes that cannot be explained by policy performance or citizen satisfaction alone. This is a finding that challenges a certain optimistic strand of democratic theory, which holds that competitive elections function as accountability mechanisms, rewarding competent incumbents and punishing poor performers. What the Mexican gubernatorial case suggests, by contrast, is that the conversion of authoritarian organizational capacity into electoral advantage can proceed largely independently of governance quality. The party machine, in other words, is not merely a relic of the past; it is an actively deployed instrument of political reproduction, adapted to the new rules of the democratic game.
This finding resonates with a body of comparative literature on the durability of subnational authoritarianism and the uneven geography of democratization. Gibson's work on "boundary control" in federal systems, O'Donnell's reflections on "brown areas" lacking effective rule of law, and Benton's analysis of PRI adaptability in Mexican states all converge on a similar insight: national-level democratic transitions do not automatically or evenly transform subnational political environments. The decentralization reforms that accompanied Mexico's democratic opening, while designed in part to promote accountability and responsive local governance, also transferred significant discretionary resources to governors, many of whom belonged to parties with deep roots in the logic of machine politics. This created what might be called a structural irony of democratic reform: the very mechanisms intended to bring government closer to citizens simultaneously increased the capacity of well-organized incumbents to insulate themselves from electoral accountability. The paper under discussion adds empirical precision to this theoretical claim by focusing specifically on gubernatorial races, a level of analysis that is often underweighted in accounts that focus on presidential or legislative competition.
The policy and institutional implications of these findings are considerable. For international development actors, aid organizations, and civil society observers — including those engaged in governance reform programming across Latin America — the persistence of machine-based incumbency advantage raises difficult questions about the efficacy of electoral monitoring, transparency initiatives, and anti-corruption interventions when they are not accompanied by deeper structural reform of the networks through which political machines operate. It is insufficient to ensure that ballot-counting procedures are technically clean if the conditions of electoral competition are fundamentally distorted by the organizational asymmetries between incumbents with access to state resources and challengers who must mobilize support on the basis of programmatic appeals alone. ODA programming in governance and democracy sectors has at times focused too narrowly on formal electoral integrity while underinvesting in the harder problem of transforming the underlying incentive structures that sustain machine politics. The Mexican case offers a cautionary illustration of why this imbalance can leave democratic transitions institutionally fragile even when they appear procedurally successful.
Looking forward, the study opens several productive avenues for both researchers and practitioners. As Mexico continues to navigate significant political transformation — including the rise of Morena under Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now Claudia Sheinbaum, a movement that has itself been analyzed through the lens of new forms of populist mobilization and centralized party building — the dynamics of subnational incumbency are likely to evolve rather than disappear. Whether Morena's rapid expansion into formerly PRI-dominated states reproduces the structural logic of machine politics under a new party label, or whether it represents a genuinely different mode of political organization, is a question of first-order importance for understanding Mexican democracy's next phase. More broadly, the theoretical framework developed in this paper invites application to other transitional contexts — from sub-Saharan Africa to parts of Southeast Asia — where subnational political machines embedded in formerly authoritarian party systems continue to shape competitive electoral environments in ways that formal institutional analysis consistently underestimates. For scholars of civil society and development, the lesson may be that democratization is less a transition that happens and more a process that must be actively and continuously renegotiated at every level of the political system.