Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-29
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian political structures within formally democratic systems represents one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics. In Latin America, where democratic transitions unfolded across the 1980s and 1990s with varying degrees of institutional rupture, the question of how legacy structures from prior regimes shape competitive elections has taken on renewed urgency. Mexico's case is particularly instructive in this regard. The country's transition from seven decades of single-party rule under the Institutional Revolutionary Party — the PRI — was long, negotiated, and profoundly uneven across territorial and institutional lines. Rather than a clean break, Mexico's democratization produced a political landscape in which federal-level competition coexisted with entrenched subnational enclaves where authoritarian organizational logics continued to determine electoral outcomes. The article under review, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, takes this tension as its central object of inquiry, asking what actually explains electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial elections in the post-transition period, and to what extent governors themselves shaped those outcomes. The answers it advances challenge comfortable narratives about democratic consolidation and performance-based accountability.
The paper's core argument rests on a distinction that is deceptively simple but analytically powerful: the difference between electoral success driven by policy performance and citizen satisfaction on the one hand, and success driven by organizational capacity, party machines, and the strategic mobilization of patronage networks on the other. By examining gubernatorial elections across Mexican states following the national democratic opening, the authors find that the latter mechanism remains dominant. Democratic competition, they argue, combined with decentralization — the devolution of fiscal resources and administrative authority to state governments — did not produce the accountability linkages that modernization theories of democracy would predict. Instead, it created conditions under which governors could leverage newly expanded resources to entrench incumbency advantages rooted in organizational rather than programmatic politics. The authoritarian playbook, in other words, was not abandoned with the transition; it was adapted, funded, and made more competitive. This is a finding of genuine import, and it resonates with a broader literature on the resilience of machine politics in contexts where formal democratic rules are adopted without corresponding transformations in the underlying political economy.
To understand the paper's significance, it is necessary to situate Mexico's subnational politics within the broader regional trajectory of decentralization and its unintended consequences. Across Latin America, the fiscal and administrative transfers of the 1990s and 2000s were championed by international development organizations and domestic reformers alike as mechanisms for bringing government closer to citizens, improving service delivery, and creating more responsive local accountability. In Mexico, however, the PRI's territorial organization had long penetrated the structures of state government, municipal administration, and sectoral corporatism in ways that were not easily dislodged by formal rule changes alone. Governors who inherited these networks — whether they carried the PRI banner or eventually operated under competing party labels — found themselves in possession of powerful instruments for organizing votes, dispensing targeted benefits, and neutralizing challengers. The decentralization of resources amplified the patronage capacity available to incumbents without simultaneously creating the monitoring mechanisms, civil society infrastructure, or opposition organizational strength needed to discipline governors through electoral accountability. The result was a perverse equilibrium: more competitive elections at the formal level, but persistent incumbency advantages rooted in non-programmatic linkages.
The implications of this research extend well beyond Mexico and speak to fundamental questions about democratic quality in aid recipient countries that receive substantial ODA directed at governance reform. Donors and multilateral institutions have for decades invested in decentralization programs, local government capacity building, and electoral monitoring as pathways toward more responsive governance in transitional contexts. The Mexico case, as analyzed here, raises uncomfortable questions about the conditions under which these interventions actually shift political incentives. If incumbents can convert decentralized resource flows into organizational capacity that sustains electoral dominance regardless of performance, then governance reforms that fail to address the underlying political economy of machine politics risk inadvertently strengthening the structures they are meant to transform. This finding is consistent with a growing body of research on subnational authoritarianism — work by scholars including Edward Gibson on "boundary control" and Jonathan Fox's longstanding research on Mexican political transitions — that emphasizes the need to disaggregate national-level democratic assessments and examine the sub-national landscape with equal rigor. The paper adds empirically grounded gubernatorial-level evidence to this tradition, lending it particular policy traction.
From a methodological standpoint, the paper's approach of examining governors as strategic agents who actively shape electoral outcomes rather than merely as passive beneficiaries of structural advantages represents an important contribution. By foregrounding gubernatorial agency — the decisions governors make about resource allocation, alliance management, candidate selection, and organizational investment — the analysis avoids the determinism that sometimes afflicts structural accounts of authoritarian legacies. This matters because it opens space for causal variation: some governors may exploit their structural advantages more skillfully than others, some party organizations may be more capable of translating resources into votes, and some state-level contexts may offer more or fewer opportunities for opposition mobilization. Understanding these sources of variation is essential not only for academic purposes but for practitioners working on electoral integrity, anti-corruption reform, and civil society strengthening in Mexican states. It suggests that interventions designed to improve performance accountability will face differential resistance depending on the organizational density of incumbent party machines in specific subnational contexts.
Looking forward, the article's findings carry particular relevance as Mexico enters a period of significant political change following the consolidation of MORENA as the dominant national party under the leadership of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now Claudia Sheinbaum. The question that emerges naturally from this research is whether MORENA represents a genuine transformation of the organizational logics that have historically governed Mexican subnational politics, or whether it represents the latest iteration of a deeper structural pattern in which the incumbent party — whatever its ideological coloring — leverages organizational capacity and state resources to sustain electoral dominance. Early evidence from MORENA-governed states is mixed, and the party's rapid territorial expansion raises the possibility that it has absorbed, rather than displaced, significant portions of the clientelistic networks previously managed by the PRI and other parties. For researchers in comparative politics, this trajectory offers a natural experiment of considerable value: do authoritarian organizational legacies persist as institutional constraints independent of the specific party that inherits them, or are they genuinely party-specific in ways that allow new political actors to construct different kinds of electoral linkages? The paper reviewed here lays essential groundwork for pursuing these questions rigorously. For practitioners engaged in democratic deepening, the message is sobering but productive: electoral competition alone, even when formally free and fair, is insufficient to dismantle the organizational architectures through which authoritarian legacies reproduce themselves across democratic transitions.