Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-30
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The question of how democracies consolidate — or fail to do so — at the subnational level has become one of the most consequential research puzzles in comparative politics. Across Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia, national-level transitions to multiparty electoral systems have frequently coexisted with the persistence of old-regime dynamics in provinces, states, and municipalities. Mexico offers one of the most richly documented cases of this phenomenon. The country's formal democratic transition, culminating in the alternation of the presidency in 2000 after seven decades of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) dominance, was celebrated internationally as a landmark moment. Yet the resilience of subnational political machines, the durability of clientelistic networks, and the structural advantages enjoyed by incumbent governors have continued to complicate the picture of what Mexican democracy actually delivers. The article under examination by the Journal of Politics in Latin America enters this debate with a focused empirical question: what explains electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial elections after the democratic transition, and to what degree have governors themselves shaped those outcomes through the resources and organizational legacies at their disposal?
The core argument of the paper rests on a critical distinction that scholars of democratization have long theorized but that empirical work has often struggled to operationalize cleanly: the difference between performance-based accountability and machine-based electoral reproduction. In genuinely competitive democracies, the theoretical expectation is that incumbents win reelection — or that their parties secure continued power — when they have governed well, delivering public goods, managing fiscal resources responsibly, and responding to citizen preferences. The paper contests this model as an incomplete account of Mexican gubernatorial politics. Instead, it argues that decentralization, far from producing responsive subnational governance, has in many cases empowered governors to concentrate patronage resources, control local bureaucracies, and deploy state apparatus in ways that structurally advantage the incumbent party regardless of policy performance. Authoritarian legacies — the organizational infrastructure, the informal networks, the cultures of deference and reward that the PRI built over decades — did not simply evaporate with the transition. They were absorbed, adapted, and in many cases reproduced by successor parties of both the left and the right, creating a durable incumbency premium that operates largely independently of how well any given administration actually governs.
This finding connects to a wider body of scholarship on what Edward Gibson famously called "subnational authoritarianism" and what more recent work has framed in terms of hybrid regimes and competitive authoritarianism at the local level. The Mexican case is particularly instructive because the country's federal architecture is unusually asymmetric: state governors command substantial fiscal transfers from the federal center, operate with limited horizontal accountability, and until relatively recently faced no constitutional prohibition on having their parties succeed them in office through hand-picked successors. The paper's attention to decentralization as a mechanism that enables, rather than constrains, machine politics is significant. Development economists and ODA practitioners have for decades advocated fiscal and administrative decentralization as a route to better governance, on the assumption that local accountability mechanisms will discipline subnational officials more effectively than distant central oversight. The Mexican evidence complicates this optimism. When subnational political ecologies are already structured by authoritarian legacies — by the absence of robust civil society organizations, by the weakness of investigative journalism, by the fragmentation of opposition parties — decentralization may simply extend the territorial reach of incumbent advantage rather than opening democratic space.
The policy implications of this research are substantial for international actors engaged with Mexico's political development, and by extension with comparable transitions elsewhere. Civil society strengthening has been a central pillar of democracy-support programming by multilateral institutions and bilateral donors, including in Mexico, for the past three decades. Yet the paper's findings implicitly raise questions about the depth of civil society's countervailing power in gubernatorial contexts. If party machines retain sufficient organizational density, resource access, and coercive or clientelistic leverage to secure electoral outcomes independent of performance, then the electoral arena itself may be a less fertile site for civil society engagement than other domains — judicial reform, freedom of information, anti-corruption enforcement, campaign finance regulation. For researchers and practitioners at institutions like IOCSS, this points toward a more granular mapping of which institutional levers are most susceptible to reform pressure in hybrid subnational environments, rather than treating formal electoral competition as automatically self-correcting over time.
Looking forward, the article's findings also speak to debates about Mexico's ongoing democratic trajectory under the Morena movement and President Claudia Sheinbaum's administration. The consolidation of Morena's dominance at both federal and state levels, achieved in part through the mobilization of social program beneficiaries and through the charismatic authority associated with former President López Obrador, raises its own questions about whether a new form of machine politics — one that leverages the programmatic infrastructure of the welfare state rather than the old PRI's sectoral corporatism — is being constructed on top of the same structural substrate the paper analyzes. The persistence of incumbency advantage through organizational rather than performance mechanisms is not unique to one party or one historical moment; it reflects deeper features of state-society relations and institutional design in Mexico's federalism. For scholars, the challenge ahead lies in disaggregating which elements of authoritarian legacy are genuinely diminishing across electoral cycles — as new generations of voters emerge, as civil society organizations develop new monitoring capacities, as the media landscape fragments and digitizes — and which are proving resilient enough to reshape how democratic competition functions in ways that formal electoral results alone cannot reveal. This is work that demands both the longitudinal rigor of electoral studies and the ethnographic sensitivity to local political cultures that the most important contributions to this literature have always required.