Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-02
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 confronting comparative political science. Nowhere is this tension more vividly on display than in Latin America, where waves of democratization beginning in the 1980s produced new constitutional frameworks and multiparty electoral competition without necessarily dismantling the underlying organizational structures — party machines, clientelistic networks, and executive patronage — that had sustained single-party rule for generations. Mexico offers perhaps the most analytically rich case in this regard. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governed the country without interruption from 1929 to 2000, constructing over seven decades an extraordinarily durable system of political control that penetrated every level of government, from national ministries to municipal offices. When Vicente Fox's victory in the 2000 presidential election signaled the formal end of that hegemony, observers inside and outside academia asked a question that has grown only more urgent since: what, precisely, had changed? This article by Marcos Rangel, published ahead of print in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, addresses precisely that question with particular focus on the subnational arena — specifically, gubernatorial elections — where democratic transitions often arrive last and legacies of authoritarian rule prove most resilient.
The paper's central argument is elegant and theoretically grounded. Rangel contends that democratic competition, when combined with decentralization, did not straightforwardly produce a performance-based politics in which governors won or lost elections primarily on the basis of public goods provision, economic management, or policy outcomes. Instead, the organizational infrastructure inherited from the PRI era — what the author characterizes as party machines — continued to structure electoral success long after the formal conditions of democracy had been established. This framing is significant because it challenges a persistent optimism in democratic theory: the assumption that electoral accountability mechanisms will, over time, discipline incumbents to govern well because poor performance will be punished at the ballot box. In Mexico's gubernatorial contests, Rangel argues, incumbency advantage derived less from the retrospective evaluation of governance quality than from the organizational capacity to mobilize voters, distribute selective benefits, and sustain networks of political loyalty across sprawling and heterogeneous territories. The question of whether governors shaped electoral outcomes in the post-transition period is answered affirmatively — but with the crucial qualifier that the mechanisms through which they did so were more organizational than programmatic.
This finding connects directly to a growing body of comparative scholarship on the "quality" of democracy as distinct from its mere existence. Scholars of Latin American politics have long noted that the region's democracies frequently satisfy minimalist procedural criteria — competitive elections, universal suffrage, peaceful transfers of power — while falling short of more demanding standards related to the rule of law, horizontal accountability, and meaningful programmatic representation. The Mexican case, particularly at the subnational level, illustrates how this gap can persist and even widen under conditions of decentralization. When fiscal resources and administrative authority are devolved to state governments without corresponding improvements in oversight capacity or civil society monitoring, governors gain access to new patronage resources that can reinforce, rather than dissolve, machine politics. Decentralization, in this reading, does not automatically democratize; it may instead provide old actors with new tools to perpetuate incumbency advantage through non-programmatic means. This dynamic has been documented in varying forms across Mexico's federal units and finds resonance in comparative cases from Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, where subnational authoritarian enclaves have survived and adapted within nationally democratic systems.
The policy implications of Rangel's analysis are substantial and deserve careful attention from both development practitioners and scholars of ODA and governance reform. International donors and development institutions have invested heavily in programs designed to strengthen electoral systems, improve subnational governance, and build state capacity across the Global South. Much of this programming rests on the assumption that institutional improvements — better electoral commissions, transparency laws, civic education initiatives — will translate into more competitive and accountable politics at all levels of government. Rangel's findings complicate this picture considerably. If incumbency advantage in subnational elections is primarily a product of organizational depth — the capacity to sustain loyalty networks, deliver targeted benefits, and mobilize support through party machines — then institutional reforms that focus primarily on electoral procedures or formal accountability mechanisms may fail to address the structural roots of democratic deficits. This suggests that governance reform programming must engage more seriously with the political economy of party organization, the regulation of campaign finance and patronage at the subnational level, and the conditions under which civil society can serve as a genuine counterweight to machine politics rather than being incorporated into it.
The broader implications for scholarship on democratic consolidation and backsliding are equally important. Mexico's experience suggests that transitions from authoritarian rule should be understood not as singular events but as extended, contested processes in which formal institutional change and informal organizational continuity exist in productive tension for decades. The gubernatorial arena, as a site where PRI-era organizational capacities proved particularly durable, reveals that democratic consolidation cannot be read off from national-level electoral outcomes alone. Subnational politics shapes the texture of democratic life for the majority of citizens in federal systems, determining the quality of public services, the accessibility of justice, and the degree to which political competition is genuinely open or organizationally foreclosed. Future research would benefit from systematic cross-state comparisons within Mexico to identify the conditions under which party machines have eroded — whether through opposition party growth, demographic change, civil society mobilization, or economic crisis — versus those in which they have maintained their organizational efficacy. The findings also invite reflection on how Mexico's ongoing political transformations under the MORENA party, which has itself built formidable organizational infrastructure at multiple levels, will shape the next generation of scholarship on incumbency, machine politics, and democratic quality in Latin America's most populous Spanish-speaking nation.