Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-05
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian patterns within formally democratic institutions represents one of the most consequential puzzles in contemporary comparative politics. Across Latin America, the formal procedural requirements of democracy — multiparty elections, term limits, judicial oversight — were adopted throughout the 1980s and 1990s, yet in many cases the social and organizational infrastructures of authoritarian rule proved remarkably durable. Mexico offers perhaps the most analytically compelling case of this phenomenon. After seven decades of uninterrupted rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the country's democratic transition culminated in the historic 2000 presidential election, which brought Vicente Fox of the PAN to power. Yet the transition at the federal level did not automatically dissolve the networks, patronage systems, and machine politics that had underpinned PRI hegemony at the subnational level. Understanding what actually drives electoral outcomes in Mexico's gubernatorial contests — whether genuine performance or inherited organizational capacity — is not merely an academic exercise. It speaks to the quality and durability of democratic consolidation across the developing world, and to the broader question of whether electoral competition alone is sufficient to break the grip of legacy political machines.
A new contribution to the Journal of Politics in Latin America addresses precisely this set of questions, examining what explains electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial elections following the democratic transition, and evaluating the degree to which sitting governors were able to shape electoral outcomes during this period. The paper's central argument rests on two interacting dynamics: democratic competition and decentralization. The transition to multiparty democracy opened up formal space for electoral contestation, but decentralization simultaneously transferred substantial fiscal and administrative resources to subnational governments, endowing governors with new tools to consolidate personal and partisan power. The argument, as it emerges from the paper's framework, is that these two forces did not cancel each other out — rather, they interacted in ways that amplified incumbency advantage. Governors who inherited or built robust party machines were able to deploy state resources strategically, delivering selective benefits to key constituencies, managing local media environments, and leveraging administrative networks to mobilize voters. In this reading, electoral success in gubernatorial contests is less a reward for governance performance than a reflection of organizational capacity and the residual strength of authoritarian-era party infrastructure.
This finding carries significant implications when placed against the broader landscape of subnational politics in Latin America. The literature on subnational authoritarianism — developed most influentially by scholars such as Edward Gibson and Steven Levitsky — has established that democratic transition at the national level frequently coexists with authoritarian enclaves at the regional and local levels. Mexico conforms closely to this pattern. Even as federal institutions became increasingly competitive and the PRI suffered national defeats, numerous state-level political machines retained a stranglehold on gubernatorial contests, deploying the instruments of incumbency — public employment, infrastructure spending, conditional social transfers — to sustain electoral dominance. The paper under review extends and deepens this body of work by providing systematic evidence that it is precisely the organizational legacies of the authoritarian period, rather than voters' assessments of government performance, that best explain gubernatorial electoral outcomes. This aligns with comparative evidence from Argentina, where Peronist provincial machines have demonstrated extraordinary resilience despite national-level political volatility, and from Brazil, where subnational oligarchies have repeatedly adapted to new electoral rules while maintaining local dominance. Across these cases, the common thread is the capacity of legacy organizations to convert institutional resources into durable electoral advantages.
The policy implications of this research are substantial, particularly for scholars and practitioners engaged with questions of democratic quality, aid effectiveness, and civil society strengthening. International development organizations and bilateral donors invested in democratic governance reform have long recognized that formal institutional change — electoral commissions, constitutional provisions, anti-corruption bodies — is insufficient on its own to transform political behavior. What the Mexico case illuminates is that subnational party machines can absorb and adapt to formal democratic competition without surrendering their organizational advantages. This suggests that ODA interventions focused exclusively on electoral administration or national-level institutional reform risk missing the terrain on which democratic consolidation is actually contested. Meaningful democratization requires attention to the fiscal architecture of intergovernmental relations — specifically, whether decentralization transfers resources with adequate accountability mechanisms attached — as well as to the conditions under which civil society organizations and independent media can operate at the subnational level. Where governors control dominant economic patronage networks, the independence of local civic actors is structurally compromised. Donor strategies that treat subnational governance as a technical administrative challenge rather than a political one are likely to fall short.
For researchers, the paper also raises productive questions about the mechanisms through which performance information reaches voters and the conditions under which such information can actually shift electoral behavior. A rich body of scholarship has explored voter retrospection in established democracies, finding that citizens do punish governments for economic downturns and reward them for growth. But this literature increasingly recognizes that the translation of performance signals into electoral outcomes is mediated by informational environments, social trust, and the availability of credible alternative political actors. In contexts where incumbents control local media, where clientelistic networks provide selective information alongside material benefits, and where opposition parties lack organizational depth, performance-based accountability is systematically weakened. The Mexico gubernatorial case is a particularly clear instance of these dynamics at work. Looking forward, the central research challenge is to identify the conditions — whether structural, institutional, or conjunctural — under which this equilibrium breaks down. Episodes of machine collapse in Mexico, such as those observed in states where organized crime penetration eroded PRI networks or where civil society mobilization created new accountability pressure, suggest that the dominance of machine politics is contingent rather than permanent. Understanding the tipping points at which legacy organizational advantages give way to more performance-sensitive electoral competition will be essential not only for scholars of Latin American politics, but for all researchers and practitioners concerned with the long, uneven, and frequently reversible process of democratic deepening in the developing world.