Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-06
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian institutions and practices long after formal democratic transitions have concluded represents one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics. Nowhere is this phenomenon more analytically rich — or politically consequential — than in Mexico, where the collapse of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional's (PRI) seven-decade hegemony at the federal level did not produce a straightforward liberalization of subnational politics. Instead, the country's democratization unfolded unevenly across its thirty-one states, with gubernatorial elections emerging as contested terrain where the structural inheritances of one-party rule collided with the procedural demands of competitive electoral democracy. This paper, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, enters this debate with a focused empirical inquiry: what actually explains electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial contests after the democratic transition, and how much agency did sitting governors exercise in shaping those outcomes? The answers offered carry implications well beyond Mexico's borders, touching on foundational questions about the durability of authoritarian legacies, the logic of party organization, and the limits of performance-based accountability in hybrid political environments.
The study's central argument rests on a significant and counterintuitive claim — that party machines, rather than gubernatorial performance, are the primary drivers of electoral success at the subnational level. This finding challenges the normative logic embedded in much of the democratization literature, which assumes that competitive elections will generate accountability linkages compelling elected officials to govern effectively in order to secure re-election or favorable succession. In Mexico's case, the paper suggests, that assumption fails precisely because the structural conditions enabling it are absent or severely attenuated. The combination of democratic competition at the procedural level and extensive decentralization of fiscal and administrative power to state executives created conditions in which governors could leverage institutional resources — patronage networks, clientelistic exchange, and organizational capacity inherited from the PRI apparatus or reproduced by successor parties — to secure electoral continuity without necessarily improving public service delivery or economic outcomes for their constituents. The implication is not simply that Mexican democracy is imperfect, a banal observation, but rather that the incentive structures governing elite political behavior at the subnational level remain fundamentally shaped by the organizational logic of the authoritarian era.
Understanding this argument requires situating it within the broader trajectory of Mexico's political transformation. The PRI's gradual loss of federal dominance — culminating symbolically in Vicente Fox's 2000 presidential victory — unfolded against a backdrop of subnational political diversity that the national-level narrative of democratization often obscured. Many states retained PRI governors and legislative majorities well into the 2000s and beyond, and even where opposition parties captured governorships, they frequently inherited the administrative apparatus, informal networks, and clientelistic infrastructure that the PRI had constructed over decades. Decentralization, accelerated by reforms in the 1990s intended in part to support democratization by devolving resources to subnational authorities, paradoxically reinforced the capacity of state-level machines to operate autonomously from federal oversight. Governors commanding larger fiscal transfers and expanded administrative discretion were simultaneously less accountable upward to federal authorities and, the paper argues, less compelled to be accountable downward to citizens through performance, because machine resources provided an alternative pathway to electoral success. This dynamic is consistent with broader findings from the comparative decentralization literature suggesting that devolution without concomitant accountability reforms can entrench rather than disrupt existing power structures.
The policy and research implications of this analysis are considerable. For scholars of Latin American politics, the study reinforces the importance of disaggregating democratic transitions — treating them not as uniform national processes but as contested, multi-level phenomena in which subnational arenas can evolve along trajectories quite distinct from national-level trends. The finding that incumbency advantage in Mexican gubernatorial elections derives more from organizational and machine capacity than from performance signals that standard indicators of democratic quality — electoral competition, voter turnout, alternation in office — may capture only a partial and misleading picture of how political power actually operates. For development practitioners and international donors engaged in governance reform in Latin America and comparable contexts, the research carries a cautionary message about the limits of electoral conditionality as a lever for improving public sector performance. If the dominant pathway to electoral success runs through party machines rather than policy outcomes, then pressures to hold elections or ensure procedural fairness will not, by themselves, generate the accountability mechanisms that justify investment in democratic governance.
Looking forward, the trajectory of Mexican subnational politics will be shaped by at least two countervailing forces that this research illuminates. On one side, the gradual erosion of machine infrastructure — through federal anti-corruption initiatives, civil society monitoring, and changing voter demographics — may progressively weaken the organizational advantages that have insulated governors from performance accountability. On the other, the 2018 rise of Morena under Andrés Manuel López Obrador and its sustained dominance through Claudia Sheinbaum's presidency represents a potentially new configuration of party machine politics, one that reproduces many structural features of PRI hegemony under a different ideological banner and with its own networks of mobilization and patronage. Whether the logic identified in this paper — party machines over performance — will characterize the Morena era at the subnational level as it did PRI and early opposition governorships is among the most important empirical questions facing scholars of Mexican politics in the coming decade. Researchers and civil society organizations invested in strengthening democratic accountability would do well to take seriously the paper's implicit warning: procedural democracy can coexist with, and even facilitate, the reproduction of authoritarian organizational practices, and dismantling that coexistence requires institutional reforms far more demanding than the conduct of competitive elections alone.