Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-09
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The question of how authoritarian legacies persist within formally democratic systems has occupied political scientists for decades, yet it takes on renewed urgency in an era when democratic backsliding has become a defining feature of global politics. Mexico's post-transition experience offers one of the most instructive and under-examined laboratories for understanding this phenomenon. Having spent seven decades under the hegemonic rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mexico's gradual democratization from the 1980s through the landmark 2000 presidential election of Vicente Fox created a hybrid political landscape — one where competitive multiparty elections coexisted with deeply entrenched organizational networks, clientelistic infrastructures, and institutional habits forged under authoritarian rule. The study of Mexico's gubernatorial elections in this period thus speaks to a question of far broader comparative relevance: does the formal introduction of electoral competition dismantle the structural advantages that authoritarian incumbents and their successors inherit, or do those advantages simply adapt and endure under a democratic veneer?
A recent article in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, "Authoritarian Legacies and Incumbency Advantage in Mexico's Gubernatorial Elections: Party Machines Over Performance," takes up precisely this question, and its central argument deserves careful attention. The paper contends that the combination of democratic competition and fiscal and administrative decentralization did not level the electoral playing field in subnational contests. Rather, it enhanced the capacity of incumbent governors and their affiliated party machines to leverage state resources, organizational networks, and institutional authority to perpetuate electoral dominance. The analytical move here is significant: rather than treating incumbency advantage as an artifact of voter preference for known quantities or of informational asymmetries between candidates, the paper foregrounds the organizational dimension — the party machine as a durable political infrastructure that translates state power into electoral outcomes. This shifts the explanatory weight away from gubernatorial performance, which one might expect to be the primary currency in a competitive democratic environment, and toward structural political resources that incumbents control regardless of how effectively they govern.
This finding resonates deeply with a broader literature on subnational authoritarianism and what scholars have termed "electoral authoritarian enclaves" — regions within formally democratic nation-states where local political actors maintain hegemonic control through a combination of machine politics, resource monopolization, and the selective application of coercion. Gibson's concept of "boundary control," for instance, highlights how subnational elites in Latin America have historically managed to insulate their fiefdoms from national-level democratizing pressures by controlling the organizational and informational flows between local and national arenas. Mexico's decentralization process, rather than distributing power more broadly and nurturing local democratic accountability, appears in this analysis to have replicated at the subnational level the very dynamics that the PRI system deployed nationally for most of the twentieth century. Governors who inherited PRI organizational networks — or who successfully built analogous machines under other party banners — were able to convert expanded administrative and fiscal authority into electoral capital, often irrespective of whether their governance records justified continued public trust.
The policy implications of this analysis are significant for scholars and practitioners working in the fields of democratic consolidation, decentralization, and development cooperation. International development actors, including bilateral and multilateral ODA providers, have long treated administrative decentralization as a component of good governance programming, on the premise that bringing government closer to citizens enhances accountability and responsiveness. The Mexican case complicates this premise substantially. When decentralization occurs in the context of weak horizontal accountability mechanisms — including underpowered legislative oversight, compliant judiciaries, and poorly resourced civil society organizations — expanded subnational authority may strengthen incumbents rather than empower citizens. This is a lesson with direct relevance for ODA programming across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, where decentralization has been promoted as a democratizing instrument while the structural conditions necessary to make that instrument work have often been absent. Development actors who ignore the pre-existing distribution of organizational power at the subnational level risk inadvertently reinforcing the very asymmetries that impede democratic deepening.
Looking forward, the trajectory of Mexican democracy since Andrés Manuel López Obrador's 2018 election — and the subsequent consolidation of the Morena party as a new hegemonic political force — lends additional retrospective weight to this research. The period the article likely analyzes, spanning the post-2000 transition years, can now be read as a phase in which the structural advantages of organized incumbency were temporarily dispersed across multiple parties rather than genuinely dismantled. Morena's subsequent success in replicating nationally many of the organizational and territorial logics that the PRI once commanded suggests that the lesson from Mexico's subnational elections was not lost on political strategists. For researchers in comparative politics and development studies, this trajectory reinforces the imperative of studying electoral outcomes not merely as aggregations of voter preferences but as products of the political organizations, resource networks, and institutional legacies within which voters make their choices. The field would benefit from more granular subnational comparative work of this kind — work that refuses to treat formal democratization as a sufficient condition for genuine democratic competition, and that takes seriously the durable organizational architectures that authoritarian systems leave behind long after their formal demise.