Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-10
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian political structures within formally democratic systems represents one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics, and nowhere is this tension more vividly illustrated than in post-transition Mexico. Since the watershed electoral defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) at the federal level in 2000, Mexico has been celebrated as a paradigmatic case of competitive democratization in Latin America. Yet beneath the surface of multiparty competition and regular elections, scholars and practitioners have long suspected that the organizational infrastructure built under seven decades of single-party rule did not simply dissolve with the introduction of electoral contestation. The article under review, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, addresses this suspicion directly, asking what actually explains electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial elections following the democratic transition — and specifically whether governors governed their way to victory or whether something older and more structural determined outcomes. The question carries profound implications not only for how we understand Mexican democracy, but for the broader global debate about whether democratic procedure alone is sufficient to dismantle inherited authoritarian advantage.
The paper's central argument is built on a theoretical distinction that is deceptively simple but analytically powerful: the difference between performance-based incumbency advantage and machine-based incumbency advantage. In established liberal democracies, the conventional wisdom holds that incumbents succeed or fail largely on the basis of their policy records — economic conditions, public service delivery, and governance quality determine whether voters reward or punish officeholders. This retrospective voting model underpins much of electoral theory and is embedded in the design assumptions of development assistance programs that seek to strengthen accountability mechanisms. The article, however, argues that Mexico's gubernatorial elections reveal a fundamentally different dynamic, one in which the organizational legacies of the authoritarian era — party machines capable of mobilizing voters, distributing patronage, and structuring local political economies — function as the primary determinant of electoral outcomes. Governors who enjoyed access to intact or reconstituted party machines retained their seats and delivered them to successor candidates regardless of their actual policy performance. The implication is not merely that machines matter alongside performance, but that machines override performance as the decisive variable. This finding challenges the foundational premise that democratic competition will naturally generate accountability over time, and it does so with subnational evidence that is often overlooked in macro-level analyses of democratic consolidation.
To fully appreciate the significance of this argument, it is necessary to situate it within Mexico's specific political geography and institutional history. The PRI's authoritarian system was not simply a federal phenomenon; it was reproduced and sustained at the state level through governors who functioned simultaneously as party bosses, resource allocators, and electoral machines. When decentralization accelerated in the 1990s and early 2000s — partly as a consequence of democratic opening, partly as a result of fiscal reforms promoted by international financial institutions — gubernatorial offices gained substantial new resources and discretionary authority. This decentralization, which in many development frameworks is presumed to enhance local accountability and citizen voice, instead provided incumbents with expanded material resources to sustain and extend clientelistic networks. The paper's argument that decentralization interacted with democratic competition to entrench rather than erode machine politics resonates with a growing body of comparative literature on subnational authoritarianism, which has documented how regional elites in Brazil, Argentina, Russia, and across sub-Saharan Africa have exploited decentralized structures to insulate themselves from democratic pressures operating at the national level. Mexico's case adds crucial analytical weight to this comparative conversation.
For development practitioners, international donors, and civil society researchers, the policy implications of this line of inquiry are substantial and somewhat sobering. A significant portion of ODA directed at governance reform in post-transition democracies operates on the assumption that institutional capacity building — strengthening electoral management bodies, training civil society monitors, improving public financial management — will gradually erode the advantages enjoyed by entrenched political actors. If the Mexican evidence is representative, however, this assumption deserves serious scrutiny. When incumbency advantage is rooted in organizational infrastructure rather than performance, technical improvements in electoral administration may do little to alter the underlying distribution of political power. The machines that the PRI constructed over decades were not merely corrupt arrangements between politicians and voters; they were deeply embedded social institutions that structured expectations, mediated access to resources, and created durable networks of obligation that persisted even as the formal political landscape was transformed. Dismantling such structures, or building countervailing citizen capacity sufficient to overcome them, requires interventions that go far beyond election observation or public administration reform. It requires sustained, long-term support for independent civil society organizations, autonomous local media, and citizen monitoring bodies capable of making machine politics visible and costly. Development assistance strategies that treat democratic elections as an endpoint rather than a beginning of accountability construction risk systematically underestimating the work that remains to be done.
From a research perspective, the article makes a methodological contribution that merits separate attention. Gubernatorial elections have historically received far less scholarly scrutiny than presidential or legislative contests, in part because of the data challenges involved in constructing comparable subnational datasets across time and across jurisdictions with varying institutional configurations. The focus on state-level executive races opens a window onto political dynamics that aggregate national analyses simply cannot capture — including the variation in machine strength across Mexican states, the differential pace of party system change at the subnational versus national level, and the mechanisms by which organizational legacies are transmitted across electoral cycles even when the formal partisan identity of the dominant actor changes. This subnational comparative approach is increasingly recognized as essential to rigorous analysis of democratic consolidation, and the article's engagement with gubernatorial elections represents a contribution to a methodological tradition that includes foundational work on authoritarian enclaves in Brazil and Argentina, as well as more recent scholarship on subnational regime variation in emerging democracies across Asia and Africa.
Looking forward, the findings presented in this article carry particular urgency as Latin America navigates a period of pronounced democratic stress. The region has witnessed democratic backsliding in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, alongside more subtle erosions of institutional independence in countries that maintain the formal architecture of competitive elections. In this context, understanding how authoritarian legacies operate beneath the surface of electoral democracy is not merely an academic exercise but a practical imperative for any actor interested in democratic resilience. Mexico's own political landscape continues to evolve rapidly, with the consolidation of the Morena movement under President Claudia Sheinbaum raising fresh questions about whether a new form of mass political organization is supplanting the old PRI machines or inheriting their structural logic. For researchers at institutions focused on civil society and global political economy, the questions raised by this article — about the durability of authoritarian organizational forms, the limits of formal democratization, and the conditions under which performance-based accountability can take root — will remain central to both scholarly inquiry and policy design for the foreseeable future. The subnational level is where democracy is ultimately lived or merely performed, and scholarship that takes gubernatorial politics seriously is scholarship that takes democracy seriously in its fullest sense.