Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-11
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian institutional logics within formally democratic systems has emerged as one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics. Across Latin America, the formal architecture of electoral democracy — competitive multiparty contests, universal suffrage, independent electoral commissions — has been erected over the ruins of decades-long authoritarian rule, yet the behavioral and organizational inheritance of those prior regimes continues to structure political outcomes in ways that formal institutional analysis alone cannot explain. Mexico offers an especially illuminating case. The country's transition away from PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) hegemony, completed at the federal level with Vicente Fox's historic 2000 presidential victory, was widely celebrated as the culmination of a gradual democratic opening. Yet the subnational arena told a more complicated story — one in which the machinery of single-party dominance, far from dissolving, was redeployed and adapted to the new competitive environment. This article, published ahead of print in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, engages precisely this tension: after democratic transition, what actually explains who wins Mexico's gubernatorial elections, and to what degree do sitting governors determine those outcomes?
The paper's central argument challenges a widely held assumption in the democratization literature — namely, that electoral competition eventually disciplines incumbents, rewarding good governance and punishing poor performance. According to this view, the introduction of meaningful electoral competition should gradually erode the organizational advantages inherited from authoritarian rule, as voters gain the capacity to hold officials accountable and parties are forced to compete on records rather than on patronage and coercion. The article's findings complicate this optimistic reading considerably. Rather than performance metrics driving gubernatorial electoral outcomes in post-transition Mexico, the evidence points to the enduring primacy of party machines — the organizational networks, clientelistic linkages, and mobilization infrastructures that PRI-era governments built over seven decades of uncontested rule. These machines did not disappear with democratic opening; they were, in many cases, inherited wholesale by successor parties or retained by PRI-affiliated governors who survived the transition at the subnational level. The implication is structurally important: decentralization, far from empowering accountable local governance, provided new fiscal and administrative resources that incumbents could channel into machine maintenance and extension, effectively entrenching organizational advantages that track authoritarian lineage more than democratic legitimacy.
This finding resonates with a broader and troubling pattern visible across the developing world. The scholarly literature on hybrid regimes and competitive authoritarianism — from work on sub-Saharan African "dominant party" systems to studies of post-Soviet electoral politics — consistently identifies the same mechanism: legacies of single-party organization create durable subnational power bases that coexist with, and sometimes instrumentalize, formal democratic competition. In Latin America specifically, the wave of decentralization reforms undertaken through the 1990s, often promoted by international financial institutions and ODA donors as instruments of democratization and local accountability, produced outcomes that were far more ambiguous than anticipated. Where regional political economies were dominated by well-organized incumbents — whether PRI governors in Mexico, ARENA-linked networks in parts of El Salvador, or PT municipal machines in Brazil — decentralization frequently deepened incumbent advantage rather than diffusing it. The Mexican case studied here exemplifies a pattern in which the spatial devolution of resources amplified organizational power, making gubernatorial incumbency an especially formidable electoral asset independent of policy performance. The fiscal resources accompanying decentralization effectively became a new dimension of machine politics, available for selective distribution to key constituencies, local brokers, and organized labor networks that formed the backbone of PRI's historical coalition.
For practitioners and policymakers in the ODA space, these findings carry real and somewhat uncomfortable implications. A significant portion of international development programming in post-authoritarian settings has been premised on the assumption that building formal democratic institutions — electoral management bodies, civil society organizations, anti-corruption commissions, accountability frameworks — will progressively crowd out the informal authoritarian legacies that distort political competition. What the Mexican subnational evidence suggests is that this premise may systematically underestimate the resilience and adaptability of machine-based political organization. When party machines retain organizational depth, clientelistic reach, and control over locally deployed public resources, they can sustain electoral advantages across multiple electoral cycles even as formal democratic institutions mature. This is not an argument for pessimism about democracy, but it does counsel greater attention to the political economy of subnational incumbency when designing governance interventions. Programs that strengthen fiscal accountability, for instance, must grapple with the reality that incumbents may possess both the incentive and the capacity to capture or neutralize accountability mechanisms before they become effective. Civil society strengthening initiatives similarly face the challenge that in environments defined by strong party machines, civil organizations may be absorbed into, or neutralized by, incumbent networks rather than operating as genuinely independent accountability actors.
Looking forward, the research significance of this paper extends in several directions that merit sustained scholarly and policy attention. First, the argument about decentralization amplifying rather than tempering incumbent advantage raises important questions about the sequencing of institutional reforms. If subnational elections remain dominated by machine politics rather than performance accountability, the democratic benefits of decentralization remain unrealized in precisely the arena where citizens interact most directly with the state. Second, the paper's methodology — examining gubernatorial elections systematically rather than focusing on the headline federal contests — points toward a more granular research agenda that takes subnational variation seriously as both a dependent and explanatory variable. The heterogeneity across Mexican states, in the strength of authoritarian legacies, in the depth of opposition party organization, and in the socioeconomic conditions that structure clientelistic exchange, offers analytical leverage that aggregate national-level analysis obscures. Third, and perhaps most consequentially for the comparative literature, the Mexican case invites researchers to examine how authoritarian organizational legacies interact with newer political cleavages — including identity politics, anti-corruption mobilization, and the rise of López Obrador's MORENA movement, which explicitly positioned itself against PRI's machine politics yet has developed its own forms of organizational mobilization. Understanding whether MORENA represents a genuine rupture with machine politics or its latest iteration is a question with profound implications for Mexico's democratic trajectory and for broader debates about how democracies absorb and transform their authoritarian inheritances. For scholars and practitioners working across the ODA, governance, and civil society fields, the answer is unlikely to be reassuring without continued empirical scrutiny and programmatic humility about the depth of change that formal democratic transition alone can achieve.