Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-12
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The relationship between democratic transition and electoral continuity has long occupied scholars of comparative politics, but nowhere does this tension manifest more vividly than in Latin America's largest Spanish-speaking democracy. Mexico's formal transition away from the Institutional Revolutionary Party's seven-decade hegemony — a process that culminated symbolically in the 2000 presidential election of Vicente Fox — was heralded across the region and beyond as a landmark moment in democratic consolidation. Yet the persistence of authoritarian-era party structures, patronage networks, and subnational political machines in the years that followed raised urgent questions about the depth and durability of that transition. A new contribution to the Journal of Politics in Latin America by researchers examining Mexico's gubernatorial elections takes up these questions with precision, arguing that democratic competition at the national level has coexisted — indeed, interacted — with entrenched incumbency advantages rooted less in government performance than in the organizational infrastructure inherited from the authoritarian period. This finding carries implications that extend well beyond Mexico's borders, touching on fundamental debates about how democracies emerge from, and are shaped by, their authoritarian predecessors.
The article's central analytical claim is that the decentralization accompanying Mexico's democratic opening paradoxically strengthened the hand of incumbent governors and their party machines rather than diluting the concentration of political power. Decentralization, in the Mexican case as in many comparable transitions, transferred substantial fiscal resources and administrative authority to state governments. The intent, broadly consistent with governance reform orthodoxy promoted by international development institutions in the 1990s and 2000s, was to bring government closer to citizens, improve service delivery, and create more competitive subnational political arenas. What this paper argues, however, is that governors — especially those aligned with the PRI's residual organizational network — were able to capture these newly devolved resources and deploy them to entrench their own electoral positions and those of their chosen successors. The result was an incumbency advantage that operated through machine politics rather than through citizen satisfaction with public goods provision. In other words, voters were not rewarding governors for paving roads or improving schools; they were responding, willingly or under pressure, to the distributive logics and clientelistic relationships that the old regime had perfected over decades of single-party rule.
This finding connects to a rich and contested literature on authoritarian legacies and democratic quality. Scholars including Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have documented how the organizational capacity of formerly hegemonic parties can serve as a decisive resource in competitive electoral environments — transforming a former monopoly on power into a durable competitive advantage. In Mexico's case, the PRI's legendary capacity for mobilization, vote-brokering, and selective distribution of state benefits did not dissolve when the party lost the presidency. Instead, those capacities migrated in part to the subnational level, where governors retained sufficient control over public employment, social spending, and local media environments to tilt electoral contests in their favor. The article under review contributes empirical specificity to this broader theoretical claim by focusing on gubernatorial elections — a level of analysis that has received less systematic attention than presidential or legislative contests — and by separating out the effects of machine capacity from the effects of policy performance. This methodological choice is significant: it allows the authors to directly test competing explanations for incumbency success and to demonstrate that the organizational channel is doing the explanatory work that the performance channel cannot.
For researchers and practitioners working in the ODA and development policy space, these findings carry uncomfortable implications. International democracy support programs, and the broader suite of governance reform initiatives promoted by donors, have tended to assume that decentralization and electoral competition are mutually reinforcing drivers of accountability. The Mexican case, as presented here, complicates that assumption substantially. If fiscal decentralization primarily provides incumbents with more resources to sustain clientelistic networks — rather than empowering citizens to demand better performance — then the standard reform toolkit may be producing outcomes that diverge sharply from stated objectives. Development scholars have noted similar dynamics in other subnational contexts across the Global South, from Brazilian state politics to India's district-level electoral patterns, suggesting that this is not a Mexico-specific aberration but a structural tendency in transitional democracies with uneven institutional capacity across levels of government. Donors and multilateral institutions designing governance support programs would benefit from incorporating this body of evidence more directly into program theory, paying closer attention to how subnational political economies mediate the effects of institutional reforms.
Looking forward, the trajectory of Mexican subnational politics will be shaped by several intersecting forces. The rise of Morena as a nationally dominant party under López Obrador and now Claudia Sheinbaum has introduced a new dynamic into the equation: a party that explicitly positioned itself against the PRI's machine politics but which governs through its own networks of social program beneficiaries and community-level organizers. Whether Morena is reproducing the logic of machine politics under different ideological branding, or whether it represents a genuinely distinct mode of electoral mobilization, is a question that researchers will need to address with the same rigor applied to the PRI's residual influence. For civil society scholars and democracy practitioners, the deeper lesson of this article is that formal democratic institutions — elections, term limits, decentralization — are necessary but not sufficient conditions for meaningful political competition. The organizational and historical substrates of political life shape how those institutions function in practice, and no amount of institutional engineering can substitute for the patient work of building independent civil society, strengthening judicial oversight of electoral processes, and reducing the asymmetries of resource and information that allow incumbents to convert state authority into electoral advantage. Mexico remains, in this sense, an instructive and unfinished laboratory for understanding the possibilities and limits of democratic consolidation in the twenty-first century.