Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-14
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 comparative politics scholars for decades, yet the mechanisms by which those legacies translate into durable electoral advantages remain incompletely understood. Mexico offers one of the most instructive cases in this regard. After seven decades of uninterrupted rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the country's transition to multiparty democracy in the late 1990s and early 2000s was widely celebrated as a watershed moment for Latin American democratization. Yet the persistence of subnational political machines, incumbency networks, and governance structures that were forged under authoritarianism has complicated the narrative of clean democratic rupture. A recent article in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, examining gubernatorial elections in post-transition Mexico, argues that what explains electoral success at the subnational level is not performance — that is, policy outcomes, service delivery, or economic management — but rather the organizational capacity of party machines and the structural advantages conferred by incumbency. This finding carries significant implications not only for how we understand Mexican democracy but also for broader debates in comparative politics about what transitions to democracy actually change, and what they leave intact.
The paper's core analytical contribution is to disentangle two distinct channels through which incumbents might win elections: a performance channel, in which voters reward or punish governors based on observable governance outcomes, and an organizational channel, in which incumbents leverage institutional resources, patronage networks, and mobilization capacity to secure victory regardless of their actual record. The authors find that the organizational channel, rooted in the inherited infrastructure of authoritarian party-building, predominates. This is a theoretically consequential claim. Democratic theory, particularly in its Schumpeterian and retrospective accountability variants, presupposes that competitive elections create incentives for good governance. Incumbents who underperform should lose; those who deliver should win. If, however, incumbents can rely on machine politics to insulate themselves from performance-based accountability, then the electoral mechanism that is supposed to discipline governors fails to function. The finding suggests that in Mexico's gubernatorial arena, competition produced winners and losers — but the criteria by which winners were selected were largely organizational rather than meritocratic in any governance sense. Voters, or at least enough of them, were bound to machines through material incentives, social networks, and coercive dependencies that pre-dated democracy and survived its formal advent.
The role of decentralization in this story deserves close attention. The paper identifies democratic competition combined with decentralization as jointly shaping the conditions under which these dynamics play out. This framing connects the Mexican case to a well-established tension in the comparative decentralization literature. Fiscal and administrative decentralization, which accelerated in Mexico through the 1990s as part of both liberalization pressures and genuine political reform, was intended in part to bring government closer to citizens and enhance accountability. In practice, however, the transfer of resources and responsibilities to subnational governments in contexts where state-level political machines remain intact can reinforce rather than erode local authoritarian enclaves. Governors who gained control over significantly expanded budgets after decentralization had more material with which to build and maintain patronage networks. The combination of formal democratic rules — competitive elections, term limits, regular campaigns — and expanded subnational resource control created conditions in which machine politics could adapt and modernize rather than wither. This dynamic has been observed across Latin America, from Brazilian municipal politics to Argentine provincial power structures, but Mexico's PRI heritage gives it a particularly sharp institutional form.
The policy implications of this research are sobering for those engaged in democracy promotion, civil society support, and governance reform in the region. International development actors, including bilateral donors and multilateral institutions, have for decades channeled ODA toward programs that seek to strengthen democratic institutions, improve public service delivery, and build civil society capacity as a counterweight to clientelism. The implicit theory of change behind much of this programming assumes that better-informed citizens and stronger civil society organizations will hold governments accountable through electoral mechanisms. What research of this kind suggests is that the electoral mechanism itself may be structurally compromised at the subnational level, not because citizens lack information or civil society lacks voice, but because the organizational landscape of politics is so thoroughly shaped by machine networks that performance-based accountability cannot gain traction. This does not mean that governance reforms or civil society support are futile, but it does suggest that reform strategies need to grapple explicitly with the organizational infrastructure of machine politics rather than assuming that formal democratization has already displaced it. Initiatives that strengthen independent audit institutions, protect municipal autonomy from gubernatorial interference, and build constituencies for programmatic rather than clientelistic politics may be more effective than those focused primarily on electoral integrity in isolation.
Looking forward, the Mexican case invites reflection on the longer arc of democratic consolidation in transitional contexts. Mexico's 2018 presidential election, which brought Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the MORENA movement to power on an explicitly anti-establishment platform, and the subsequent reconfiguration of national politics under Claudia Sheinbaum, represent a partial disruption of the old PRI hegemony at the federal level. Yet subnational politics, as the paper under review implies, has shown greater continuity with pre-transition patterns. The durability of gubernatorial incumbency advantages rooted in party machines rather than performance suggests that democratic deepening in Mexico — and by extension in comparable cases throughout Latin America — will require sustained attention to the subnational level, where authoritarian legacies have proven most resilient. Researchers and practitioners alike would do well to track not only whether elections are competitive in a formal sense, but whether the accountability mechanisms that elections are supposed to provide are actually operative in the contexts where ordinary citizens most directly encounter the state. The gap between democratic form and democratic function remains one of the defining challenges of comparative politics in the twenty-first century, and work of this kind helps to map its precise contours with analytical precision.