Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-15
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The question of how authoritarian legacies persist beneath the surface of formally democratic institutions has occupied comparative political scientists for decades, yet its empirical contours remain contested. Mexico offers one of the most instructive cases in contemporary political development: a country that underwent a celebrated democratic transition beginning in the late 1990s, only to reveal that the organizational sinews of the old Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) regime had not simply dissolved. The recent study published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, examining incumbency advantage and gubernatorial elections in post-transition Mexico, arrives at a pivotal moment. Across Latin America, and indeed across much of the Global South, the relationship between formal democratic procedures and durable authoritarian infrastructure is being re-examined in light of democratic backsliding, populist consolidation, and the resilience of machine politics. Understanding why party machines — rather than governmental performance — continue to drive electoral outcomes in subnational Mexican politics illuminates dynamics that extend far beyond any single country.
The paper's central intervention is to disaggregate what "incumbency advantage" actually means in the Mexican subnational context. The conventional assumption in electoral studies is that incumbents benefit primarily because they have delivered public goods, managed the economy competently, or built personal reputations. The Mexico case, as the study argues, complicates this narrative substantially. Decentralization, which accelerated markedly in Mexico during the 1990s and 2000s as part of the broader democratic transition package, handed governors expanded fiscal resources and administrative authority. Yet rather than creating accountable, performance-oriented executives, decentralization appears to have supercharged the organizational capacity of party machines at the state level. Governors who command entrenched networks of patronage, clientelistic distribution, and organizational coordination enjoy electoral advantages that are structurally independent of whether they govern well. The implication is counterintuitive and analytically significant: democratic competition, under conditions where organizational legacies from an authoritarian period survive intact, may actually entrench incumbents more deeply rather than disciplining them toward better performance.
This finding connects directly to a broader theoretical debate about the conditions under which democratic transitions produce genuine accountability versus what scholars have termed "electoral authoritarianism" or "competitive authoritarianism." The Mexican experience is instructive precisely because the country's transition was procedurally impeccable — competitive multiparty elections, an independent electoral authority, increasingly robust civil society — yet subnational politics remained structurally deformed by inherited organizational asymmetries. The PRI had spent seven decades constructing a layered apparatus of local brokers, union affiliations, agrarian networks, and municipal intermediaries. When opposition parties won federal elections and even some governorships, they frequently found themselves unable to displace this infrastructure without building comparable machines of their own, which in turn perpetuated the logic of machine politics even under non-PRI banners. The study's focus on gubernatorial elections thus captures precisely the subnational arena where these legacies have proven most durable, insulated from the reformist pressures that national-level competition sometimes generates.
From the perspective of ODA strategy and international development policy, these findings carry underappreciated implications. Donors and multilateral institutions have long approached Mexico's democratization as a largely accomplished transition requiring only incremental strengthening of legal frameworks, judicial independence, and anti-corruption mechanisms. The persistence of machine politics at the gubernatorial level challenges this framing. When decentralization transfers resources and authority to the subnational level in contexts where authoritarian organizational legacies remain strong, the result may be the privatization of state power by entrenched party networks rather than the deepening of democratic responsiveness. This pattern is not unique to Mexico. Comparative scholarship on Brazil, the Philippines, Nigeria, and Pakistan has documented analogous dynamics in which subnational strongholds preserve the logic of patronage politics even as national-level institutions adopt more competitive and formalistic democratic norms. For practitioners designing governance interventions, the implication is that institutional reform at the national level is necessary but insufficient; the subnational infrastructure of political organization requires direct attention if accountability mechanisms are to take root.
The study's attention to how governors actively shape electoral outcomes — rather than simply benefiting passively from organizational inheritance — raises equally important questions about the agency of political elites in consolidated patronage systems. Gubernatorial incumbents are not merely passive inheritors of a structural advantage; they actively invest in maintaining and extending machine networks, using the fiscal and administrative resources that decentralization has placed at their disposal. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle in which incumbency advantage generates organizational capacity, which in turn generates further incumbency advantage, largely independent of the quality of public service delivery. For researchers, this underscores the need to move beyond simple vote-share analyses and examine the mechanisms of advantage — how resources are distributed, which intermediaries are activated, and how informal institutions of clientelism interact with the formal rules of electoral competition. For practitioners and civil society organizations operating in such environments, it highlights the critical importance of demand-side accountability: citizen monitoring, independent media, and organized civil society capable of making performance legible to voters who might otherwise be captured within clientelistic networks.
Looking forward, the Mexican case will likely grow in significance as a reference point for scholars tracking democratic resilience and erosion across the Global South. The 2018 victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador's Morena party represented, in part, a popular repudiation of precisely the machine politics this study analyzes — and yet Morena has faced persistent questions about whether it is building its own organizational infrastructure that replicates the structural logic it ostensibly displaced. The 2024 election of Claudia Sheinbaum as president, and the ongoing consolidation of Morena's subnational presence, will provide a natural test of the paper's core argument: do authoritarian legacies gradually attenuate as new organizational formations consolidate, or does the machine-politics equilibrium prove self-reproducing regardless of which party controls the machinery? For the international community of researchers, development practitioners, and civil society advocates engaged with questions of democratic quality and governance effectiveness, this paper offers a rigorous empirical grounding for what has often remained a theoretical conjecture — that the organizational infrastructure of authoritarianism outlasts the formal institutions that replaced it, and that its consequences are most legible precisely where democratic competition is most intense.