Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-27
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The question of how democracies consolidate — or fail to — after authoritarian transitions remains one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics. Decades of scholarly attention have been devoted to the formal mechanics of democratic transition: the design of electoral systems, the crafting of constitutions, the staging of competitive elections. Yet an equally important and often underexamined dimension concerns what persists beneath these formal changes — the organizational residue of authoritarian rule, the durable networks of patronage and machine politics that outlast the regimes that built them. Mexico offers an especially revealing case study in this regard. The country's gradual, negotiated transition from seven decades of PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) dominance into multiparty competition was celebrated in global democracy discourse as a model of peaceful political opening. But as this article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America makes clear, electoral success in Mexico's post-transition gubernatorial contests cannot be adequately explained by democratic performance metrics alone. Instead, the legacy structures of authoritarian machine politics continue to shape who wins, how they win, and why incumbency advantages persist in ways that challenge conventional theories of electoral accountability.
The central argument advanced in this research concerns the relative weight of party machines versus governance performance in determining gubernatorial electoral outcomes in Mexico following the transition to democracy. The study examines a period in which decentralization — a structural reform that transferred significant fiscal and administrative authority from the federal government to the states — fundamentally altered the incentive landscape for subnational politicians. As governors gained control over larger budgets and regulatory powers, they also acquired the resources necessary to entrench themselves and their parties through clientelistic distribution, selective enforcement, and the management of local media environments. The paper argues that this combination of democratic competition and decentralization did not straightforwardly produce accountability. Rather, it reinforced incumbency advantages rooted not in policy achievement or voter satisfaction, but in the organizational capacity of party machines to mobilize support, distribute selective benefits, and suppress or coopt opposition. This is a deeply counterintuitive but empirically robust finding: voters in Mexican states, when evaluating gubernatorial performance, appear less responsive to objective governance outcomes than to the organizational reach and resource-distribution capacity of incumbent party networks. The democratic form is present — elections are competitive, turnover does occur — but the substantive logic of voter choice is substantially shaped by authoritarian inheritances.
To understand the significance of these findings, it is essential to situate them within broader patterns of democratic erosion and subnational variation in Latin America. The region as a whole underwent a remarkable wave of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s, yet scholars have long observed that national-level democratic transitions frequently coexist with subnational political regimes that remain authoritarian or hybrid in character. The work of Edward Gibson on "boundary control" — the strategies by which subnational elites insulate their domains from national democratic norms — resonates strongly here. Mexico's federal structure, combined with the extraordinary longevity of PRI dominance in many states even after the party lost the presidency in 2000, created precisely this kind of territorial variation. Some Mexican states democratized genuinely, with real electoral competition, civil society activism, and accountability mechanisms gaining traction. Others remained under the grip of machine politics, where the PRI or its successors maintained control not through superior governance but through organizational depth, the manipulation of local institutions, and the selective distribution of public resources to key constituencies. The article's contribution is to examine these dynamics systematically at the gubernatorial level, identifying the mechanisms through which authoritarian legacies translate into durable incumbency advantages even in an era of formal democratic competition.
The policy implications of this research extend well beyond Mexico's borders and carry particular relevance for international development practitioners and ODA architects working on democratic governance. A recurring assumption in development programming is that decentralization, by bringing government closer to citizens, enhances accountability and improves service delivery. This assumption underpins a wide range of donor-supported reforms across the Global South, from fiscal decentralization initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa to administrative deconcentration programs in Southeast Asia. The Mexican case complicates this narrative in important ways. Decentralization in contexts where party machines with authoritarian roots remain organizationally powerful may not enhance accountability — it may instead provide incumbents with the additional resources and autonomy needed to entrench their dominance. For practitioners designing governance reform programs, this underscores the importance of attending not only to the formal architecture of intergovernmental fiscal relations but also to the organizational ecology of political parties, the capacity of civil society organizations to monitor local government, the independence of subnational media, and the integrity of electoral management bodies at the local level. Without reforms across all of these dimensions simultaneously, decentralization risks becoming a subsidy for machine politics rather than a catalyst for democratic deepening.
There is also a research agenda implied by these findings that merits serious scholarly attention. The relationship between authoritarian legacies and electoral behavior has been studied extensively at the national level, but the subnational dimension remains comparatively underdeveloped. Mexico's gubernatorial elections provide an unusually rich laboratory because they exhibit substantial variation across states in the strength of authoritarian legacies, the degree of party machine organization, and the extent of genuine electoral competition. Future research could profitably examine what conditions allow performance-based accountability to emerge even in contexts of strong machine politics — whether, for instance, civil society density, media pluralism, or opposition party strength can counteract incumbency advantages rooted in machine mobilization. Longitudinal analysis tracking how these dynamics evolve as cohorts of voters who came of political age under the PRI authoritarian system are gradually replaced by younger citizens with different formative experiences could also illuminate whether authoritarian legacies are genuinely durable or gradually eroding. For the field of comparative democratization more broadly, the Mexican gubernatorial case reinforces the importance of distinguishing between democratic form and democratic substance — between the presence of elections and the presence of electoral accountability — and of taking seriously the long shadow that authoritarian institutions cast over post-transition politics. As democratic backsliding accelerates globally and the resilience of hybrid regimes becomes ever more apparent, scholarship that illuminates the mechanisms of authoritarian persistence in formally democratic settings provides an indispensable analytical foundation for both researchers and reformers.