Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-08-01
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian organizational structures within formally democratic systems represents one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics today. Across Latin America, the formal trappings of competitive elections have often coexisted uneasily with informal power networks rooted in pre-democratic arrangements — clientelism, machine politics, and incumbency-based resource mobilization that precede and survive regime transition. Mexico occupies a particularly instructive position in this landscape. Its protracted exit from seven decades of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) hegemony produced one of the most studied transitions in the region, yet the subnational level — especially gubernatorial politics — has remained analytically underexplored relative to federal-level dynamics. A new paper in the Journal of Politics in Latin America addresses this gap directly, examining what actually drives electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial elections after the democratic opening, and asking whether governors themselves function as meaningful architects of their own electoral outcomes. The findings point toward a sobering answer: party machines and the organizational residues of authoritarian governance matter more than performance, even in a formally competitive democratic environment.
The core argument rests on a structural observation about how democratization and decentralization interacted in the Mexican context. Mexico's transition unfolded gradually across the 1990s, with the PRI ceding state governorships to opposition parties before losing the presidency in 2000. This subnational liberalization was accompanied by significant fiscal and administrative decentralization, which transferred substantial resources and discretionary authority to state governments. In theory, decentralization should enhance democratic accountability by bringing decision-making closer to citizens and making governors' performance more legible. In practice, however, decentralization created new opportunities for incumbent governors to entrench themselves and their parties by controlling resource flows, patronage networks, and electoral machinery. The paper's central contention is that this combination — competitive elections layered onto decentralized structures that governors controlled — produced incumbency advantages rooted not in policy performance but in organizational capacity. Voters in gubernatorial elections were responding, at least in part, to signals and incentives generated by party machines rather than evaluating governors on the merits of their governance.
This finding speaks directly to a literature on authoritarian legacies that has grown considerably since the third wave of democratization. Scholars such as Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, as well as earlier work by Frances Hagopian on Brazil, have documented how parties and elites that organized power under authoritarian conditions often prove remarkably adaptive within new democratic rules — not by subverting elections outright, but by leveraging inherited organizational advantages. The PRI is arguably the paradigmatic case: a party whose extraordinary longevity was built on the fusion of state resources, local brokers, and a managed relationship with civil society that made it extraordinarily difficult to dislodge even as competitive pressures mounted. What the present paper adds is granular evidence that these organizational advantages did not simply evaporate after the PRI's national defeat in 2000. At the gubernatorial level, incumbency advantages — whether held by the PRI, the PAN, or later the PRD and its successors — appeared to reproduce organizational logics that predated the democratic transition. The machine, in other words, outlasted the specific regime that created it, and opposition parties that captured governorships learned quickly to operate it.
The implications for understanding subnational democracy in Latin America are significant, and they resonate well beyond Mexico. Across the region, decentralization has been a cornerstone of governance reform agendas promoted by international development organizations and multilateral lenders since the 1990s. The underlying logic was that bringing government closer to citizens would improve service delivery, reduce corruption, and deepen democratic participation. Yet the Mexican evidence contributes to a growing body of research suggesting that decentralization's effects are highly contingent on the pre-existing organizational ecology of subnational politics. Where strong party machines or patron-client networks already exist, decentralization may amplify rather than constrain incumbency advantages, because it increases the resources that incumbents can deploy through those networks. This has direct relevance for ODA programming: governance and democratization aid that focuses on strengthening formal electoral institutions — voter registration, electoral commission capacity, party finance rules — may achieve limited traction if the informal organizational infrastructure of machine politics remains intact and is indeed strengthened by resource decentralization.
The research also invites reflection on what accountability actually means in transitional and post-transitional contexts. A persistent assumption in development and governance discourse is that competitive elections create performance incentives — that politicians who deliver public goods will be rewarded at the ballot box, and those who do not will be punished. The Mexican gubernatorial case complicates this assumption considerably. If electoral outcomes are driven substantially by machine mobilization, patronage distribution, and organizational capacity rather than policy performance, then the accountability mechanism that competitive elections are supposed to generate may be substantially weakened or distorted. Voters may rationally respond to the material incentives offered by machine networks even when they are dissatisfied with governance quality, because the credible alternative is a rival machine rather than a meaningfully different governance model. For civil society organizations working on accountability and transparency in such environments, this represents a structural challenge that goes beyond the monitoring of individual politicians or policies.
Looking forward, several dimensions of this research warrant further development. The relative weight of party machine advantages versus performance signals is likely to vary across different state contexts, levels of civil society organization, and types of gubernatorial incumbents. Methodologically, distinguishing between resource-based machine effects and genuine performance-based electoral rewards requires careful attention to the timing of transfers, the distribution of public goods relative to electoral cycles, and the behavior of voters in contexts where machine penetration is weaker. The rise of new political formations in Mexico — most notably Morena, which achieved national dominance under Andrés Manuel López Obrador and then Claudia Sheinbaum — raises fresh questions about whether a party that emerged partly as an anti-machine force has begun replicating the organizational strategies it once opposed, particularly at the subnational level. For researchers and practitioners engaged with Latin American politics, governance reform, and the endurance of democratic institutions, the lesson from this work is both analytically important and practically pressing: formal democratic competition is a necessary but insufficient condition for accountability, and the organizational inheritance of the authoritarian past continues to shape who wins, and why, long after the transition itself is declared complete.