Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-08-02
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian institutional legacies within formally democratic systems represents one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics. Nowhere is this tension more instructive than in Latin America, where decades of one-party or military rule gave way to multiparty competition without necessarily dismantling the organizational infrastructure through which political dominance had previously been maintained. Mexico offers a paradigmatic case. The country's transition away from PRI hegemony — a process unfolding gradually through the 1990s and consummated at the federal level with Vicente Fox's 2000 presidential victory — generated enormous scholarly and public optimism about the prospects for genuine democratic consolidation. Yet the sub-national dimension of Mexican democracy has proven considerably more resistant to transformation. Recent scholarship investigating what actually determines electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial contests reveals an uncomfortable truth: party machines built under authoritarian conditions continue to shape outcomes in ways that dwarf the influence of policy performance, calling into question the quality and depth of the democratic transition itself.
The article under review, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, addresses two interrelated questions: what explains electoral success in gubernatorial elections following Mexico's democratic transition, and to what degree have governors themselves shaped those outcomes? The paper's central argument is that democratic competition, combined with decentralisation, did not level the playing field in the way transitional optimists anticipated. Instead, incumbency advantage — rooted not in the delivery of public goods or demonstrable administrative competence but in the organizational reach of party machines — emerged as the dominant driver of electoral outcomes across Mexico's thirty-one states and the federal capital. This distinction matters enormously. If voters reward performance, then competitive elections create incentives for governors to govern well. If voters respond primarily to machine politics — patronage distribution, clientelistic networks, and the mobilization capacity of party organizations — then the behavioral logic shifts: incumbents invest in organizational maintenance rather than policy outcomes, and citizens have weaker mechanisms to discipline underperforming leaders. The paper's argument, grounded in systematic analysis of gubernatorial elections across the post-transition period, suggests the latter dynamic predominates.
The concept of authoritarian legacies in this context requires careful unpacking. Mexico's PRI governed for over seven decades through a sophisticated fusion of coercion, co-optation, and clientelism that extended into every state and municipality. When the PRI lost the presidency in 2000, it did not simultaneously lose its organizational network at the sub-national level. State-level bosses, known colloquially as caciques, maintained their grip on local political economies, controlling access to public employment, social transfers, and contracts in ways that had been refined over generations. The transition to multiparty competition meant that rival parties — the PAN on the right, the PRD and later Morena on the left — needed to either build equivalent organizational structures or capture existing ones. The paper's findings suggest that whichever party held the governorship inherited, adapted, or replicated these machine politics dynamics. This is a critical insight: the pathology of machine politics was not PRI-specific but was embedded in the institutional architecture of sub-national governance itself, making it available to any party willing to exploit it.
The broader regional implications extend well beyond Mexico. Across Latin America, processes of decentralisation promoted throughout the 1990s and 2000s — often at the encouragement of international development institutions, including aid donors pursuing governance reform agendas — transferred significant fiscal and administrative authority to sub-national governments without equivalent transfers of accountability mechanisms. Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru all exhibit variants of the same pattern: sub-national executives wielding disproportionate control over local political economies, with electoral outcomes reflecting organizational capacity more than programmatic delivery. For the ODA community and international democracy support practitioners, this body of evidence poses a direct challenge to institutional design assumptions. Donor-funded electoral assistance programs, civil society capacity building, and transparency initiatives have tended to target formal electoral administration — voter registration, ballot integrity, media access — while underestimating the degree to which electoral competition is pre-structured by the machine politics operating beneath the formal surface. Strengthening the procedural components of elections without addressing the underlying patronage architecture may produce competitive elections that nonetheless fail to generate accountability.
Looking forward, the Mexican case takes on additional significance given the transformations occurring under the Morena government of Claudia Sheinbaum and her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Morena's rapid territorial expansion has involved both genuine programmatic appeal and the absorption of existing political networks, replicating at the national level the machine-building dynamics that the article documents at the gubernatorial level. Whether subnational incumbency advantage will work in Morena's favor in the medium term — as the party faces the inevitable maturation of governing coalitions and the management of expectations — is a question of both scholarly and practical consequence. For researchers, the paper opens productive avenues for cross-regional comparison and for disaggregating the mechanisms through which authoritarian organizational legacies translate into democratic incumbency advantages. For practitioners in ODA, civil society, and governance programming, the findings argue for deeper investment in accountability infrastructure — audit institutions, investigative journalism, local civil society monitoring — that can operate within states rather than focusing exclusively on national-level reforms. Mexico's gubernatorial elections, in short, are not merely a domestic curiosity; they are a window into the incomplete architecture of democratic accountability across much of the developing world.