Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-08-04
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The question of how authoritarian legacies persist long after formal democratic transitions is among the most consequential puzzles in comparative political science. Across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Eastern Europe, scholars have documented with increasing precision how the institutional residue of authoritarian rule — patronage networks, machine politics, elite coordination mechanisms — continues to shape electoral competition decades after competitive elections are introduced. Mexico offers one of the most richly documented cases of this phenomenon. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governed Mexico for over seven decades through a combination of clientelism, selective repression, and the disciplined management of subnational political actors. When electoral liberalization accelerated through the 1990s and culminated in the watershed presidential transition of 2000, a widespread assumption held that competitive democracy would eventually erode these inherited structures. The paper under examination challenges that assumption in a direct and empirically grounded way, turning attention to Mexico's gubernatorial elections — a level of government where the persistence of old organizational logics has been insufficiently theorized and where the consequences for democratic quality are most acutely felt.
The central argument advanced in this research is that electoral success in Mexico's post-transition gubernatorial contests is better explained by the organizational capacities of party machines than by gubernatorial performance in office. This is a significant claim because it runs counter to the dominant retrospective voting framework, which holds that democratic competition creates incentives for officeholders to deliver public goods and be rewarded or punished accordingly at the ballot box. If voters reliably sanctioned poor performance and rewarded competent governance, incumbency should function as a double-edged sword — advantageous for successful governors, costly for ineffective ones. Instead, the paper argues that the decentralization of political authority in Mexico, rather than strengthening accountability, effectively empowered governors to consolidate subnational machines that reproduced incumbency advantages regardless of policy outcomes. Democratic competition, in other words, interacted with decentralization not to discipline political elites but to entrench them. The inherited organizational infrastructure of the PRI era proved adaptable: governors across party lines learned to leverage the discretionary resource flows that decentralization enabled in order to sustain electoral coalitions built on material exchange rather than programmatic appeal.
This finding connects to a broader literature on the regional and global dynamics of subnational authoritarianism and uneven democratization. Scholars such as Edward Gibson have long argued that Latin American federal systems create "boundary control" dynamics, where subnational elites use territorial authority to insulate themselves from national-level democratic pressures. Mexico's case is particularly instructive because the transition from PRI hegemony was itself a nationally uneven process — democratization advanced rapidly at the federal level while subnational arenas retained much of their old organizational character. The paper's emphasis on decentralization as a structural enabler of machine politics resonates with development literature on the risks of fiscal decentralization in contexts where accountability institutions are weak. International donors and multilateral development institutions spent considerable resources in the 1990s and 2000s promoting decentralization as a pro-accountability reform. The Mexican subnational experience suggests that decentralization can cut the other way: where party organizations predate effective monitoring institutions, the transfer of resources to subnational units provides machine politicians with the material foundation to consolidate rather than democratize their political base. This has implications well beyond Mexico, relevant to ongoing debates about governance reform in ODA recipient countries across the Global South.
The policy and research implications of this work are substantial. For practitioners engaged in democratic governance programming — whether through bilateral development agencies or multilateral bodies — the study reinforces the importance of sequencing: administrative decentralization without accompanying investment in local accountability mechanisms, civil society capacity, and electoral integrity infrastructure can perversely strengthen incumbent elites rather than broadening citizen voice. The finding that party machines operate over performance also raises questions about the appropriate metrics for evaluating democratic health at subnational levels. Headline electoral competitiveness — the presence of opposition parties, contested races, alternation in office — may mask the persistence of organizational dominance if incumbents succeed in converting state resources into durable electoral coalitions. Research on ODA and democracy support would benefit from more granular attention to the subnational level, where formal democratic institutions frequently coexist with informal hierarchies that constrain genuine competition. For scholars of Latin American politics, the paper contributes to an emerging literature that takes seriously the within-country variation in democratic quality and resists the aggregation of national-level democratization scores into assessments of regime character.
Looking forward, the questions raised by this research point to several understudied dynamics that merit sustained scholarly and policy attention. As Mexico continues its post-PRI political recomposition — including the consolidation of Morena as a dominant party under the AMLO and Sheinbaum administrations — the mechanisms identified here take on new relevance. The paper's logic implies that a new political force can inherit and adapt machine structures built by its predecessors, particularly if access to subnational resource flows remains structurally entrenched. The broader comparative question — under what conditions do authoritarian legacies eventually erode rather than persist — remains open. Some scholarship points to generational turnover, civil society mobilization, and the gradual professionalization of civil services as long-run correctives; others emphasize the role of economic shocks in disrupting patronage-dependent coalitions. What the Mexican gubernatorial case makes clear is that formal democratic transition, however significant, does not automatically generate the accountability mechanisms that liberal democratic theory assumes. For researchers at the intersection of political economy and development studies, and for practitioners designing governance support programs, this finding is not merely an academic qualification — it is a practical guide to where the work of democratization remains most urgently unfinished.