Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-08-21
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
Mexico's long democratic transition from the institutional hegemony of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) to a genuinely competitive multiparty system stands as one of the most consequential political transformations in Latin American history. Since the PRI's historic loss of the presidency to Vicente Fox in 2000, observers and scholars have debated the depth and quality of Mexico's democratic consolidation. Yet a persistent puzzle has haunted this story: why, despite the formal apparatus of competitive elections, do incumbents and established party organizations continue to deliver predictable, often lopsided electoral outcomes at the subnational level? The article under review, published ahead of print in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, addresses precisely this question by examining gubernatorial elections in post-transition Mexico, and its findings carry implications that extend well beyond the country's borders. At a moment when the global democratic recession has prompted renewed interrogation of what transitions actually deliver, the Mexican case offers a sobering and theoretically rich laboratory.
The central argument advanced in this research is that electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial contests cannot be adequately explained by incumbent performance — that is, by the quality of governance, service delivery, or economic management that voters might rationally reward or punish at the polls. Instead, the paper contends that the combination of democratic competition and political decentralization has paradoxically entrenched party machines inherited from the authoritarian period, allowing them to dominate subnational electoral arenas through organizational capacity rather than through demonstrated competence. This is a significant claim, and it runs against the grain of modernization-theoretic accounts that predict incumbents in consolidated democracies will face meaningful accountability through retrospective voting. If governors are insulated from performance-based electoral punishment, then democratic accountability at the subnational level remains structurally incomplete, regardless of how competitive elections appear on the surface. The argument draws on a well-established tradition in comparative politics that distinguishes between electoral democracy — the holding of regular, formally free contests — and liberal or substantive democracy, where institutions genuinely translate popular preferences into policy and hold powerholders responsible.
The theoretical emphasis on authoritarian legacies connects to a broader literature on path dependence in democratizing polities. Scholars of post-authoritarian transitions from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia have documented how organizational resources, informal networks, and patterns of patronage cultivated under single-party or military rule do not dissolve upon the formal liberalization of political competition. In the Mexican case, the PRI spent seven decades constructing a capillary network of corporatist organizations, municipal loyalties, and selective benefit distribution that penetrated virtually every dimension of social and economic life. Decentralization, which accelerated in Mexico during the 1990s and 2000s partly under pressure from international financial institutions and donors who framed it as a governance reform conducive to development, had the unintended consequence of placing substantial fiscal and administrative resources directly in the hands of state governments. Rather than empowering citizens and local communities to hold governors accountable, as the prescriptive literature on decentralization anticipated, these resources were channeled through existing machine structures, reinforcing rather than disrupting the organizational advantages of established parties. The research thus contributes to a growing critical literature on decentralization that challenges its assumed pro-democratic effects, a finding highly relevant to development policy practitioners who continue to promote fiscal and administrative decentralization as a component of governance reform programming in aid-dependent contexts.
From a political economy perspective, the research invites reflection on the interaction between subnational elite interests, national party competition, and the distribution of development resources. Mexico's federal transfers — participaciones and aportaciones — constitute a major share of state government revenue, and control over their allocation is a powerful instrument for sustaining electoral coalitions. The incumbency advantage documented in this research is not simply a story of voter psychology or name recognition; it is underpinned by the material capacity to distribute benefits selectively to organized constituencies. This has direct implications for how international donors and multilateral agencies design anti-corruption and governance reform interventions in middle-income federal systems. If subnational party machines derive their resilience from the intersection of fiscal decentralization and organizational inheritance rather than from deficiencies in formal electoral rules, then interventions focused narrowly on electoral administration or campaign finance regulation are likely to prove insufficient. Addressing the structural conditions that reproduce machine politics demands engagement with the broader architecture of intergovernmental fiscal relations and with the sociological density of patron-client networks at the local level — a considerably more complex and politically sensitive undertaking.
The paper's findings on how governors themselves shaped electoral outcomes through the mobilization of organizational resources also speak to a comparative debate about the role of subnational authoritarian enclaves in federal democracies. Work by Gibson and others has shown that subnational authoritarianism can persist within nationally democratic frameworks, sustained by the boundary-control strategies of dominant local elites who resist the penetration of national democratic norms into their jurisdictions. Mexico's gubernatorial arena appears to exhibit some of the structural properties described in this literature, even in the post-hegemonic period when the PRI's national grip had weakened considerably. The implication is that democratization in Mexico, as in analogous cases in Brazil, Argentina, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, has been spatially uneven — formally advanced at the national level while contested or attenuated at the subnational level where most citizens actually encounter the state in their daily lives.
Looking forward, this research carries urgency in light of recent Mexican political dynamics, including the consolidation of Morena under Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now Claudia Sheinbaum. The question of whether a new hegemonic force is reconstituting machine-style dominance at the subnational level — this time under a nominally left-populist banner — is one that the analytical framework developed in this paper is well positioned to address. If the incumbency and machine effects documented in this research are structural rather than party-specific, they will persist regardless of which political organization controls state governments. For researchers, this implies that the analytical tools developed to study the PRI era remain relevant and should be adapted to examine the organizational strategies of parties that may present themselves as anti-establishment but replicate subnational patronage dynamics under new ideological packaging. For practitioners in the ODA and civil society sectors working on democratic governance in Latin America, the lesson is equally clear: electoral observation, civic education, and formal institution-building must be complemented by sustained attention to the political economy of subnational power, patronage networks, and the distributional logics that sustain incumbents across regime transitions. Democracy's consolidation, this research reminds us, is measured not only at the national ballot box but in the granular, often invisible structures through which political power is reproduced at the margins of the state.