Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-09-07
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
Mexico's transition from single-party hegemony to competitive democracy has long been held up as a model case for scholars of authoritarian breakdown, yet more than two decades after the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost the presidency in 2000, the persistence of entrenched political machines at the subnational level continues to complicate any triumphalist narrative about democratic consolidation. This matters acutely in the current global landscape, where a wave of democratic backsliding across Latin America, Eastern Europe, and parts of Asia has renewed scholarly and policy interest in the durability of authoritarian-era institutions even after formal transitions to electoral pluralism. Understanding why some post-authoritarian structures survive democratization while others do not is not merely an academic exercise; it shapes how international donors, election-monitoring bodies, and civil society organizations calibrate their support for democratic governance in transitional and hybrid regimes. The article under review, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, contributes directly to this debate by examining Mexico's gubernatorial elections and asking a deceptively simple question with far-reaching implications: what actually explains electoral success in the states, and how much credit or blame belongs to the performance of incumbent governors themselves?
The paper's central argument is that electoral outcomes in Mexico's 32 states are driven less by retrospective evaluations of gubernatorial performance than by the residual strength of party machines inherited from the PRI's decades-long hegemonic rule. This is a significant departure from conventional democratic theory, which assumes that competitive elections function as accountability mechanisms in which voters reward competent incumbents and punish poor performers. Instead, the authors argue that democratic competition, layered on top of Mexico's decentralized federal structure, created conditions in which subnational party organizations—built during the authoritarian period to mobilize votes, distribute patronage, and control local bureaucracies—retained their organizational capacity and adapted it to a multiparty environment. Rather than dissolving under democratic pressure, these machines became a durable source of incumbency advantage, allowing governing parties to win reelection-adjacent contests (via aligned successor candidates, since Mexican governors are constitutionally barred from immediate reelection) largely independent of whether they delivered public goods, reduced corruption, or improved security outcomes. This finding echoes and extends the subnational authoritarianism literature associated with scholars like Edward Gibson and Kenneth Greene, but pushes it further by explicitly decoupling machine-based incumbency advantage from performance-based accountability, suggesting the two operate on largely separate tracks.
The implications of this argument extend well beyond Mexico's borders and speak to broader patterns in the political economy of democratization across the Global South. In many countries where dominant-party or authoritarian systems have given way to formally competitive elections—from Tanzania and Cambodia to parts of the post-Soviet space—incumbent parties have similarly leveraged inherited administrative infrastructure, clientelist networks, and control over subnational fiscal transfers to entrench themselves well past the formal end of one-party rule. This pattern complicates the standard sequencing assumption embedded in much democracy-promotion programming, which treats the holding of free and fair elections as sufficient evidence of a transition's success. Mexico's case demonstrates that decentralization, often promoted by international donors and multilateral institutions as a mechanism for deepening democratic accountability and civil society participation at the local level, can paradoxically entrench machine politics if it hands fiscal and administrative resources to actors who inherited pre-existing organizational advantages. For civil society organizations working on governance and anti-corruption programming in transitional democracies, this is a crucial corrective: strengthening electoral institutions alone does not neutralize inherited asymmetries in political organization, and reform efforts that ignore subnational party infrastructure risk reproducing the very accountability deficits they aim to correct.
From a policy and research standpoint, the article's findings carry direct relevance for how development agencies, election observers, and pro-democracy foundations design interventions in hybrid and post-transition contexts. If party machines rather than governance performance are the primary driver of electoral outcomes, then civic education campaigns and performance-transparency initiatives—common tools in the ODA-funded democracy and governance portfolio—may have more limited effects than assumed unless they are paired with efforts to dismantle or counterbalance clientelist infrastructure itself, such as civil service reform, campaign finance regulation, and support for independent local media capable of monitoring subnational incumbents. This also has implications for how international observers assess the "quality" of democracy in countries like Mexico: formally competitive, procedurally clean elections can coexist with substantively weak accountability if machine politics insulates incumbents from performance-based punishment. Researchers studying comparative democratization should take seriously the analytical distinction the paper draws between electoral competitiveness and electoral accountability, since conflating the two risks overstating the depth of democratic consolidation in cases that superficially resemble successful transitions.
Looking ahead, this line of research points to several productive avenues for both scholars and practitioners engaged with Latin American political economy. Future comparative work might examine whether similar machine-based incumbency advantages persist in other decentralized federal systems in the region, such as Brazil or Argentina, where subnational political dynasties and party brokers likewise complicate simple models of democratic accountability. For civil society actors and donors operating in Mexico and comparable contexts, the findings suggest that sustained investment in local-level institutional reform—rather than a narrow focus on national electoral integrity—will be necessary to erode the structural advantages that authoritarian-era machines continue to enjoy. As Mexico approaches further electoral cycles amid ongoing debates over judicial reform, security governance, and the concentration of power under Morena at both the federal and state levels, understanding the durability of these older PRI-era organizational legacies offers an essential analytical lens for anticipating how new dominant coalitions might themselves entrench similar advantages, underscoring that the challenge of building genuine democratic accountability in Mexico is far from resolved.