Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-09-10
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
Mexico's gubernatorial elections have become one of the most instructive laboratories for understanding how democracies cope with the residue of decades of one-party dominance. More than a quarter-century after the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost its first governorship in 1989 and nearly two decades after Vicente Fox ended the PRI's uninterrupted 71-year hold on the presidency, Mexico's subnational politics still bear the fingerprints of the authoritarian era that supposedly ended in 2000. This matters far beyond Mexico's borders: across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and post-Soviet Eurasia, a large share of the world's "democracies" are precisely this kind of hybrid case, where competitive elections coexist with entrenched party machines, clientelist distribution networks, and incumbents who inherited organizational infrastructure from a prior authoritarian regime. Understanding whether and how these legacies persist is central to any serious assessment of democratic consolidation, and it speaks directly to the interests of donors, multilateral institutions, and civil society organizations that fund democracy-support and governance programming on the assumption that competitive elections alone will gradually erode illiberal practices.
The article under review, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, tackles a deceptively simple question with significant theoretical stakes: what actually explains electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial races since the democratic transition, and how much credit or blame do sitting governors deserve for these outcomes? The paper's central argument is that democratic competition, layered onto Mexico's decentralized federal structure, did not simply reward or punish governors for their performance in office. Instead, electoral outcomes have continued to be driven substantially by the strength of inherited party machines — patronage networks, local brokers, and organizational assets built up during decades of PRI hegemony — rather than by voters rationally evaluating incumbents' governance record. This is a pointed challenge to the standard "economic voting" or "performance voting" literature, which assumes that decentralization and free elections create accountability by allowing citizens to reward competent governors and punish incompetent ones. The paper's finding that party-machine strength systematically outperforms performance metrics as a predictor of gubernatorial electoral success suggests that Mexico's transition redistributed the sites of electoral competition without dismantling the authoritarian-era infrastructure that continues to structure who wins.
This finding resonates with a broader pattern documented across post-authoritarian and post-communist contexts: formal democratization frequently outpaces the substantive dismantling of clientelist and patronage structures. In Latin America specifically, scholars have long noted that decentralization reforms of the 1980s and 1990s — often promoted by international financial institutions and USAID-style governance programs as a route to more accountable, responsive local government — had the ironic effect of creating new arenas in which old-regime party machines could entrench themselves at the subnational level, sometimes even more durably than at the national level. Mexico's PRI, having lost the presidency, retreated into state-level fortresses precisely because gubernatorial races offered lower information environments, weaker media scrutiny, and denser patron-client relationships than presidential contests. This dynamic parallels similar findings from Argentina's provincial "feudalization," Brazil's coronelismo-inflected state politics, and the durability of dominant regional parties in parts of post-Soviet Russia and Central Asia. The common thread is that federalism and decentralization, often treated by development institutions as unambiguously pro-democratic reforms, can simultaneously function as safe harbors for authoritarian-successor organizations if not paired with independent local media, robust civil society oversight, and genuine fiscal transparency at the subnational level.
For ODA and governance-focused institutions, the policy implications are considerable. A great deal of democracy-assistance funding over the past three decades — channeled through USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, European party foundations, and multilateral development banks — has been premised on the theory that competitive elections plus decentralized authority will, over time, produce accountable local governance. This paper's findings imply that such assumptions require serious qualification: elections can be free and competitive in a procedural sense while remaining substantively captured by legacy party organizations whose advantage rests on organizational and clientelist capital rather than public goods delivery. This should push donors and civil society organizations working on governance reform to shift emphasis away from election-day monitoring alone and toward longer-horizon interventions — investigative journalism capacity, party-finance transparency, civil-service professionalization to weaken patronage-based public employment, and support for opposition party-building at the subnational level — that address the deeper organizational asymmetries the paper identifies. It also has a cautionary implication for how development economists and political scientists model "the resource curse" or fiscal decentralization's effects on governance: where authoritarian-successor parties retain machine capacity, additional local fiscal autonomy may simply provide more resources to distribute clientelistically rather than more accountability.
Looking forward, this line of research opens several productive avenues that IOCSS and similarly positioned observatories should track. First, comparative work extending this party-machine-versus-performance framework to other hybrid regimes — particularly in Central America, the Andean region, and parts of Southeast Asia and Africa where dominant parties survived nominal transitions — would help establish whether Mexico's pattern is a general feature of authoritarian successor parties or a product of Mexico's specific federal design. Second, as Mexico's own political landscape has been reshaped by the rise of Morena as a new dominant force with its own emerging machine-like characteristics in several states, researchers should ask whether Morena is reproducing the very dynamics this paper documents for the PRI, which would suggest that machine politics is a structural feature of Mexican federalism rather than a party-specific pathology. Finally, for practitioners designing governance and anti-corruption programming, the paper is a useful corrective against over-indexing on procedural electoral indicators; genuine democratic accountability at the subnational level likely requires deliberate investment in dismantling clientelist infrastructure itself, not merely in preserving the ritual of competitive voting.