Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-09-13
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
Authoritarian legacies rarely dissolve neatly when a country crosses the threshold into competitive democracy; instead, they tend to migrate into new institutional forms, reshaping the rules and incentives of politics long after the formal transition has been declared complete. Mexico offers one of the richest laboratories for observing this phenomenon. Having lived under one of the twentieth century's longest-running hegemonic party regimes, in which the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governed continuously from 1929 until its first presidential defeat in 2000, Mexico's subsequent decades of multiparty competition provide an unusually long panel of subnational elections through which to trace how the machinery of authoritarian rule persists, adapts, or erodes under democratic conditions. This question carries particular urgency today, as a wave of democratic backsliding across Latin America and beyond has renewed scholarly and policy interest in the conditions that allow dominant parties to entrench themselves even amid nominally free elections. Understanding why some parties retain durable advantages at the ballot box despite alternation in power speaks directly to debates over the quality and resilience of democratic institutions in the Global South, and to the broader question of whether formal democratization is sufficient to dislodge entrenched political machines.
The article under review, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, examines gubernatorial elections across Mexico's thirty-two states in the post-transition period to ask a deceptively simple question: what actually explains electoral success at the state level once democratic competition became the norm? The study's central argument is that outcomes have been driven less by the substantive performance of incumbent governors — economic stewardship, public service delivery, or governance quality — than by the strength and reach of inherited party machines, many of which trace their organizational DNA to the PRI's corporatist structures of clientelism, patronage networks, and mobilizational capacity built up over seven decades of one-party rule. By combining this with an analysis of how administrative decentralization, which transferred substantial fiscal and policy authority to state governments beginning in the 1990s, interacted with democratic competition, the authors show that incumbency advantage in Mexican states has functioned less as a reward for good governance and more as a byproduct of institutional inheritance. Governors and gubernatorial parties that controlled dense networks of local brokers, public-sector employment, and discretionary spending were able to convert these authoritarian-era assets into durable electoral advantages, effectively insulating themselves from the kind of retrospective, performance-based accountability that democratic theory presumes voters exercise.
This finding resonates with and extends a substantial body of comparative research on subnational authoritarianism and hybrid regimes in Latin America, Africa, and post-Soviet Eurasia, where scholars have long observed that national-level democratization frequently coexists with pockets of authoritarian enclave politics at the state, provincial, or municipal level. Mexico's federal structure makes it an especially instructive case because decentralization, often prescribed by international donors and multilateral institutions as a democratizing reform meant to bring government closer to citizens and improve accountability, may have inadvertently created new opportunities for machine politics to flourish by handing sub-national elites greater control over resources and personnel without a commensurate strengthening of oversight institutions. This dynamic echoes concerns raised in the civil society and governance literature more broadly: reforms designed to disperse power can, absent robust civil society monitoring, judicial independence, and press freedom at the local level, simply relocate rather than eliminate authoritarian practices. For organizations working on democratic governance and civil society strengthening in the region, this is a critical reminder that formal decentralization and electoral competition are necessary but far from sufficient conditions for genuine democratic accountability.
The implications extend well beyond Mexico's borders and carry direct relevance for the design of governance and democracy-support programming funded through official development assistance. Donor agencies and international NGOs that channel resources toward decentralization reforms, electoral assistance, and subnational governance capacity-building often operate on the implicit assumption that competitive elections alone will generate accountability dividends over time. This study's findings suggest a more cautious reading: where party machines retain control over patronage resources and clientelist networks, electoral competition may coexist indefinitely with weak accountability, producing a durable equilibrium in which incumbents survive not because they perform well but because they have inherited superior organizational infrastructure. This has direct bearing on how development practitioners might rethink programming — shifting emphasis from simply supporting the mechanics of elections toward strengthening independent civil society monitoring capacity, investigative journalism, judicial oversight of public procurement and hiring practices, and transparency mechanisms that can disrupt clientelist exchange at the subnational level, where much authoritarian legacy persists furthest from national scrutiny.
Looking ahead, this research invites both scholars and practitioners to pay closer attention to subnational political economy as a critical, and often underexamined, site of democratic consolidation or its absence. As Mexico continues to navigate a period of significant political change, including the consolidation of new dominant political forces at the national level under MORENA, the question of whether new parties will replicate the same machine-based incumbency advantages once they control state governments becomes especially pressing, and offers a natural extension for future research tracking whether authoritarian-legacy dynamics are party-specific or structural features of Mexican federalism itself. More broadly, this line of inquiry underscores the value of long time-series, subnational comparative designs for understanding democratic durability, a methodological approach that researchers and donors interested in civil society and governance outcomes elsewhere in Latin America, and in hybrid regimes more generally, would do well to emulate. For practitioners in the development and civil society space, the lesson is clear: durable democratic accountability requires sustained attention to the organizational substrate of politics — the machines, networks, and resource flows that persist beneath the formal architecture of competitive elections — rather than treating electoral turnover itself as a sufficient marker of democratic health.