[JPLA] Authoritarian Legacies and Incumbency Advantage in Mexico's Gubernatorial Elections: Party Machines Over Performance

Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America  |  Published: 2026-09-17

Category: 정권·선거 변동  |  Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics

Authoritarian legacies rarely vanish with the signing of a new electoral law; they migrate downward, embedding themselves in the machinery of subnational politics long after national democratization has been declared complete. This is the central puzzle animating the article "Authoritarian Legacies and Incumbency Advantage in Mexico's Gubernatorial Elections: Party Machines Over Performance," published ahead of print in the Journal of Politics in Latin America. Mexico's transition away from seven decades of single-party dominance under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is often held up as a textbook case of gradual, negotiated democratization, culminating in the historic 2000 presidential alternation. Yet three decades later, scholars and practitioners of governance continue to grapple with a persistent anomaly: in many states, electoral outcomes for governorships appear only loosely tied to the actual performance of incumbents, and instead seem to track the durability of inherited party organizations. At a moment when democratic backsliding, party fragmentation, and the erosion of accountability mechanisms are being debated across Latin America and beyond, understanding why voters in a formally competitive system continue to reward machine politics over governance outcomes carries significance well beyond Mexico's borders.

The article's core argument, as its title signals, is that incumbency advantage in Mexico's gubernatorial races is driven less by the substantive performance of governors — economic management, public service delivery, security outcomes — than by the residual strength of party machines built during the authoritarian era and adapted to the decentralized, competitive environment that followed. This is a meaningful departure from conventional retrospective-voting models, which assume that voters primarily reward or punish incumbents based on tangible governance results. Instead, the paper situates Mexico's subnational electoral dynamics within the literature on "subnational authoritarianism" and territorial party bastions, associated with scholars such as Edward Gibson and Agustina Giraudy, who have shown that national democratization can coexist with durable authoritarian enclaves at the state or provincial level. What is distinctive here is the explicit linkage between decentralization and the survival of these machines: as fiscal and administrative authority devolved to Mexican states after the PRI's national defeat, governors inherited not just policy responsibility but also the clientelist networks, patronage resources, and organizational infrastructure that had underpinned PRI rule for decades. Democratic competition, rather than dismantling these networks, appears in many cases to have given incumbents new electoral tools — control over state budgets, public employment, and local media relationships — that substitute for, rather than complement, demonstrable governing performance.

This finding resonates with, and extends, a broader body of political economy scholarship on how decentralization reforms — frequently promoted by international development actors and multilateral lenders as instruments of democratic deepening and improved local accountability — can produce paradoxical effects when they are layered onto pre-existing authoritarian party structures. Across Latin America, from Argentina's provincial "feudos" to Brazil's coronelismo-inflected state politics, the transfer of resources and authority to subnational governments has repeatedly empowered entrenched political machines as readily as it has fostered responsive local governance. For organizations engaged in democracy and governance-focused official development assistance, this is a cautionary pattern: institutional reforms designed on the assumption that electoral competition alone disciplines incumbents may underperform if they do not also address the organizational and resource asymmetries that give legacy parties durable advantages. The Mexican case is particularly instructive because it combines a genuinely competitive multiparty system — PRI, PAN, and PRD/Morena have all won and lost gubernatorial races — with the persistence of machine-based advantage, suggesting that formal competitiveness is not a sufficient condition for performance-based accountability.

The policy and research implications extend in several directions. For democracy-support and governance programming, the findings imply that interventions aimed narrowly at improving electoral administration, campaign finance transparency, or media pluralism may fail to loosen the grip of party machines if they do not also target the underlying patronage architecture — public sector employment practices, discretionary social spending, and party control over local bureaucracies. This has direct relevance for donor agencies and civil society organizations working on political party strengthening or anti-clientelism initiatives in decentralized federal systems, not only in Mexico but across other federal or quasi-federal developing democracies where subnational governments control significant discretionary resources. For the academic literature, the study contributes a useful corrective to performance-voting models that have been developed largely from data in consolidated, high-information democracies; it suggests that in contexts of weak institutionalization, incomplete media penetration, and legacy party infrastructure, the microfoundations of voter choice may operate quite differently, with organizational capacity substituting for the retrospective evaluations that classical accountability theory presumes.

Looking forward, this line of research invites further comparative and longitudinal inquiry into whether the erosion — or renewal — of authoritarian-origin party machines follows a generational logic, fading as the organizational memory of one-party rule dissipates, or whether such machines are being actively reconstituted by newer dominant actors, including Morena at the national level, which has itself been accused of building analogous patronage structures in the states it now controls. For practitioners in the ODA and civil society space, the study is a reminder that democratic consolidation is not a linear or self-executing process: formal alternation in power and competitive elections can mask the reproduction of authoritarian governing logics at the subnational scale. Future research disaggregating which specific machine resources — public employment, conditional cash transfer administration, media capture, or local security apparatuses — matter most for incumbency advantage would sharpen both the theoretical model and the practical toolkit available to reformers seeking to align Mexican, and more broadly Latin American, electoral competition with genuine governance accountability.

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