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

Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America  |  Published: 2026-09-19

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

Mexico's gradual transition from one-party hegemony under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to a competitive multiparty democracy is often cited as one of the more consequential democratization episodes of the late twentieth century, yet three decades after the PRI's landmark defeat in the 2000 presidential election, the persistence of authoritarian-era political practices at the subnational level remains one of the most stubborn puzzles in Latin American politics. The new study published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, "Authoritarian Legacies and Incumbency Advantage in Mexico's Gubernatorial Elections: Party Machines Over Performance," arrives at a moment when scholars and democracy-support practitioners alike are reassessing whether formal electoral competition is sufficient to dislodge entrenched patterns of clientelism and elite capture. As international donors and civil society organizations increasingly channel resources toward decentralized governance reforms on the assumption that local accountability will naturally follow from free and fair elections, this article's central question — what actually explains electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial races — carries implications well beyond the Mexican case itself.

The article's core contribution lies in disentangling two competing explanations for gubernatorial electoral outcomes: whether governors win reelection or maintain their party's grip on state government because they perform well in office, delivering public goods and competent administration, or because they inherit and operate durable party machines built during the era of single-party rule. The findings, as the abstract indicates, point toward the latter: democratic competition combined with administrative decentralization did not simply create a level playing field in which voters reward good governance, but rather transplanted authoritarian-era organizational infrastructure — patronage networks, clientelist brokerage systems, and centralized party discipline — into a formally democratic institutional shell. This is a significant departure from performance-voting models common in the comparative electoral behavior literature, which assume that once meaningful competition is introduced, incumbents are disciplined by voters based on outcomes such as economic growth, service delivery, or corruption control. The Mexican gubernatorial data instead suggest that incumbency advantage operates largely independent of governance quality, rooted instead in organizational continuity from the PRI period that certain parties — not exclusively the PRI itself, but any party capable of capturing and reproducing these machine structures — have been able to exploit.

This finding resonates with and extends a substantial body of scholarship on "subnational authoritarianism," associated with researchers such as Edward Gibson and Agustina Giraudy, which has long argued that national-level democratization in federal systems can coexist indefinitely with authoritarian enclaves at the state or provincial level. Mexico's federal structure, combined with the fiscal and administrative decentralization pursued since the 1980s and 1990s, effectively created thirty-two semi-autonomous political arenas in which local elites could adapt rather than abandon authoritarian toolkits. This pattern is not unique to Mexico: comparable dynamics have been documented in Argentina's provincial party machines, in Brazil's coronelismo-descended clientelist networks in the Northeast, and in various post-Soviet and Southeast Asian contexts where decentralization reforms, intended to democratize governance, instead handed durable political monopolies to regional strongmen and dominant-party organizations. For the broader field of political economy and civil society studies, this reinforces a growing consensus that decentralization is not inherently democratizing — its effects depend heavily on the organizational inheritance and institutional guardrails present at the moment of reform.

The implications for policy and for the donor and civil society community that IOCSS engages with are considerable. Development agencies and democracy-assistance programs have for decades treated subnational elections and decentralized budgeting as proxies for democratic deepening, often measuring success through election frequency, turnout, or formal competitiveness rather than through the underlying organizational balance of power between incumbents and challengers. If incumbency advantage in contexts like Mexico's gubernatorial races is driven primarily by inherited party machinery rather than responsiveness to citizens, then interventions aimed at improving public service delivery, transparency, or participatory budgeting may do relatively little to alter electoral outcomes or enhance genuine accountability, since voters are not necessarily rewarding or punishing governments on those bases in the first place. This suggests that civil society support strategies focused narrowly on performance transparency — anti-corruption audits, service-delivery scorecards, participatory monitoring — may need to be paired with efforts that directly target the organizational asymmetries between incumbents and opposition: campaign finance regulation, media access rules, civil service protections that insulate public employees from being conscripted into patronage networks, and support for opposition party institutionalization. In other words, the study implicitly argues for a shift in democracy-support paradigms from an emphasis on electoral mechanics toward a deeper engagement with party organizational structures and the machinery of political mobilization.

There is also a methodological and theoretical significance to this work for the study of comparative democratization more broadly. Much of the literature on democratic transitions in the 1990s and 2000s, influenced by modernization theory and rational-choice institutionalism, implicitly assumed that authoritarian legacies would erode over time as new generations of voters and politicians socialized into competitive politics. Mexico's gubernatorial trajectory, spanning roughly a quarter-century of multiparty competition, offers a long enough time horizon to test this assumption empirically, and the finding that machine-based incumbency advantage persists rather than performance-based accountability emerging organically is a sobering data point for that literature. It suggests that authoritarian legacies are not simply residual friction that dissipates with democratic maturation, but can become self-reinforcing features of the political landscape, particularly where decentralization concentrates resources and appointment powers in the hands of incumbent parties at the subnational level.

Looking forward, this research invites both scholars and practitioners to pay closer attention to the subnational scale as a distinct unit of democratic analysis rather than treating national-level regime classification as sufficient. For researchers, it opens avenues for comparative work examining which conditions — competitive judicial oversight, strong local media ecosystems, robust civil society monitoring, or federal-level electoral authority intervention — might successfully break machine-based incumbency cycles, and whether Mexico's more recent political turbulence, including the rise of Morena as a new dominant force since 2018, will reproduce or disrupt these dynamics as it inherits gubernatorial power in many states once held by the PRI or PAN. For development and governance practitioners, the study is a reminder that formal decentralization reforms, however well-intentioned, require careful sequencing and complementary institution-building to avoid simply relocating authoritarian practices rather than eliminating them. As international attention increasingly turns to democratic backsliding and the durability of illiberal practices even within nominally democratic systems, Mexico's gubernatorial experience offers a cautionary and empirically grounded case study of how authoritarian legacies can outlive the authoritarian regimes that produced them.

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