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

Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America  |  Published: 2026-09-21

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

Mexico's transition from a single-party dominant system to competitive democracy is often cited as one of Latin America's landmark cases of political liberalization, yet more than two decades after the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost the presidency in 2000, questions about the depth and quality of that democratization remain unresolved. The forthcoming article in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, "Authoritarian Legacies and Incumbency Advantage in Mexico's Gubernatorial Elections: Party Machines Over Performance," speaks directly to this unresolved tension. At a moment when democratic backsliding is a widely discussed phenomenon across the globe—from Central Europe to parts of Latin America and Southeast Asia—understanding how authoritarian-era institutional residues continue to shape electoral outcomes in supposedly consolidated democracies is not merely an academic exercise. It is central to assessing whether formal democratic transitions actually translate into accountable governance, or whether they leave intact the machinery that once sustained one-party rule, simply repackaged under competitive rules.

The article's central empirical puzzle—what explains electoral success in Mexico's thirty-two state gubernatorial races since the democratic transition, and how much of that success is attributable to governors' own performance in office—cuts against a comfortable assumption embedded in much of the literature on democratization: that competitive elections eventually reward good governance and punish poor performance, disciplining incumbents through the ballot box. The paper's core argument, that decentralization combined with nominally democratic competition has in practice entrenched "party machines" rather than performance-based accountability, is a significant corrective. It suggests that Mexico's federalist structure, rather than diffusing power and creating multiple accountability points as democratization theory often predicts, instead created thirty-two subnational arenas in which entrenched party organizations—many with roots in the PRI's historic corporatist and clientelist networks—could reconstitute local dominance. Incumbency advantage, in this telling, is not a reward for effective policy delivery but a structural artifact of organizational capacity, patronage networks, and institutional control inherited from the authoritarian period. This reframes gubernatorial elections less as referenda on governance and more as contests over who controls pre-existing party infrastructure.

This finding resonates with, and extends, broader regional patterns in the political economy of subnational authoritarianism that scholars such as Edward Gibson and others have identified across federal systems in Latin America and beyond. Mexico is a particularly rich laboratory because its transition was gradual and geographically uneven: democratization arrived state by state, often well before or after the 2000 presidential handover, leaving a patchwork of subnational regimes with varying degrees of genuine competitiveness. The article's implicit contribution to this literature is to show that even where competitive elections have taken firm root—where opposition parties can and do win—the underlying logic of electoral success may remain distinctly non-programmatic. This matters enormously for how researchers and donors conceptualize "democratic consolidation." A state can exhibit alternation in power, multiparty competition, and formally free elections while still operating on a political economy of patronage, machine mobilization, and resource distribution that closely mirrors authoritarian-era practices. For civil society and governance scholars, this is a caution against treating electoral turnover as a sufficient proxy for democratic quality or governmental accountability.

The policy implications of this research extend well beyond Mexico's borders and are of direct relevance to the international development and governance community, including donors and technical assistance providers engaged in decentralization and local governance programming across the Global South. Decentralization has long been promoted—by the World Bank, USAID, and bilateral donors alike—as a mechanism for improving accountability by bringing government closer to citizens and creating competitive pressure among subnational units. This article's findings imply that decentralization's accountability-enhancing effects are conditional on the absence of entrenched party machines capable of capturing local electoral markets; where such machines survive a national transition, decentralization may simply relocate authoritarian governance practices to the subnational level rather than dissolving them. This has direct bearing on how development practitioners design anti-corruption, public financial management, and local governance reform programs: technical interventions aimed at improving service delivery or fiscal transparency are unlikely to shift electoral incentives if voters are mobilized through patronage networks rather than performance evaluation. Similarly, for institutions monitoring democratic quality indices, the research suggests a need to disaggregate "electoral competitiveness" from "electoral accountability," since the two can diverge sharply at the subnational level even in nominally consolidated democracies.

Looking forward, this line of inquiry opens several productive avenues for both researchers and practitioners engaged with Mexico and comparable federal democracies. Scholars might extend the analysis to municipal-level elections, where party machine effects could be even more pronounced given lower media scrutiny and weaker opposition infrastructure, or examine whether recent shifts in Mexico's party system—including the rise and consolidation of MORENA as a new dominant force—represent a genuine break from machine politics or simply its reconstitution under a new partisan banner. For practitioners in the ODA and governance-reform space, the findings underscore the importance of pairing decentralization initiatives with deliberate efforts to strengthen programmatic linkages between citizens and parties, such as support for issue-based civil society organizations, independent local media, and transparent public expenditure tracking that can make performance information salient to voters. More broadly, the study is a timely reminder that the durability of authoritarian legacies is not simply a matter of formal institutions or elite behavior, but of the deeper organizational and clientelistic infrastructures that outlast regime transitions—an insight with clear resonance for civil society and democracy-support communities working in post-authoritarian contexts well beyond Mexico.

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