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

Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America  |  Published: 2026-09-25

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

Mexico's gradual democratization after seven decades of one-party dominance by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) remains one of the most closely watched transitions in comparative politics, and the mechanics of its subnational elections carry disproportionate weight for understanding how authoritarian-era institutions persist under competitive democracy. A new study appearing ahead of print in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, titled "Authoritarian Legacies and Incumbency Advantage in Mexico's Gubernatorial Elections: Party Machines Over Performance," takes up this question directly by asking what explains electoral success in Mexico's 32 gubernatorial races in the decades following the country's transition to multiparty competition. The timing of this research matters: as Latin America has cycled through waves of democratic backsliding, populist insurgency, and renewed authoritarian nostalgia over the past decade, understanding whether incumbency advantages in nominally democratic systems are earned through governance performance or inherited from older clientelist infrastructures speaks directly to debates over the quality and durability of subnational democracy across the region.

The article's central argument, as summarized in its abstract, is that democratic competition in Mexico's states did not simply reward or punish governors for policy performance, but instead operated in combination with decentralisation processes that redistributed resources and authority to state-level party organizations. This is a meaningful departure from a purely performance-based theory of retrospective voting, in which voters reward incumbents for economic growth, service delivery, or public safety. Instead, the paper's framing—captured in its subtitle "Party Machines Over Performance"—suggests that entrenched party structures, built up during decades of PRI hegemony at the federal and state levels, continued to confer electoral advantages on incumbent parties in gubernatorial races even after Mexico's democratic transition formally leveled the electoral playing field. The paper's core empirical puzzle, then, is not merely whether incumbents win, but why: whether their victories reflect responsiveness to constituents or reflect the residual strength of authoritarian-era party machines that decentralisation inadvertently reinforced rather than dismantled.

This finding resonates with a broader body of scholarship on subnational authoritarian enclaves in federal systems, a concept most associated with research on Mexican state politics but with clear analogues in Argentina, Brazil, and other Latin American federations where national democratization did not evenly penetrate state and local governance. Mexico is a particularly instructive case because its transition was gradual and decentralized rather than a single rupture: opposition parties won governorships in states like Baja California as early as 1989, well before the PRI lost the presidency in 2000, meaning that different Mexican states have had wildly divergent durations of exposure to genuine electoral competition. This variation is precisely what allows researchers to isolate the effect of decentralisation and party-machine persistence from simple regime-type change, and it is why gubernatorial elections—rather than presidential races—offer the more analytically powerful terrain for testing theories about authoritarian legacies. The article's focus on this subnational layer positions it within a growing literature arguing that national-level democratic indicators can mask substantial unevenness in how competitive, accountable, or clientelist governance actually is at the state level.

For institutions like IOCSS that track the political economy of development assistance and civil society space, this research carries implications beyond electoral studies narrowly conceived. Donor agencies and multilateral institutions that fund decentralisation reforms—often on the theory that devolving fiscal and administrative authority to subnational governments improves accountability and responsiveness—should take seriously the possibility that decentralisation can also entrench incumbent party machines rather than open competitive political marketplaces. This has direct bearing on how governance and democracy-support programming is designed in federal or quasi-federal developing countries, where technical assistance often targets state or provincial capacity without adequately accounting for how existing party infrastructures capture the very institutions being strengthened. If decentralisation combined with authoritarian legacies produces incumbency advantages disconnected from performance, then civil society organizations and electoral monitoring bodies operating at the state level in Mexico and comparable federations may need to recalibrate their theories of change around what actually drives electoral accountability.

Looking forward, this study invites researchers and practitioners to treat gubernatorial and other subnational elections as a distinct unit of analysis rather than a scaled-down version of national contests, particularly in federal systems with long authoritarian histories. For scholars, the next empirical frontier is likely to involve disaggregating which components of "party machine" strength—patronage networks, media control, clientelist voter mobilization, or local bureaucratic capture—matter most, and whether newer parties such as MORENA, which displaced the PRI-PAN duopoly at the federal level in 2018, are capable of building comparable machine advantages of their own or are instead vulnerable to the same performance-based volatility the article associates with genuine democratic competition. For practitioners in the ODA and governance-support space, the paper is a reminder that formal decentralisation reforms are not self-executing democratizing forces, and that program design should incorporate baseline assessments of incumbent party infrastructure at the state level before assuming that devolved authority will translate into more accountable, performance-responsive governance. As Mexico's states continue to serve as a natural laboratory for studying the durability of authoritarian legacies under formal democracy, this line of research offers a template for similarly structured investigations in other federal developing democracies where IOCSS's comparative work on civil society and political economy is likely to extend.

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