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

Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America  |  Published: 2026-10-01

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

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Subnational elections have become one of the most consequential arenas for understanding the durability of democratic transitions in Latin America, and Mexico offers a particularly instructive case. Since the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost its seven-decade grip on the presidency in 2000, scholars have debated whether Mexico's thirty-two states genuinely broke with authoritarian patterns of governance or merely relocated them to the subnational level. A forthcoming article in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, "Authoritarian Legacies and Incumbency Advantage in Mexico's Gubernatorial Elections: Party Machines Over Performance," published Ahead of Print in 2026, takes up this question directly by asking what has actually explained electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial races since the democratic transition, and how much governors' own performance in office has mattered relative to inherited party structures. The timing of this inquiry matters: as global indices from Freedom House and V-Dem have flagged democratic backsliding across multiple regions, Mexico's state-level elections serve as a live test of whether formal democratization since 2000 has translated into substantive electoral accountability or whether older authoritarian machinery continues to determine outcomes beneath the surface of competitive politics.

The article's central argument, as its title makes explicit, is that party machines have outweighed governor performance in shaping electoral outcomes at the gubernatorial level. The abstract frames this as a function of two interacting forces: the introduction of genuine democratic competition after 2000, and the decentralisation of fiscal and administrative authority to state governments that accompanied Mexico's broader political liberalization. Rather than finding that voters reward or punish governors based on service delivery, infrastructure investment, or security outcomes, the study's framing suggests that incumbency advantage in gubernatorial races is substantially inherited from pre-existing authoritarian-era party infrastructure, particularly the clientelist and patronage networks the PRI built during its hegemonic period. This is a meaningful departure from a purely retrospective-voting model of electoral accountability, and it implies that decentralisation, often championed in the ODA and governance literature as a mechanism for improving local accountability, may have instead entrenched machine politics by handing incumbent parties greater discretionary resources to distribute to local power brokers.

This finding resonates with a wider body of comparative research on authoritarian successor parties across Latin America, from the Colorado Party's legacy in Paraguay to the Peronist machine in Argentine provinces, where scholars have long observed that formal democratization does not automatically dismantle the organizational assets accumulated under single-party or authoritarian rule. Mexico is a particularly rich case because its transition was gradual and negotiated rather than a rupture, allowing the PRI and its state-level apparatuses to survive electoral competition in a majority of states even after losing the presidency in 2000 and again in 2012 and 2018 under Enrique Peña Nieto and Andrés Manuel López Obrador's Morena, respectively. The gubernatorial focus is significant because Mexican governors have historically wielded outsized control over state budgets, security forces, and public employment relative to their formal constitutional powers, a pattern documented extensively in the political economy literature on Mexican federalism. By centering party machines rather than governor performance as the explanatory variable, this article contributes to a growing consensus that decentralisation reforms intended to improve democratic responsiveness can, absent complementary institutional safeguards, simply redistribute rather than dissolve authoritarian-era advantages.

For policy audiences engaged in democracy and governance programming, including donors and civil society organizations that support electoral integrity and decentralisation initiatives across Latin America, this research carries direct implications. If incumbency advantage in Mexican gubernatorial elections is driven primarily by inherited party machinery rather than demonstrable governance performance, then technical assistance focused narrowly on improving public service delivery or governor accountability metrics may have limited effect on electoral competitiveness unless paired with reforms targeting party financing, patronage networks, and state-level electoral administration. This has particular relevance for organizations such as Mexico's Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE), which oversees both federal and coordinated state elections, and for international observers who have historically concentrated monitoring resources on presidential contests while paying comparatively less attention to the thirty-two separate gubernatorial races that occur on staggered cycles. Civil society groups working on political finance transparency and anti-clientelism initiatives in Mexico, as well as comparative governance researchers tracking similar dynamics in Central America and the Andean region, may find in this study empirical grounding for arguing that decentralisation without parallel party-system reform risks reproducing rather than remedying authoritarian legacies.

Looking ahead, this article invites further comparative work testing whether the party-machine-over-performance dynamic identified in Mexico's gubernatorial elections generalizes to other federal or decentralized Latin American systems, and whether it holds consistently across Morena-led, PRI-led, and opposition-led states as Mexico's party system continues to fragment following the 2024 election of Claudia Sheinbaum. For researchers, the study underscores the value of disaggregating subnational elections from national-level democratic assessments, since aggregate democracy scores can mask significant variation in machine politics at the state level. For practitioners in the ODA and democracy-support community, the findings suggest that monitoring and technical assistance frameworks should incorporate indicators of party organizational continuity, not merely governance outcomes, when assessing the health of subnational democratic competition. As Mexico continues to navigate the tension between formal electoral pluralism and entrenched party infrastructure, this Journal of Politics in Latin America contribution offers a timely empirical anchor for both scholarly and policy conversations about what genuine democratization at the subnational level actually requires.

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