Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-25
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian institutional legacies within formally democratic systems represents one of the most consequential and underappreciated phenomena in comparative politics today. Across the Global South, transitions from single-party or military rule have rarely produced clean breaks with the organizational habits, clientelistic networks, and electoral machinery that sustained authoritarian incumbents for decades. Mexico offers perhaps the most analytically rich case for examining this dynamic. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governed Mexico without meaningful electoral competition for over seven decades, constructing a vast apparatus of patronage, corporatist linkages, and sub-national political control that did not simply dissolve when multiparty competition arrived at the federal level in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Understanding how and why subnational incumbents — particularly governors — continued to win elections in the post-transition period therefore speaks not only to Mexican politics but to a broader set of questions about democratic consolidation, the durability of authoritarian organizational forms, and the conditions under which voter preferences actually translate into accountability.
The article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, examining incumbency advantage in Mexico's gubernatorial elections through the lens of authoritarian legacies, engages directly with a puzzle that should trouble anyone committed to the normative promise of democratic transitions. The central argument, as indicated by the paper's subtitle — "Party Machines Over Performance" — is that electoral success in gubernatorial contests cannot be adequately explained by the performance of incumbent administrations. Rather, it is the organizational infrastructure of parties, particularly those with deep roots in the PRI's authoritarian era, that drives electoral outcomes. This is a significant finding because it challenges a foundational assumption of democratic theory: that voters reward competent governance and punish failure. If party machines systematically override performance signals, then elections in transitional democracies may be less an instrument of accountability than a mechanism for reproducing established power structures under new formal rules.
The paper's analytical contribution becomes sharper when situated within the literature on decentralization and subnational authoritarianism. Mexico's democratic transition was primarily a federal-level phenomenon; the alternation of power at the national level in 2000, when Vicente Fox ended 71 years of PRI federal control, did not automatically democratize the subnational arena. Scholars such as Edward Gibson and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros have documented the ways in which Mexican governors retained extraordinary discretion over public resources, patronage networks, and state-level media environments long after federal democratization. Decentralization, which accelerated in Mexico through the 1990s and 2000s as fiscal transfers and administrative responsibilities shifted to states, paradoxically strengthened the hand of incumbent governors by giving them greater resources to distribute through clientelistic channels. The paper under review appears to build on this insight by showing that decentralization, combined with the organizational inheritance of authoritarian party structures, created conditions under which incumbency advantage became structurally entrenched rather than contingent on administrative performance. This matters enormously for development and ODA practitioners who design governance reform programs premised on the assumption that decentralization inherently promotes accountability — the Mexican evidence suggests the relationship is far more conditional.
From the perspective of regional and global trends, Mexico's gubernatorial politics also illuminates patterns visible across Latin America and beyond. The literature on competitive authoritarianism and hybrid regimes, developed by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way among others, has established that formal electoral competition and genuine democratic accountability are not synonymous. In contexts where incumbents control state resources, media access, and party networks built under authoritarian conditions, elections may be competitive in a procedural sense while remaining deeply unequal in terms of the resources available to challengers. Brazil's state-level politics, Venezuela before its slide into outright authoritarianism, and various contexts in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia exhibit analogous dynamics. The specific contribution of the Mexican case is its longitudinal richness: decades of gubernatorial elections following a clear transition moment allow researchers to trace how authoritarian organizational legacies persist, mutate, or erode over time, and under what conditions performance signals begin to acquire electoral weight relative to machine politics. For ODA donors and multilateral institutions investing in electoral integrity and governance strengthening across the developing world, this kind of subnational, longitudinal analysis is essential — it reveals that institutional reform at the national level may leave subnational power structures largely untouched.
The policy implications of this research are substantial and, in important respects, sobering. Governance reform programs in transitional democracies frequently focus on national-level institutions — electoral commissions, anti-corruption agencies, judicial independence — while the subnational arena, where the daily experience of governance is most immediate for citizens, receives comparatively less sustained attention. If party machines built under authoritarian conditions continue to determine electoral outcomes at the gubernatorial level despite formal democratization, then the quality of local public services, citizen participation, and civil society engagement is likely to remain constrained. Development organizations working in Mexico and analogous contexts should consider targeted investments in subnational electoral monitoring, civil society capacity-building at the state and municipal levels, and transparency mechanisms that make gubernatorial resource allocation legible to citizens and opposition actors. At the same time, researchers should resist the temptation to frame authoritarian legacies as uniformly static or deterministic: the paper's framing implies that the relative weight of machine politics versus performance-based accountability is a variable, not a constant, and identifying the conditions — electoral competitiveness thresholds, civil society density, media pluralism, opposition party strength — under which performance begins to matter more is itself a research agenda of significant practical consequence.
Looking forward, Mexico's political landscape has shifted considerably with the rise of MORENA and the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now Claudia Sheinbaum, parties and leaders who came to power explicitly positioning themselves against the PRI's machine politics. Whether MORENA has reproduced analogous organizational structures under new ideological branding, or whether it represents a genuine disruption of the party-machine model at the subnational level, is a question that the analytical framework developed in this paper is well-positioned to address. The findings also carry implications for how scholars and practitioners think about the relationship between democratic quality and development outcomes: if subnational governance in large, middle-income democracies like Mexico continues to be shaped more by organizational inheritance than by policy performance, the accountability mechanisms that foreign aid programs routinely assume to be operational may be far weaker than projected. This calls for a more granular, historically grounded approach to assessing governance context — one that takes seriously the long shadow of authoritarian institution-building and treats democratic consolidation as a genuinely incomplete, contested, and reversible process rather than a threshold that, once crossed, can be assumed to function as textbooks describe.