Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-29
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian institutional legacies within nominally democratic systems represents one of the most consequential and underexplored puzzles in comparative political science. Mexico's democratic transition, formally consummated with the defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the 2000 presidential election after more than seven decades of single-party dominance, offered scholars and practitioners what appeared to be a paradigmatic case of electoral democratization. Yet the trajectory of subnational politics in Mexico following that watershed moment revealed a far more complex and troubling dynamic — one in which the formal architecture of democratic competition coexisted with, and in many respects reinforced, inherited structures of political control rooted in the authoritarian past. The article under examination in the Journal of Politics in Latin America engages precisely this tension, asking what explains electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial elections in the post-transition period and to what degree governors themselves functioned as architects of electoral outcomes rather than merely as beneficiaries of them. These questions carry significance well beyond Mexican borders, touching on foundational debates about the quality and depth of democratic consolidation across the developing world.
The paper's central argument — that party machines, rather than gubernatorial performance, constitute the decisive variable in explaining electoral outcomes at the subnational level — challenges a broadly intuitive assumption embedded in much of the democratic accountability literature. Conventional theories of electoral behavior presuppose that voters reward competent governance and punish poor performance, a logic that underwrites the normative case for democratic elections as mechanisms of vertical accountability. In Mexico's gubernatorial context, however, the article finds that this performance-reward nexus is substantially disrupted. Instead, incumbents and their designated successors draw their electoral strength from organizational capacity: the capacity to mobilize clientelistic networks, to distribute targeted benefits through party structures, and to leverage state resources in ways that cement loyalty rather than respond to public preferences. This finding implies that Mexico's democratic transition, whatever its significance at the national level, did not fundamentally disrupt the logic of political control that had sustained PRI hegemony for generations. The machine endured even as the regime formally changed.
The role of decentralization deserves particular attention in this analysis, as it introduces a dimension that complicates simple narratives of democratization as a linear liberalizing force. The paper argues that democratic competition, combined with the decentralization of political authority and fiscal resources that accompanied Mexico's transition, created conditions under which subnational actors — above all governors — acquired expanded capacities to shape electoral environments in their favor. Decentralization, in theory, should bring government closer to citizens and enhance local accountability. In practice, across many Latin American contexts, it has frequently empowered regional political bosses who exploit newly transferred resources and authority to entrench themselves against competitive challenge. Mexico's governors emerged from the transition period not merely as administrative executives but as political machines in their own right, controlling appointment networks, public works contracts, media environments, and security apparatuses in ways that structurally advantaged their preferred successors. The authoritarian legacy here is not merely ideational or cultural but deeply institutional: the organizational templates, patronage circuits, and informal rules of the game that PRI-era governors deployed were adapted rather than dismantled.
From the perspective of comparative political economy and the international development community, these findings carry important implications for how scholars and practitioners conceptualize the relationship between democratic formal institutions and substantive political change. International donors and ODA frameworks have long operated on assumptions, sometimes explicit and sometimes tacit, that the introduction of competitive elections constitutes a meaningful threshold in the democratization process, after which governance conditionalities and civil society support can gradually promote deeper accountability. Mexico's subnational experience suggests that this threshold model is insufficient. The persistence of machine politics in contexts of formal democratic competition indicates that electoral institutions alone cannot generate accountability without broader transformations in the organizational structure of political parties, the independence of subnational media, the robustness of civil society organizations capable of monitoring incumbents, and the integrity of public financial management. Aid strategies that focus narrowly on electoral observation or party pluralism without attending to the organizational and material infrastructure of incumbency advantage risk misdiagnosing the problem they seek to address. The subnational level, as this research underscores, is frequently where the most consequential political battles over democratic quality are actually fought.
The research also intersects productively with a growing body of comparative literature on what scholars have variously termed competitive authoritarianism, electoral authoritarianism, and subnational authoritarianism — frameworks that seek to theorize political regimes in which the coexistence of formal democratic procedures and substantively unequal political competition is not a transitional anomaly but a stable equilibrium. Gibson's foundational work on subnational authoritarianism, Levitsky and Way's analysis of competitive authoritarian regimes, and more recent contributions examining the politics of subnational variation in Latin America all converge on a conclusion that resonates with the article's findings: that national-level democratization is fully compatible with, and can even sustain, authoritarian enclave politics at lower levels of government. Mexico's gubernatorial politics thus offers not a peculiar exception but an analytically generative case that illuminates broader patterns visible from Venezuela's regional barons to Brazil's state-level coronelismo to the entrenched machinery politics of Indian state governments. In each setting, the formal mechanisms of accountability — elections, audits, freedom of press — operate within organizational fields structured by incumbency advantages that cannot be dissolved merely by holding elections.
Looking forward, the research agenda opened by this article points in several productive directions. First, there is need for more granular analysis of the conditions under which machine politics is disrupted — whether through civil society mobilization, national-level policy intervention, economic shocks that degrade patronage networks, or the emergence of genuinely programmatic opposition parties capable of competing on policy grounds. Mexico's own recent political trajectory, including the rise of Morena as a nationally dominant force and its complex relationship with the very machine politics it nominally challenged, offers a rich and evolving laboratory for such analysis. Second, the methodological challenge of isolating the relative contributions of performance and machine capacity to electoral outcomes in data-poor subnational environments deserves continued attention; the article's approach of leveraging longitudinal gubernatorial data to disentangle these effects represents a significant methodological contribution that other regional scholars would do well to emulate. Third, for the practitioner community — development agencies, civil society organizations, and bilateral donors engaged with governance programming in Latin America and beyond — the findings counsel a reorientation toward the organizational and material conditions that determine whether electoral competition can generate genuine accountability, rather than treating elections as ends in themselves. The quality of democracy, in Mexico as in countless other transitional contexts, will ultimately be determined not by the formal existence of competitive elections but by whether the organizational field within which those elections take place is structured by rules, resources, and capacities that make incumbency advantage earned rather than inherited.