Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-08-05
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The question of why democracies sometimes look like the authoritarian systems they replaced is among the most pressing puzzles in comparative politics today. Across much of Latin America, the formal trappings of electoral competition — multiparty races, term limits, independent courts — coexist uneasily with political practices that trace their origins to decades of machine rule, clientelism, and party monopoly. Mexico offers perhaps the most instructive case in this regard. Having spent over seven decades under the hegemonic grip of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, Mexico's democratic transition at the turn of the millennium was widely celebrated as a watershed moment for the region. Yet as new research published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America makes clear, the institutional DNA of authoritarianism has proven remarkably durable, shaping electoral dynamics at the subnational level in ways that challenge easy narratives of democratization as a clean break with the past.
The article under review — "Authoritarian Legacies and Incumbency Advantage in Mexico's Gubernatorial Elections: Party Machines Over Performance" — takes as its central puzzle the drivers of electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial contests during the post-transition era. The research asks a deceptively straightforward question: what explains why incumbent governors or their designated successors continue to win so reliably, even in an era of ostensibly free and competitive elections? The paper's core argument is that democratic competition, combined with fiscal and administrative decentralization, did not simply dismantle the organizational infrastructure of the PRI era. Instead, it created conditions under which party machines — with their deep roots in local patronage networks, bureaucratic control, and territorial organization — were repurposed rather than dismantled. The implication is striking: what looks like electoral performance or voter reward for good governance may in fact be the expression of machine capacity, not merit-based democratic accountability. Governors who commanded robust party organizations, regardless of their actual policy records, enjoyed systematically higher probabilities of engineering favorable succession outcomes. Performance, in other words, was secondary to organizational muscle.
This finding resonates with a well-established body of comparative literature on path dependency and institutional persistence. The work of scholars such as Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way on competitive authoritarianism, or Beatriz Magaloni's earlier research on the PRI's survival strategies, has long suggested that authoritarian successor parties possess organizational advantages that do not evaporate with the formal opening of the electoral arena. Mexico's case is particularly illuminating because decentralization — often prescribed as a remedy for entrenched central power — paradoxically reinforced subnational machine politics. When resources and administrative authority were transferred to states, governors gained new levers with which to maintain patronage networks, reward loyalists, and discipline potential defectors. In this context, decentralization did not produce accountable local government so much as it produced well-resourced local fiefdoms. The research thus contributes to a growing revisionist literature that cautions against treating decentralization as inherently democratizing, particularly in settings where civil society is thin and oversight institutions remain weak.
The implications for our understanding of ODA policy and international democracy assistance are significant. Much of the development community's investment in electoral support, institutional strengthening, and civil society promotion in Mexico and the broader region has rested on the assumption that formal democratic institutions, once established, will gradually crowd out informal authoritarian practices. If the evidence suggests instead that subnational machine politics can persist — and even flourish — under formally democratic conditions, then external assistance programs need to recalibrate their targets and metrics. Supporting electoral management bodies and independent media at the national level may matter less than building the capacity of local civil society organizations to monitor gubernatorial conduct, demand transparency in public procurement, and contest the clientelistic exchanges that bind voters to incumbents. The IOCSS research agenda on civil society and development effectiveness speaks directly to this gap: the mechanisms through which organizational capacity is built at the community level, rather than at the apex of the state, are precisely those that matter for breaking the hold of machine politics over subnational electorates.
The broader regional context lends additional urgency to these findings. In recent years, observers have noted a democratic backsliding trend across Latin America — from the erosion of judicial independence in El Salvador to executive overreach in Bolivia and the consolidation of personalist power in Nicaragua and Venezuela. Against this backdrop, Mexico's experience offers a more subtle but equally instructive lesson: democratic erosion need not take the dramatic form of a coup or a constitutional crisis. It can occur incrementally, through the quiet persistence of machine networks that deprive voters of meaningful accountability even as the machinery of elections continues to function. The election of Claudia Sheinbaum in 2024 and the ongoing reconfiguration of MORENA's own organizational apparatus suggest that the dynamics identified in this research are not merely historical artifacts — they are live features of contemporary Mexican politics, now operating through a new hegemonic vehicle.
Looking forward, researchers and practitioners would do well to track whether Mexico's subnational electoral landscape is converging toward genuine accountability or merely cycling through successive machine configurations. The analytical lens provided by this research — disaggregating party organizational capacity from gubernatorial performance — offers a template for assessing democratic quality at the subnational level that could be productively applied across the region. For international organizations engaged in development programming, the challenge is to design interventions that do not merely strengthen formal institutions but actively disrupt the informal networks through which machine politics reproduces itself across electoral cycles. This requires sustained engagement with local civil society actors, independent journalism, and academic research communities — precisely the constituencies that authoritarian legacies have historically been most effective at marginalizing. The enduring lesson of the Mexican case is that democratic consolidation is not a destination reached by holding free elections; it is an ongoing contest over whether organizational capacity in service of accountability can outcompete organizational capacity in service of incumbency.