Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-08-07
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian institutional arrangements within formally democratic systems represents one of the most consequential and underexamined challenges in comparative politics. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in Mexico, a country whose democratic transition has been celebrated as one of Latin America's landmark political transformations yet whose subnational political landscape continues to exhibit patterns of competition and incumbency that bear the unmistakable imprint of seven decades of single-party rule. The research published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America on authoritarian legacies and incumbency advantage in Mexico's gubernatorial elections arrives at a critical juncture, as scholars and practitioners alike are forced to reckon with the uncomfortable possibility that democracy's formal arrival does not guarantee its substantive consolidation — and that the organizational infrastructure of authoritarian parties can survive, adapt, and even thrive within competitive electoral environments.
Mexico's transition away from the Partido Revolucionario Institucional's (PRI) hegemonic grip was gradual, contested, and deeply uneven across territorial levels. While the federal executive finally changed hands in 2000 when Vicente Fox of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) won the presidency, the dynamics at the gubernatorial level had been undergoing a more complex evolution for years prior. Subnational elections became arenas of genuine competition earlier than federal contests in some states, yet in others the PRI's organizational machinery remained dominant well into the democratic era. This variation across Mexico's thirty-one states has made gubernatorial elections a particularly rich laboratory for understanding how authoritarian legacies manifest in the post-transition period. The article under review enters this analytical space by asking a question with profound implications: in an era of nominally competitive elections, does gubernatorial performance actually determine electoral outcomes, or do the structural advantages embedded in party machines remain the decisive factor? The authors' argument — that party organizational capacity and incumbency advantage rooted in machine politics rather than performance accountability explains electoral success — challenges a foundational assumption of democratic theory, namely that elected officials are held responsible through the ballot box for their conduct in office.
The theoretical core of this argument draws on a rich tradition of scholarship on patronage politics, clientelism, and organizational power in transitional democracies. Classical accounts of machine politics, from the American urban machines of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to contemporary analyses of distributive politics in the developing world, consistently find that party organizations capable of delivering selective benefits to targeted constituencies can insulate incumbents from the democratic accountability mechanism. In the Mexican context, the PRI spent decades constructing an extraordinarily elaborate system of corporatist linkages — connecting the party apparatus to labor unions, peasant organizations, business associations, and state bureaucracies — that allowed it to mobilize voters and distribute resources in ways that bore little relationship to aggregate economic performance or public goods provision. The critical insight of the research examined here is that decentralization, widely anticipated by reformers as a mechanism for strengthening local accountability and deepening democratic governance, may have paradoxically reinforced these dynamics by placing greater fiscal resources and administrative discretion in the hands of governors whose primary political asset was their organizational reach rather than their policy competence. Decentralization enlarged the resource base available to governors without necessarily subjecting them to the kind of programmatic accountability that would require performance-driven electoral competition.
This finding connects to broader regional patterns that have troubled democratic theorists and development practitioners across Latin America for the past two decades. Edward Gibson's influential work on "boundary control" and subnational authoritarianism demonstrated that federalism creates opportunities for regional elites to maintain authoritarian practices within their territorial domains even as national politics democratizes. Jonathan Fox's research on clientelism and civil society in Mexico similarly illustrated how organizational resources could be deployed to constrain the choices available to nominally free voters. More recently, the literature on democratic backsliding has expanded its analytical gaze beyond the dramatic democratic breakdowns of the twentieth century to examine the quieter erosion of accountability norms and competitive fairness through the exploitation of incumbency advantages — what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way termed "competitive authoritarianism" at the national level but which operates with particular force at the subnational level where monitoring is weaker, civil society is less organized, and national media attention is more diffuse. Mexico's governors, especially in states where opposition parties lack organizational depth, have historically operated in exactly this kind of environment, using control over state resources, bureaucratic appointments, and regulatory authority to tilt the competitive playing field in ways that formal electoral rules cannot easily counteract.
The policy implications of these findings are significant for both Mexican domestic politics and for the international development community engaged in governance reform across the Global South. If incumbency advantage in gubernatorial elections flows primarily from organizational machine capacity rather than performance, then standard toolkit interventions focused on strengthening formal electoral administration, enhancing transparency in public procurement, or improving the technical quality of public service delivery will have limited effect on the quality of democratic accountability at the subnational level. What these findings suggest instead is that the organizational dimension of democratic competition — the capacity of opposition parties to build durable grassroots networks, the ability of civil society organizations to monitor state resource allocation independently, and the empowerment of local media to scrutinize incumbents' use of public funds — may be more determinative of competitive electoral outcomes than the administrative reforms that international donors typically fund. The research also raises pointed questions about the sequencing and design of decentralization programs: when fiscal transfers are made to subnational governments without commensurate investments in horizontal accountability institutions, the predictable result is that whoever controls the governorship gains organizational advantages that compound over time, transforming structural incumbency into near-permanent electoral dominance regardless of developmental outcomes.
Looking forward, this article makes a contribution that extends well beyond Mexico's specific democratic trajectory. As democratic backsliding accelerates globally and as the relationship between electoral competition and genuine political accountability grows increasingly fraught, research that disaggregates the mechanisms through which authoritarian legacies survive formal democratic transitions becomes essential scholarly infrastructure. Mexico's current political moment — marked by the consolidation of Morena as a dominant party at the federal level and the ongoing negotiation of power across a diverse subnational landscape — makes these questions freshly urgent. Whether the patterns identified by the authors represent a legacy gradually eroding under the pressure of genuine interparty competition, or a durable equilibrium in which machine politics perpetually displaces performance accountability, remains an open and consequential question. For practitioners in the ODA and governance reform space, the research underscores the necessity of attending to party organizational capacity and subnational power structures — not merely formal institutional design — as the true determinants of whether democratic transitions produce the accountability relationships that development theory assumes. The best-designed electoral commission is ultimately limited in what it can accomplish when the parties contesting elections are themselves unequally endowed with the organizational resources that determine who can mobilize, who can monitor, and who ultimately wins.