Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-08-09
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics
The persistence of authoritarian political structures within formally democratic systems represents one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics. Nowhere is this tension more instructive than in Latin America, where wave after wave of democratic transitions over the past four decades have produced institutional frameworks that coexist uneasily with inherited machines of political control. Mexico's trajectory is particularly revealing: a country that dismantled the hegemonic dominance of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) at the national level in 2000 yet continued to exhibit patterns of subnational political entrenchment that challenged the assumption that competitive elections alone are sufficient to dissolve legacy power structures. A recent article in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, examining authoritarian legacies and incumbency advantage in Mexico's gubernatorial elections, places this tension at the center of inquiry, asking not merely whether governors win elections but why they win — and what that answer reveals about the deeper architecture of political power in post-transition societies.
The article's core argument pivots on a distinction that much of the democratization literature has underappreciated: the difference between performance-based incumbency advantage and machine-based incumbency advantage. In mature democracies with strong accountability mechanisms, the prevailing expectation is that incumbents succeed or fail largely on the basis of their governance record — economic management, public service delivery, corruption control, and policy responsiveness. The retrospective voting model, foundational to much of electoral theory, presupposes that voters hold officeholders accountable for outcomes. What the Mexican case demonstrates, according to this analysis, is that democratic competition combined with political decentralization can produce an alternative logic entirely. Rather than compelling governors to perform in order to survive, the institutional environment created incentives to invest in party machines — clientelistic networks, resource patronage, and organizational capacity — as the primary instrument of electoral reproduction. In this reading, decentralization, often theorized as a mechanism that brings government closer to citizens and sharpens accountability, functioned instead as a resource multiplier for entrenched political actors, granting them greater access to fiscal flows, appointment powers, and territorial organization precisely when competitive pressures from the national level receded.
This finding connects to a broader and increasingly urgent conversation about the limits of formal institutional change as a vehicle for democratic consolidation. Across Latin America and beyond, scholars and practitioners have grappled with what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have described as the gap between de jure democratization and de facto political transformation. In contexts where incumbent elites retain organizational capacity and resource advantages, electoral competition may paradoxically reinforce rather than displace authoritarian legacies. The Mexican subnational arena offers a particularly fertile laboratory for examining this dynamic because the country's democratic transition was explicitly sequenced — national-level alternation preceded, and in some respects depended upon, the continuation of subnational PRI machines that helped manage the transition's terms. The result was a patchwork political geography in which some states moved toward genuine competitive pluralism while others remained under the effective control of governors whose dominance resembled, in structural terms, the old hegemonic party system, albeit now clothed in the language of democratic legitimacy. The article's attention to gubernatorial elections in this context is thus not merely a sub-national footnote to national-level analysis; it is a window into how transitional bargains shape the durability of authoritarian organizational forms.
From a policy standpoint, these findings carry implications that extend well beyond Mexico's borders. For international development actors and democracy-assistance providers — including bilateral donors and multilateral institutions — the research challenges a persistent assumption embedded in many ODA frameworks: that electoral assistance, institutional capacity-building, and formal rule-of-law reforms are sufficient tools for deepening democratic governance. If subnational incumbents can sustain political dominance through machine politics rather than performance, then interventions focused primarily on electoral administration, judicial independence, or anti-corruption legislation may fail to address the organizational substrates that reproduce political inequality. The research also has direct relevance for civil society organizations operating in subnational contexts. Where party machines function as intermediaries between citizens and the state — distributing benefits, organizing mobilization, and managing dissent — autonomous civic organizations face structural disadvantages that legal frameworks alone cannot redress. Understanding these dynamics is essential for designing civil society support programs that reckon honestly with the political economy of subnational power rather than assuming a neutral playing field.
Looking forward, the analysis raises important questions about Mexico's current political moment. The rise of Morena and the consolidation of power under Andrés Manuel López Obrador and, subsequently, Claudia Sheinbaum have introduced a new hegemonic dynamic at the national level even as regional machine politics persists in varied forms across states. Whether Morena's organizational expansion reproduces the structural features of PRI dominance — with machine capacity substituting for programmatic performance — or whether it represents a genuinely different relationship between party organization and electoral accountability is a question that the framework developed in this research is well-positioned to address. For researchers, the methodological challenge is to build longitudinal datasets that can capture shifts in the relative weight of machine versus performance factors as political contexts evolve. For practitioners in ODA, civil society, and democratic governance, the lesson is sobering but clarifying: durable democratic deepening requires confronting the organizational architecture of inherited power, not merely its formal expressions in law or electoral procedure. The subnational arenas where this architecture is most entrenched are, for precisely that reason, the spaces where the work of democratic reform is most consequential and most difficult.