The growing empirical literature on political corruption shows trust (interpersonal and political) to be both cause and consequence of corruption: a conclusion that largely builds on studies using cross-national measures of corruption based on perceptions of corruption rather than actual experience, raising questions of endogeneity. The lack of trust fed by corruption is considered critical in that it undermines government efforts to mobilize society to help fight corruption and leads the public to routinely dismiss government promises to fight corruption. After disaggregating the major concepts, this article empirically explores the relationship linking corruption and trust in Mexico based on data from the 2004 Americas Barometer survey. The authors discover a powerful mutual causality between perceptions of corruption and trust in political institutions that suggests that rooting out perceptions of corruption or shoring up trust in public institutions will be an extremely difficult project for anyone who takes on the task.

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Mexico's former opposition parties had specific social bases that would not, on their own, have catapulted either opposition party into power. In the 1990s, specific regional bases of support developed for the parties, reflecting their efforts to develop their organizations more locally. Nationally, this led to the emergence of two parallel two-party systems, PAN-PRI competition in the north and center-west and PRD-PRI competition in the south. In parallel, a proregime-antiregime cleavage came to dominate the Mexican party system, which, combined with local-level opposition efforts to oust the PRI, created new incentives for the opposition parties to abandon past emphases on ideological differences and to act like catchall parties instead. The regime cleavage fostered the dealignment of the Mexican electorate, a process that promoted the development of catch-all parties. Movement within the parties to behave like catch-all parties has not come without internal tensions, but electoral dynamics prove powerful inducements to catch-all behavior. icente Fox's triumph over the long-ruling Institutional Revolution-LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 47: 2 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 47: 2 c CL N 100.0 Source: Consulta Mitofsky 2000. LA N J

During the last decade, patterns of voter turnout in Mexico have changed dramatically. Turnout patterns now resemble those of established democracies, where affluent and politically engaged citizens are more likely to participate than poorer, less informed, and rural voters who make up the Institutional Revolutionary Party's traditional base. Because those Mexicans most likely to vote are also those most likely to support the opposition, especially the National Action Party, changing partisan biases in electoral participation have had crucial consequences for Mexico's political system. Durante la úúltima déécada, los patrones de participacióón de votantes en Mééxico han cambiado dramááticamente. Estos se asemejan ahora a los de las democracias establecidas, donde los ciudadanos acomodados e interesados en políítica son máás propensos a participar que los máás pobres, los menos informados y los votantes rurales que forman la base tradicional del Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Como los mexicanos máás propensos a votar son aquellos tambiéén máás propensos aapoyar ala oposicióón,especialmente alPartido Accióón Nacional, el cambio de las tendencias de los partidarios en la participacióón electoral ha tenido consecuencias decisivas para el sistema políítico mexicano.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Este articulo se ocupa de explorar los alineamientos electorales a partir de la decada de 1960 con informaci6n electoral agregada. Se ha asociado la competencia electoral en aumento, debida al expansi6n del sistema electoral y al inicio de una crisis econ6mica, con un desalineamiento del electorado mexicano. No obstante, a pesar de que los partidos de oposici6n se han vuelto fuertes regionalmente, no han logrado realinear al electorado mexicano lejos del PRI. If many observers are to be believed, Mexico has been in crisissince at least 1968, the year of the student uprisings and the massacre of students and other protesters at Tlatelolco. Yet, the fervor of that passionate but crushed demand for democratization was not matched for twenty years. Nineteen eighty-eight may have been as critical in the democratization of Mexico as 1968. The unprecedented electoral challenge to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) from parties of both Right and Left, but especially from Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos the Left in the figure of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, may have broken the monopoly of the PRI on important electoral positions. But given the outrage and the uncertainty about the official results of the 1988 election and the PRI's resurgence in the 1991 midterm congressional elections, we do not as yet know if competitive democracy is just over the Mexican horizon. If competitive democracy is to arrive in Mexico, its parties of opposition must make deep inroads into the foundations of the ruling elite's monopoly on power. Given the formally democratic nature of Mexico's political structure, and the use of the electoral process to formally choose successors for Mexico's chief executive and the governors of its thirty-one states, none of whom can stand for reelection, the foremost challenge to Mexico's opposition parties is to win elections for critical offices. Winning those elections means overcoming the advantages held by the ruling elite's electoral machine, the PRI. One of the most daunting of those PRI advantages has been solid electoral support from Mexico's masses.2 To truly challenge the PRI electorally, and to thereby convert Mexican politics into the competitive but constitutional politics we recognize as democracy, will require realigning the Mexican electorate. The study of electoral politics in the United States and Europe has tended to identify much of the postwar period, an era marked by political stability, as consisting of "normal" elections, in which partisan alignments have remained stable. Partisan dealignment has clearly occurred in the past two decades or so, however, as shifts in party identification and changes in the social structure of the industrial democ...