No abstract

Many studies on legislatures around the world have not detected a regional voting dimension. Yet governors are often important political figures and can exert strong influence on state politicians. From an analysis of the Mexican legislature, I determine that governors hold important resources that ambitious politicians need in a system with no consecutive reelection. Mexican governors use their power over federal deputies to prod their agents, the caucus leaders, into working for their states' interests on fiscally relevant issues, especially the annual budget. On all other issues, the governors delegate their deputies' votes to the party's legislative leadership.

Mexico’s Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) held executive power continuously from 1929 to 2000, when its candidate suffered a shocking defeat in the presidential elections. This study, which covers the years 1980–2012, uses an institutional focus to understand why the PRI survived its defeat and loss of the resources of the executive bureaucracy to return victoriously after two six-year terms out of office. The book offers a model of the difficulties authoritarian parties must face after they are ousted from the executive through fair and free elections: the danger of dramatic fractures that could destroy the party and the possibility of mass voter rejection. The institutional context of Mexico allowed the party’s factions to continue to cooperate and win elections. Mexico is a federal, presidential regime with a two-tiered electoral system, with no consecutive reelection and generous public party funding. The PRI changed dramatically in organizational terms as its directly elected state governors became power brokers within the party (though governors cannot be reelected). Yet, because of the nation’s electoral rules, the national party office remained a central player, both in party and national politics. The national party headquarters continued to mount an important response to the new government’s executive and coordinated the party’s legislators in Congress. The institutional context played a crucial role in creating spaces for both factions (the governors and the national party) and allowing them to cooperate. The former hegemonic party did not, however, develop a consistent ideology or try to purge itself of its clientelist or corrupt practices, because the governors had no authority strong enough to force them the change their conduct.

The traditional literature on Mexico's formerly hegemonic party, the PRI, notes the importance of the ' informal rules of the game ' in determining outcomes, such as who will be the PRI's presidential candidate. This article argues that the onset of electoral competition allowed weaker actors within the party to strengthen their position by reforming the statutes in order to give them decision-making power previously denied them.

Theoretically based on Albert 0. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyuky, this study examines three cases of rupture or exit by Mexican presidential contenders, in 1940Mexican presidential contenders, in , 1952Mexican presidential contenders, in , and 1988, and one "noncase," in 1999, with a view to how dissidents' strategies shape political institutions. Mexico's PFU-dominated political system depended on its leaders' ability to create an equilibrium based on mutual incentives to remain loyal to the regime.