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.. Party leaders in Mexico face the challenge of maintaining party unity while remaining competitive in a democratizing context. Candidate selection rules are central to achieving both objectives. I argue that leaders must decide between "open" rules that nominate electable candidates and "closed" rules that build strong party organizations, and suggest that strategic interests are the most powerful determinant of rule choice. Despite an evident trend toward greater openness, however, party leaders have taken advantage of Mexico's mixed electoral system to preserve their own influence and placate party activists, while reaping the benefits of open rules.Los líderes de los partidos políticos en México se enfrentan al reto de mantener la cohesión de sus partidos mientras buscan seguir ganando las elecciones. Los procesos de selección de los candidatos son cruciales para lograr los dos objetivos. Planteo que los líderes deben elegir entre procesos "abiertos" que producen candidatos atractivos y procesos "cerrados" que fortalecen los partidos mismos, y que las metas estratégicas de los partidos tienen la mayor influencia en la selección de las reglas. A pesar de una tendencia hacia mayor apertura, los líderes, por medio del sistema electoral "mixto" de México, han conservado su propia influencia, conciliando con los activistas, mientras se aprovechan de los beneficios electorales de los procesos abiertos.

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the consequences of delegate selection rules for presidential nominations, yet few have sought an explanation for the variance in these rules across the states and over time. In this article, we ask why state party elites would open their processes of delegate selection to a large and potentially ideologically diverse constituency by holding primary elections rather than caucuses. We develop an account of endogenous institutional choice that suggests elites ought to be increasingly likely to open their delegate selection rules as the ideological nature of the party and the state's electorate converge. We test this claim using a new data set on Democratic Party selection rules between 1972 and 2000 and find that the degree of ideological convergence is a strong predictor of state party choices to open the process of delegate selection. These results provide additional support for general theoretical claims that characterize political institutions as fundamentally endogenous to the politics they regulate.

One of the lesser-acknowledged conclusions from analyses of the third wave of democratization relates to the importance of conservatives to democratic consolidation. Yet we know very little about the way that such interests are incorporated into the formal, institutional arena of parties and elections-especially as relates to business interests. This is true in spite of a clear, cross-regional rise in the presence of entrepreneurs themselves in politics. This article generates and evaluates a set of expectations for the political behavior of business interests. I focus my empirical attention on Mexico, where such interests are historically speaking very well organized internally, and analyze the incorporation of business-association members into the parliamentary delegation of Mexico's three major political parties. I conclude by considering where we might look for the political mobilization of business interests in the interest of establishing a research agenda for the future.

Partisan attachments and voting behavior in Germany today are more volatile than in the past. This article tests the enduring influence of social cleavages on voting relative to two other factors that account for party performance: path dependent forces and spatial dependence. Drawing on original data from the eastern German states, we explain support for Germany’s main parties in the 2017 federal election. We find relatively weak evidence for continued influence of social divisions for the major parties, but that support for the radical right Alternative for Germany (AfD) did reflect underlying cleavage structures. Additionally, we identify reliable effects of the historical immigrant population on contemporary voting. We also see weak evidence of lock-in political effects associated with German reunification, limited only to the CDU. Most interestingly, we observe powerful and robust effects of spatial dependence for three of the four parties we examine. We conclude that the effects presented here should signal to scholars of parties and electoral politics the need to incorporate history and geography into their analytical frameworks alongside more traditional approaches, since eastern Germany may in fact be less spatialized than western Germany or other country cases because of the homogenizing efforts of the SED regime.

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