Causes and Consequences of Political Clientelism: Mexico's PRD in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

PRD politicians and officials widely use clientelism to structure their relationships with citizens. This is due not only to the entrenchment of clientelism in Mexican politics or to high rates of poverty and inequality, but also to the limited institutionalization of democratic rules inside the party. The last stems largely from the party's electoral strategy in its formative years, and has resulted in uncontrolled factional battles that play out through clientelism. The Brazilian PT faced external and internal conditions quite similar to those of the PRD, but its early focus on organization building and policy change allowed it to avoid clientelism to a greater degree. This analysis problematizes the trend of using minimalist definitions that assume clientelism to be nondemocratic because these approaches result in conceptual stretching and decreased explanatory power. T he Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) is Mexico's largest left-wing political party. It was established in 1989 in opposition to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which had dominated the country's politics since its inception in 1929. In some ways, the PRD has been extraordinarily successful; in others, it has been a great disappointment. Candidates for the PRD and the electoral coalition that preceded it have twice come close to winning presidential elections, most recently in 2006, when its candidate came within 1 percent of his opponent. The party was instrumental to Mexico's democratic transition, and it has given hope for political and economic betterment to millions of people. At the same time, the PRD has been handicapped by factionalism, personalism, and clientelism, losing many supporters who became disillusioned by its practices. Why have PRD politicians come to use clientelism despite their efforts to avoid the methods of the PRI?A series of external factors-poverty, the long history of clientelism in Mexican politics, the PRI's extensive use of this method to ensure political stability, and the PRD founders' proficiency in this method-are important in answering this question. These factors, however, did not guarantee that the new party would be marked by clientelism to the degree it has been. Instead, a succession of internal events, among which the party's strategy for bringing about a transition to democracy © 2008 University of Miami stands out, have a more direct causal relationship with the outcome of clientelism.The PRD was established from a wide range of left-wing parties, social movements, and individuals, with diverse ideological visions. Coordinating these currents under one organizational roof could have taken various forms, based on individual direct participation, ideological or programmatic groups, centralized or decentralized power, and so on. However, the emergence of one predominant leader, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and the primacy of his political strategy set the party on a path of personalistic factions and centralized power, despite the best intentions not to replicate these characteristics of ...

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“…En 1994, el pri ganó los siete distritos electorales a diputados federales; sin embargo para 2000, sólo consiguió tres, por lo que redujo su 9 Aun cuando pareciera ser un caso aislado, otras investigaciones (Cornelius, 1977;Fox, 1994;Hilgers, 2008;Zaremberg, 2009) han dado cuenta de que esta interacción es muy común a nivel local tanto en México como en otros países de la región (Calvo y Murillo, 2013;Freidenberg, 2010). votación en casi diez puntos porcentuales (Hernández Corichi y Salinas Uribe, 2007). En la elección de 2006, Coahuila aportó al pan a nivel presidencial cerca de 400 894 votos, consiguió 400 513 en senadores (43.36% del total) y de los doce diputados federales por mayoría ganó nueve (pri: 2, y Nueva Alianza: 1).…”

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