Electoral Competition and the New Party System in Mexico

Abstract

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

Looking Like a Winner: Candidate Appearance and Electoral Success in New Democracies

“…In the case of the senate races, we selected images from official government photographs of the main candidates, where these pictures were of similar clarity. Because political competition in most states is effectively two-party (Klesner 2002, Klesner 2005, pairings included only candidates from the two parties or electoral coalitions with the largest portion of the vote in the senate and gubernatorial contests. For the presidential contests, we drew the candidate pairs from all three major parties (though we still presented the candidates in pairs).…”

Spatial effects and party nationalization: The Geography of partisan support in Mexico

“…The spatial pattern that emerges is one of over-and underpredicted districts clustered in space, and it is well documented in the literature on Mexican party politics (e.g. Klesner, 2005;Klesner, 2007;Baker, 2009;Hern andez-Hern andez, 2015). As is apparent from the maps, spatial context has an independent effect on cross-district party performance.…”

“…The PRD has obtained high vote shares in the Federal District, where it has established linkages with urban social movements, but it also performed well in marginalized areas across the south. These differences have been born out in analyses at the aggregate and the individual level (Klesner, 2005). 10 What is remarkable, however, is that spatial patterns exist above and beyond what we would expect on the basis of such differences in the socio-economic composition of districts.…”

“…The district-level predictors of party support are drawn from Klesner's (2005) ecological study of electoral competition in Mexico. 12 The dependent variable in the analysis is the district-level vote share obtained by the respective party in the 2012 election.…”

“…While the analysis explores in which types of districts a party does well, and how these districts are distributed across space, it cannot shed light on who in the district actually voted for the party (see King (1997) on the risk of ecological fallacy in aggregate analyses). Substantively, the models of party support in Tables 2e4 take as their starting point insights from individual-level analyses as to which voters tend to support specific parties, and use this as a proxy for how easy it might be for a party to make inroads (Klesner, 2005). 11 All spatial analyses were conducted with the open-source software packages…”