Eroded Unity and Clientele Migration: An Alternative Explanation of Mexico’s Democratic Transition

Sierra, Sebastián Garrido de

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2012655

Cited by 15 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…The Online Appendix also confirms that even in states with a PRD governor, where turnout buying is likely to be most prevalent, there is no evidence that an additional polling station increases PRD turnout 38 . While consistent with the PRD’s campaigning, this finding might be counterintuitive since the PRD is known for endorsing former PRI candidates that bring their political machines with them (Garrido de Sierra 2013a, 2013b, Langston 2012). A possible explanation is that those candidates switching to the PRD were those with the weakest machines.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Parties, Brokers, and Voter Mobilization: How Turnout Buying Depends Upon the Party’s Capacity to Monitor Brokers

2016

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Despite its prevalence, little is known about when parties buy turnout. We emphasize the problem of parties monitoring local brokers with incentives to shirk. Our model suggests that parties extract greater turnout buying effort from their brokers where they can better monitor broker performance and where favorable voters would not otherwise turn out. Exploiting exogenous variation in the number of polling stations—and thus electoral information about broker performance—in Mexican electoral precincts, we find that greater monitoring capacity increases turnout and votes for the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Consistent with our theoretical predictions, the effect of monitoring capacity on PRI votes varies nonlinearly with the distance of voters to the polling station: it first increases because rural voters—facing larger costs of voting—generally favor the PRI, before declining as the cost of incentivizing brokers increases. This nonlinearity is not present for the PAN, who stand to gain less from mobilizing rural voters.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Parties, Brokers, and Voter Mobilization: How Turnout Buying Depends Upon the Party’s Capacity to Monitor Brokers

2016

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“…While defections by national elites tend to grab most of the headlines, defections by regional elites have also played a key role in the destabilization of prominent electoral autocracies. Garrido de Sierra (2012) calculates that 36 PRI gubernatorial candidates defected to the opposition in Mexico between 1989 and 2006. The rate of defections increased dramatically after 1996 and has been linked to the unraveling of the PRI’s local political machine (Garrido de Sierra 2012; Gibson 2005).…”

Section: Authoritarian Stability and Elite Cohesionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Garrido de Sierra (2012) calculates that 36 PRI gubernatorial candidates defected to the opposition in Mexico between 1989 and 2006. The rate of defections increased dramatically after 1996 and has been linked to the unraveling of the PRI’s local political machine (Garrido de Sierra 2012; Gibson 2005). In Nigeria, the ruling People’s Democratic Party suffered a string of regional defections between 2013 and 2015, including the governors of seven states and a number of vice governors (Thurston 2015, 9).…”

Section: Authoritarian Stability and Elite Cohesionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Elite Defection under Autocracy: Evidence from Russia

Reuter

Szakonyi

2019

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Elite cohesion is a fundamental pillar of authoritarian stability. High-level defections can signal weakness, embolden the opposition, and sometimes, lead to regime collapse. Using a dataset of 4,291 ruling party candidates in Russia, this paper develops and tests hypotheses about the integrity of elite coalitions under autocracy. Our theory predicts that ruling elites defect when there is greater uncertainty about the regime’s willingness to provide spoils. Regimes that share power with the opposition, limit access to spoils, and lack formal institutions see more defections. Co-opting the opposition assuages outside threats but leaves regime insiders disgruntled and prone to defection. Those with personal followings and business connections are the most likely to defect, since they can pursue their political goals independently of the regime. Taken together, our results highlight important tradeoffs among authoritarian survival strategies. Many of the steps autocrats take to repel challenges simultaneously heighten the risk of defections.

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“…5 Nonetheless, elections in CARs are not a mere façade: The ruling party must work hard to win, and electoral defeats do occur from time to time. 6 The existing literature has studied how defections from the ruling party (Brownlee, 2007;Garrido de Sierra, 2013;Gibson, 2013;Greene, 2007;Langston, 2006;Levitsky & Way, 2010;Magaloni, 2006;Reuter & Gandhi, 2011;Rundlett & Svolik, 2016;van de Walle, 2006), opposition coalitions (Arriola, 2012(Arriola, , 2013Bunce & Wolchik, 2010Donno, 2013;Howard & Roessler, 2006), and the intervention of outside players (Bunce & Wolchik, 2010Donno, 2013;Gibson, 2005Gibson, , 2013Levitsky & Way, 2010) contribute to make these elections more competitive. However, and despite the fact that opposition parties in CARs vary substantially both in terms of their electoral strength and their degree of institutionalization, we still know little about why some opposition parties are more institutionalized or enjoy more electoral support than others (Morse, 2012).…”

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Before moving to the next section, note that this article does not pretend to offer a full-blown account of the PRI's demise, which was also driven by worsening economic conditions (Bruhn, 1997;Magaloni, 2006), the impact of economic reforms on the party's patronage machine (Greene, 2007), growing international pressure to respect electoral outcomes (Cornelius, 1986;Levitsky & Way, 2010), and increasing incentives to defect (Langston, 2006), specially after the 1996 electoral reform (Garrido de Sierra, 2013). Moreover, the diffusion process discussed in this article could only "kick off" because the PRI was willing to tolerate continued opposition victories at the municipal level, which had not been the case before the 1980s (Aziz Nassif, 1994;Cornelius, 1986;Eisenstadt, 2004, Chapter 2;Lujambio, 2001;Shirk, 2001).…”

Section: Case Selection: Mexico 1984-2000mentioning

confidence: 99%

Building Support From Below? Subnational Elections, Diffusion Effects, and the Growth of the Opposition in Mexico, 1984-2000

Lucardi

2016

Comparative Political Studies

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Can subnational elections contribute to democratization? In autocracies that hold competitive elections at multiple levels of government, subnational executive offices provide opposition parties with access to resources, increase their visibility among voters, and let them gain experience in government. This allows opposition parties to use subnational executives as “springboards” from which to increase their electoral support in future races, and predicts that their electoral support should follow a diffusion process, that is, a party’s electoral performance in municipality m at time t should be better if that party already governs some of m’s neighbors since t − 1. I evaluate this claim with data from municipal-level elections in Mexico between 1984 and 2000. Consistent with the fact that the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN) followed an explicit strategy of party-building from below but the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD) did not, the results indicate that diffusion effects contributed to the growth of the former but not the latter.

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Eroded Unity and Clientele Migration: An Alternative Explanation of Mexico’s Democratic Transition

Cited by 15 publications

References 30 publications

Parties, Brokers, and Voter Mobilization: How Turnout Buying Depends Upon the Party’s Capacity to Monitor Brokers

Parties, Brokers, and Voter Mobilization: How Turnout Buying Depends Upon the Party’s Capacity to Monitor Brokers

Elite Defection under Autocracy: Evidence from Russia

Building Support From Below? Subnational Elections, Diffusion Effects, and the Growth of the Opposition in Mexico, 1984-2000

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