Who Rules Mexico? A Critique of Some Current Views on the Mexican Political Process

Needleman, Carolyn; Needleman, Martin L.

doi:10.2307/2128356

Cited by 13 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Un ejemplo de estos trabajos es el de Gruber, et al (1971), quien entrevistó a ochenta y ocho personajes, miembros viejos y nuevos de la élite política. Otros trabajos importantes fueron los de académicos como Needleman, et al (1969) y Peter Smith o Robert E. Scott (ambos citados en Suárez, 1991). Acerca del empresariado mexicano, uno de los primeros estudios fue el de Flavia Derossi (1978), así como el de Dale Story (1986).…”

Section: No 69unclassified

Las élites del poder en México. Una exploración crítica de la literatura entre las décadas de 1970 y 1990

Oropeza

2017

Espiral

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Section: No 69unclassified

Las élites del poder en México. Una exploración crítica de la literatura entre las décadas de 1970 y 1990

Oropeza

2017

Espiral

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“…Instead, most analysts wanted to explain why Mexico's eminently democratic constitutional system was dis gured by undemocratic practices in the country's day-to-day politics (Tucker, 1957;Vernon, 1963;Brandenburg, 1964;Scott, 1964;Casanova, 1965). One explanation was an excessive concentration of executive power in the president's hands and a resulting imbalance between the three branches of government (Needleman andNeedleman, 1969, p. 1011). This was accompanied by efforts to measure the extent to which the elite structure was nascently plural and by estimates of how long it would take for fully plural elites to emerge.…”

Section: A Plural Structure?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In general, they depicted power as concentrated in 'the president, the spokesmen of major vested interests, and popular pressure' and they agreed about the rough outlines of the relations among these three power factors: the president has the nal word on all policy decisions but consults with interest-group leaders in formulating policy, and at his peril ignores the interests of the unorganized Mexican masses. (Needleman andNeedleman, 1969, p. 1012) Acknowledging that the president commanded the greatest amount of power, these analysts nevertheless believed that a diminished form of American pluralism existed. By embedding the plural elite model in theories of economic development and modernization, they predicted that the more development and modernization occurred, the more plural Mexican elites would become.…”

Section: A Plural Structure?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Structure of Mexican Elites: an Enduring Puzzle

Hazán¹

2001

Int. Rev. Sociol.

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Mexico has undergone major political changes during the past four decades. From being a stable hegemonic party system in the 1960s it became a multiparty system in the 1990s with three main parties that together took 90% of the vote, though none managed to cross the 50% threshold. New institutions were created to promote free and fairer political competitions and greater protection of civil liberties. Alternations of executive power in important states and counties became more frequent. Whereas four decades ago no one doubted that the Party of Institutional Revolution, the PRI, would win presidential, congressional, and virtually all other elections, in 1997 not only did the PRI lose control of the Chamber of Deputies, but it also lost Mexico City's rst mayoralty election. The July 2000 presidential election was the climax of these changes. The PRI's candidate, Francisco Labastida, was defeated by the National Action Party's Vicente Fox, 43% to 37%, with the Party of Democratic Revolution's candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, receiving most remaining votes. Moreover, Fox's Alliance for Change, of which the National Action Party (PAN) is the major component, won a plurality in the Chamber of Deputies and the PAN added governships in the states of Morelos and Guanajuato to the half dozen that it already controlled.Political scientists have sought to explain Mexico's political changes from a variety of theoretical standpoints. Many of their explanations have focused on the structure of Mexican elites and how it has been changing. To capture the elite structure, a handful of models have been employed without any agreement about which model is most accurate. It is probably correct to say that political scientists agree only that Mexican elites have long constituted an exceptional case, one that has been dif cult to t into any existing model. I intend to review and critique this modeling effort, paying particular attention to how the interpenetration of political, bureaucratic, and business elites has been depicted by various scholars. I begin with a brief exposition of the several models that have been used, after which I assess their applications as the elite structure changed from the hegemonic formation of the 1950s and 1960s to today's signi cantly more differentiated con guration. Competing Models of Mexican ElitesWithin elite studies there is no consensus about how to model elites. At least ve models have been proposed and each has been used in studying Mexican

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“…1, 6). A survey of different views as to where power is located is found in Needleman and Needleman (1969). 209 legislative or the judicial branch of government, and probably with fewer constraints imposed by PRI members and the bureaucracy than generally imagined.…”

Section: Centralization and Hierarchymentioning

confidence: 99%