Mexico's Democratic Transition: the Search for New Reform Coalitions

Law and Business Review of the Americas Volume 9 Number 2 Article 6 2003 Mexico's Democratic Transition: The Search for New Reform Coalitions Carol Wise Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.smu.edu/lbra Recommended Citation Carol Wise, Mexico's Democratic Transition: The Search for New Reform Coalitions, 9 LAW & BUS. REV. AM. 283 (2003) https://scholar.smu.edu/lbra/vol9/iss2/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at SMU Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Law and Business Review of the Americas by an authorized administrator of SMU Scholar. For more information, please visit http://digitalrepository.smu.edu. MEXICO'S DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION: THE SEARCH FOR NEW REFORM COALITIONS Carol Wise* N July 2000, after holding on to the presidency tenaciously for some seventy years, Mexico's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was finally turned out in an election that proved to be the country's cleanest ever. Given the near universal trend toward democratization in Latin America over the past two decades, this particular transition perhaps should have been regarded as par for the course. Yet, even the most astute observers of Mexican politics refrained from officially de- claring the region's longest standing semi-authoritarian regime the anach- ronism that it had finally become. In part, this was due to the PRI's uncanny survival skills and the time-tested ability of party leaders to re- peatedly renovate the PRI's image and re-energize its core constituency. But also, as the 1982 debt shocks marked the end of inward-looking state- led development policies across the region and the rise of a market-based internationalist orientation, some argued that despite the potential weak- nesses of a dominant-party system, Mexico enjoyed "organizational ad- vantages that can facilitate both the initiation and the consolidation of 1 economic reform." By all outward appearances, the PRI regarded itself in this same light: few would dispute that the ruling party's original intentions were to restructure radically the economy along market lines while indefinitely retaining control over Mexican politics. However, the PRI's reliance on old-style politics (e.g., clientelism, corruption, coercion) to forge an en- tirely new economic model (e.g., liberalization, privatization and deregu- lation) ultimately proved to be its undoing.2 Although the PRI's autocratic style may have been propitious for launching market reforms, their successful consolidation would require political skills (e.g., negotia- tion, transparency, accountability) that did not come naturally to any of the ruling party's various factions. This basic contradiction was first *Carol Wise is Associate Professor in the School of International Relations at USC. An earlier version of this article appeared in Carol Wise & Riordan Roett, eds., Post-StabilizationPolitics in Latin America (Washington, D.C.: Brookings 2003). 1. STEPHAN HAGGARD & ROBERT KAUFMAN, THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEMO- CRATIC TRANSITIONS 306 (1995). 2. Francisco Panizza, Beyond Delegative Democracy: Old Politics and New Econom- ics in Latin America, 32 J.LATIN AM. STUD. 737 (2000). 284 LAW AND BUSINESS REVIEW OF THE AMERICAS [Vol. 9 driven home by the PRI's near loss of the hotly contested 1988 presidential election, as internal party rifts and a prolonged and severe post-debt crisis adjustment threw the PRI's historic support base into serious ques- tion. Despite the ruling party's remarkable comeback in the 1991 mid- term elections and its legitimate victory in the presidential race of 1994, the PRI's long secular decline at the polls finally translated into the 2000 presidential victory of opposition candidate, Vicente Fox, on the center- right National Action Party (PAN) ticket. There has been no shortage of explanations for the demise of authoritarian rule in post-debt crisis Latin America, although there are some gaps when it comes to understanding the decline of a dominant single- party system such as Mexico's. For example, in contrast to earlier transitions from authoritarian rule in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, Mexico's transition has been a strictly civilian affair, albeit one with no prior epi- sode of democratization from which to draw institutional strength.3 Moreover, rather than a series of elite negotiations that worked to bring democracy to life, Mexico's transition represents the gradual unraveling of old secretive corporatist pacts between the PRI and its mass bases that had seemingly been set in stone since the 1930s. The escalation of political economic crises since the 1970s certainly contributed to the decline of elite politics, but the increased willingness of voters to opt for untried political alternatives, and the rise of civil society, opposition parties, and a more participatory mass politics, must also be factored in to Mexico's transition equation.4 The current juncture, in short, is one in which various new political alliances are being pursued in an increasingly more transparent and party-competitive environment. In this article I analyze the trend toward more vibrant, competitive, and participatory politics in Mexico within the broader context of the economic transformation that has underpinned this trend. But rather than focusing on a single strand of cause and effect, I explore the ways in which deep market restructuring since 1982 and gradual political reforms interacted erratically over time to prompt an almost inadvertent democratic transition in Mexico. 5 And, I explore the ways in which Mexico's political and economic liberalization have become, on balance, mutually reinforcing in the post-reform era. In essence, market reforms shifted the country's political calculus, as liberalization unleashed new poles of dyna- mism across some regions and sectors, and redrew class lines according to the new winners and losers in the market. While better for some and worse for others, Mexico's economic transformation over the past two decades also became the institutional locus for a new political market-an alternative organizing principle for party 3. See Joseph L. Klesner, An Electoral Route to Democracy? Mexico's Transition in Comparative Perspective, 30 COMP. POL. 477 (1998). 4. See VIKRAM K. CHAND, MEXICO'S POLITICAL AWAKENING (2001). 5. Pamela K. Starr, Monetary Mismanagement and Inadvertent Democratization in Technocratic Mexico, 33 STUD. COMP. INT'L DEV. 35 (1999). 2003] MEXICO'S DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION politics, civic action, and other forms of social mobilization. Against this backdrop, periodic economic crises (e.g., 1982, 1994-95), and the PRI's own self-inflicted political shocks (e.g., assassinations, electoral fraud, government graft) clearly eroded the hegemony of single-party rule at the federal level. At the state and municipal level, opposition parties were also able to whittle away at the PRI's share of the regional vote by run- ning performance-based campaigns and delivering on concrete issues. A main blow for the PRI, amongst numerous others, was its failure to make good on its reform promises at the microeconomic level, after unrealisti- cally raising the electorate's expectations about upward mobility. In order to set the proper political economic baseline for this discus- sion, I begin with a brief analysis of Mexican politics and economic policy prior to the 1982 debt shocks. A second section traces the PRI's electoral decline from 1982-1988, the flip side of this decline being the unprece- dented ascendance of a pocketbook or normal economic vote in Mexico. A third section examines the PRI's revival from 1988-1994, and with it a brief resurrection of the electorate's good will. The fourth section charts the rise of truly competitive politics in Mexico since 1994, and in doing so identifies the demand for another generation reforms as a key contribut- ing factor. The final section analyzes the efforts of the Fox administration to reconcile the completion of the remaining reform tasks with the much higher levels of political competition and democratic accountability now present in Mexico. While it is too soon to tell, political responses since the transfer of executive power from the PRI to the PAN suggest that no one party can continue to count on the bloc of votes that had historically been reserved for the PRI. Rather, as in most democratizing regimes, Mexican voters now appear to be opting for substance over symbol, for concrete performance over hollow promises of future gains. I. PRE-REFORM POLITICS IN MEXICO: THE SHADOW OF THE PAST Since its inception in 1929, the PRI controlled the presidency, the con- gress, and most locally elected positions by linking itself, both materially and symbolically, with the nationalistic and distributional goals of the Mexican revolution. Early on, PRI leaders reorganized Mexican society along sectoral lines (labor, business, peasants) and tied each unit closely to the party through its complete control over the federal budget. As this political arrangement became intermingled with the launching of the Im- port-Substitution Industrialization (ISI) model in the 1950s, PRI politi- cians became quite adept at administering various incentives and disincentives to keep their followers on board and their enemies in check. The latter included opposition parties, which were circumscribed tightly. A main exception was the center-right PAN that came to play the role of the loyal opposition by colluding with the PRI from time to time in con- gress. The PRI also proved to be highly resilient and skillful in changing 286 LAW AND BUSINESS REVIEW OF THE AMERICAS [Vol. 9 with the times, as the party has cast itself in a new image at numerous critical turning points since the 1940s. Though a distinctly non-democratic arrangement, by scheduling federal, state, and local elections at regular intervals, Mexico was able to project an image of competitive politics and, thereby, distance itself from the more starkly authoritarian military regimes that had emerged in the Southern Cone during the 1960s and 1970s.

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