Suchergebnisse

Summary: This article has studied Mexican democracy since 1996 to understand the motivations of party leaders in creating and manipulating laws that define electoral competition and collusion. He found that the leaders of the three main parties (PRI, PAN and PRD) negotiated institutional results that allowed them to trap them in the short term, while leaving the reputational consequences of a strategy that eroded the electoral referee to future leaders. However, the systematisation of this non-compliance strategy ultimately led to an electoral disaster. ; Resumen: Este artículo estudia la democracia mexicana desde 1996 para comprender las motivaciones de los líderes de partido al crear y manipular leyes que definen la competencia y la colusión electorales. Encuentra que los líderes de los tres principales partidos (PRI, PAN y PRD) negociaron resultados institucionales que les permitieron hacer trampa en el corto plazo, a la vez que dejar las consecuencias reputacionales de una estrategia que erosionaba al árbitro electoral a los futuros líderes. Sin embargo, la sistematización de esa estrategia de incumplimiento condujo en última instancia a un desastre electoral.

Many studies on legislatures around the world have not detected a regional voting dimension. Yet governors are often important political figures and can exert strong influence on state politicians. From an analysis of the Mexican legislature, I determine that governors hold important resources that ambitious politicians need in a system with no consecutive reelection. Mexican governors use their power over federal deputies to prod their agents, the caucus leaders, into working for their states' interests on fiscally relevant issues, especially the annual budget. On all other issues, the governors delegate their deputies' votes to the party's legislative leadership.

This article examines the changes to the Mexican Constitution & the regulatory framework contained in the Cofipe, made by legislators in 2007, as a response (in part) to the events surrounding the disputed 2006 presidential election. These changes include, among many others: a) the provision of free media time for electoral advertisements & the corresponding prohibition of television & radio spots paid by the parties or other interested actors; b) the removal (read firing) of several IFE's councilors, including the President of the General Council, in a move that was read by many as political pay- back; c) changes to the bureaucratic structure of the IFE, which will have the effect of weakening the agency's autonomy; d) the prohibition of using the politicians' personal images in public service announcements, & e)the introduction of a new form of calculating the amount of public financing each party receives from the public coffers. As a consequence of this reform, the political parties in Mexico have strengthened their political position against both the owners of the large media consortia & the IFE. Adapted from the source document.

This short article outlines why the Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI), which governed Mexico for the final 71 years of the twentieth
century, not only lost the 2006 presidential election, but posted a
miserable third place finish by taking only 22.7% of the national vote
versus 36.7% for the winner, Felipe Calderón of the center-right
National Action Party (PAN) and 36.1% for the center-left Party of the
Democratic Revolution (PRD). It also explains why, despite its recent
electoral results, the once-hegemonic party will continue to play an
important, but reduced political role: as a coalition partner with the
governing PAN to create majorities in both the Chamber of Deputies and the
Senate.

We know little about how formerly hegemonic parties react to drastic changes in the external political environment. Under non-competitive electoral conditions, the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) was characterized by centralized legislative recruitment and candidate selection that delivered a large percentage of coveted senate candidacies to national-level party politicians and bureaucrats. This centralized and nationalized recruitment gave the leader of the PRI enormous control over his wide-flung political elite. Since elections have become competitive, the PRI has decentralized its recruitment of senate candidates, searching out those most popular with state voters. This work compares the PRI candidates' backgrounds from the non-competitive and competitive periods, and runs a logistical regression to ascertain if there is a relation between competition and types of party politicians winning nominations. The article demonstrates, using first-of-its-kind data on professional backgrounds of candidates (rather than sitting legislators), that legislative recruitment in a federal context has been decentralized in Mexico.