Uncertainty in Mexico's protracted transition: The national action party and its aversion to risk

Democratization

Volumn 7, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 93-116

  Loaeza, Soledad ^a  

^a EL COLEGIO DE MÉXICO   (Mexico)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION; ELECTORAL SYSTEM; NATIONAL POLITICS; POLITICAL SYSTEM;

MEXICO;

EID: 0033740589     PISSN: 13510347     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13510340008403673     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. In addition to the PAN and the PRI, the parties participating in 1977 public discussions on the electoral reform proposal were: the Popular Socialist Party (PPS), the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution (FARM), the Mexican Workers' Party (PMT), the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), and the Socialist Party of the Workers (PST). Of these, only the PARM has survived to the present. Several new parties have been formed in the interim, the most important being the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), founded in 1989.
2. For example, proponents of this argument consider the PAN'S persistent refusal during the 1990s to form a coalition with the second largest opposition party, the PRD, to unite the anti-PRI vote, as an obstacle to defeating the PRI.
3. This vision does not take into account the role they played in the electoral reforms of 1989-90, 1992-93, 1994 and 1996 which ended government intervention in the electoral process, extended the ability to supervise parties, and culminated in the creation of an autonomous electoral commission.
4. Howard Margolis distinguishes two types of utility calculations by individuals, altruistic and selfish. The first favours the interests of the group, and the second those of the individual. According to Margolis, the rationality of a decision is the result of the interaction between both types of utility. See Margolis cited in Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 14. The distinction between altruistic and selfish behaviour was also proposed by the German sociologist Max Weber.
5. Salinas was the PRI's candidate who took office despite widespread evidence of electoral fraud and a protest movement led by the PRD's Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, who narrowly lost. The PAN's Manuel Clouthier briefly joined Cardenas in contesting the validity of the electoral results.
6. See, for example, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Toward Consolidated Democracies', Journal of Democracy, Vol.7 (1996), pp.14-33.
7. Philippe Schmitter and Javier Santiso, 'The Temporal Dimension to the Consolidation of Democracy', International Political Science Review, Vol.19 (1998), pp.69-92, insist that the recent experience is really a 'fourth wave of democratization', in which the democratizations occur in less time than was required for their predecessors in previous waves who had to wait longer for propitious moments for changes to mature.
8. For the Spanish case, see Josep Colomer, La transición a la democracia: el modelo español (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1998).
9. For the Mexican case, Jean Francois Prud'homme observes that a cycle of reforms-elections-reforms commenced in Mexico in 1986, in which each Congress produced its own electoral reform. Between 1986 and 1996, Mexico experienced the promulgation of a new law (the COFIPE of 1989-1990) and three subsequent reforms. The author argues that this pattern of reforms in itself did not generate the consensus needed for a broader pact; rather, it had very limited time horizons because it was based on trial and error, and 'gave way to patterns of recurring interaction between political forces. In this cycle, elections constitute only one moment to measure the relation of forces between different groups; the negotiation of reforms is also a moment to compare forces ...'. Jean Francois Prud'homme, 'La negociacion de las reglas del juego: tres reformas electorales (1998-1994)', Político y Gobiemo, Vol.3 (Jan. 1996), p.96.
10. The democratic values ascribed to the forging of consensus further slows down negotiations. See Schedler and Santiso, op. cit., p.11.
11. Soledad Loaeza, El Partido Acción Nacional: La Larga Marcha, 1939-94 - Oposición Leal y Partido de Protesta (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999), pp.171-85.
12. See among many others, Colomer, op. cit.
13. In the classic text The Prince (completed 1514), Machiavelli advised the Prince that accidents could always happen, that is, occurrences over which the Prince had absolutely no control, but which nevertheless could prove determinant. Machiavellian accidents are associated with uncertainty, as they are exceptions produced by nature which are not common in political reality, but which Machiavelli argued, needed to be somehow factored in to the political calculus, despite the randomness which defined their occurrence. See John P. McCormick, 'Addressing the Political Exception: Machiavelli's "accidents" and the mixed regime', American Political Science Review, Vol.87 (1993), pp.888-900.
14. The interactive system which promotes only partial negotiations, 'heightens polarization and the exclusion of political forces. The only possibility for change from within the party system appears to be the eventual political debilitation of the forces which polarize negotiations', Prud'homme, op. cit., p.98.
15. Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp.3-5, maintain that uncertainty in these circumstances is so crucial that the analysis of transitions must be partly based in the concept of 'abnormality'. There, the unexpected and the possible are as important as the routine and the probable.
16. As per North, op. cit., institutions structure exchange and are a form of channeling behaviour and reducing the range of viable options. Political actors who reject institutionalization are really rejecting the reduction of their set of options.
17. Ibid., p.6.
18. North, op. cit., p. 16, reminds us that institutions are not necessarily created to be efficient, or as that implies in this case, democratic. Rather, formal rules are created to benefit the interests of those who can negotiate them.
19. The disagreement over the achievements or extent of these transformations are due, in the first place, to disparities over when they began. The political and economic bankruptcy of the Mexican government in 1982 created conditions propitious for the advance of the opposition, eroding once and for all the foundations of authoritarianism. Between 1983 and 1985 the PAN won an unprecedented string of municipal election victories. By contrast, some analysts maintain that the transition commenced with the post-electoral crisis of 1988, and still others assert that the transition began after the federal elections of 1997, in which the PRI lost its absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the bi-cameral Congress), and PRD leader Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas was elected mayor of Mexico City.
20. These definitions of liberalization and democratization are those of O'Donnell and Schmitter, op. cit., pp.7-8.
21. All of the reforms were focused on the Chamber of Deputies, as this was the only chamber with a large, permanent opposition party presence. Opposition parties would not begin to play any real role in the upper chamber, the Senate, where they never held any seats before 1988. Proportional representation Senate seats, created only in the early 1990s, has gradually made the Senate a more plural body, but the opposition parties still hold relatively few seats.
22. Until the introduction in 1963 of proportional representation seats, the PAN never managed to win more than six seats out of a total of between 174 and 178 majoritarian electoral districts. Between 1966 and 1982, the PAN fielded candidates in at least 20 per cent of the municipalities and governed in just a few of these. Its presence in state legislatures was almost nil, and the party did not win its first state governorship in one of Mexico's 31 states until 1989. The PAN's constant inability to open up an electoral path - for whatever reasons - also created severe conflicts within the party.
23. For more on the PAN's aversion to risk, see Jorge Buendia Laredo, 'Estabilidad política, aversión al riesgo y competencia electoral en transiciones a la democracia', presented at the conference, 'Pathways to Democracy: The Protracted Transitions', Mexico City, El Colegio de México, 19-21 May 1999.
24. See, for example, Bernardo Bátíz, 'El futuro de México y Acción Nacional', a document presented to the party's XXXII National Convention, 11-12 Feb. 1984, cited in Loaeza, op. cit., p.365.
25. Besides the PAN and the PRI, the other participating parties were: the Popular Socialist Party (PPS), the Autentic Party of the Mexican Revolution (FARM), the Mexican Democratic Party (PDM), the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM), the Mexican Workers' Party (PMT), the Socialist Workers' Party (PST), and the Revolutionary Workers' Party (PRT).
26. This is what happened in Sonora 1985, where the PANista candidate Adalberto Rosas had conducted a campaign filled with threats of violence. In reply to the delicate conditions of the state prior to the election, the most distinguished members of the community and of the PRI, the PAN, and the PSUM signed a public manifesto exhorting the 'democratic conscience of Sonora' to reaffirm the responsibility of all to Obey authority in order to ensure its continued jurisdiction and thus, the legitimate right to govern,' cited in Loaeza, op. cit., p.384.
27. 'Compromiso nacional para la legitimidad y la democracia', Palabra, Vol.2, No.7, Jan.-March 1989, pp.62-70.
28. The PAN's arguments are similar to those made by Chile's Christian Democrats when it initially supported the military coup by General Augusto Pinochet in Sept. 1973, as a means of pre-empting the 'revolutionary' chaos threatening the country.