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Threats to the integrity of electoral democracy are manifold. The democratic quality of electoral contests can suffer damage from self-serving manipulation by central or subnational governments, foul play by contending parties and candidates, or the administrative incapacity or incompetence of election authorities. This paper focuses on a distinct form of threat that has received scant attention in the comparative literature: the societal subversion of democratic elections by criminal violence. Conceptually, the paper presents criminal violence as a form of horizontal threat against the integrity of liberal democratic elections. Empirically, it analyzes the ongoing civil war in Mexico (the so-called drug war) to illustrate the chilling effects criminal violence has on electoral d democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about political participation in Mexico is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including the transformation of Mexico from a one-party authoritarian regime to a multiparty competitive democracy, and the influence of political opportunities and constraints on political participation.

This paper develops a theoretical argument that explains the patterns of change in bothsocial insurance and social assistance in Mexico over the last two decades and explains some ofthe apparent contradictions in the existing literature on globalization, democratic institutions, andwelfare in Latin America. By comparing multiple social insurance and social assistance policyoutcomes during the Salinas (1988-1994), Zedillo (1994-2000), and Fox (2000-2006)administrations, the paper demonstrates that though globalization may constrain welfare policyoptions, its impact is often indirect, through its effect on the relative political capacity ofdomestic actors. Furthermore, political liberalization changes the incentives for politicians tosupply welfare. In addition, existing welfare institutions create powerful policy legacies thatinfluence the interests of some domestic political actors. The overall pattern that emerges inMexico is one of partial retrenchment of social insurance and the expansion of targeted socialassistance, a pattern that can be explained in light of economic liberalization, democratization,and policy legacies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1980s and 1990s, Mexico, was able to institute a stabilization and adjustment program in the form of a series of tripartite agreement known as the Pactos. The pacts managed to set the context for the reform of the Mexican economy. The central objectives of this paper are to understand, first, how tripartite agreements between 1987 and 1997 came about and helped reform the economy, and second, put forward some of the factors that are impeding mechanisms of social partnership in the context of democratic politics in 2000. This paper argues that the Pactos were the result of a free trade governing coalition interests for economic reform, and a set of institutional factors (State capacities (ideas, knowledge and expertise), corporatism, and the Pacto institutions) that helped create a policy mechanism that minimized uncertainty and free-riding through an system of rules that monitored, coordinated, and sanctioned political actors. This study suggests that social partnership mechanisms can help reduce uncertainty and foster cooperation in the context of economic reform and increasing competition, yet, that the institutional arrangements of Mexican presidential regime can be an obstacle for the development of tripartite accords in todays Mexican democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to operationalize democracy at the national level have occupied a central place in the discipline since the 1960s, and have resulted in a cumulative body of literature and in a variety of datasets of increasing rigor and geographic and temporal coverage. Attempts to measure democracy at the subnational level are much more recent and inchoate, cover only a few countries and periods, and, critically, are not comparable across nations. After reviewing the state of the subject at the national level and the existing (objective) national subnational indices, this paper proposes six versions of an objective Subnational Democracy Index that can be calculated on the basis of (typically available) electoral and institutional data. Because of their modest data demands, the proposed indices can easily be applied to very different national and temporal contexts, thus permitting comparisons of subnational regimes across countries. The measures are pilot-tested on the first-level subnational units of five federations (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and the United States) and of one unitary country (Uruguay). The ultimate goal of this line of research is to produce cross-sectional--time-series datasets of subnational democracy with broad geographic and temporal coverage similar to those existing for national regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to shed light on the relationship between democratic accountability and local public good provision in Mexico. I assess the way in which the system of intergovernmental finances has allowed municipal governments to remain rather unaccountable to citizens in the provision of public goods and services at the local level. By looking at the determinants of the reelection rates of the parties that control the municipal government, I explore the extent to which the process of decentralization and the way in which local governments use decentralized fiscal transfers is linked to the retention of municipal governments in the hands of the same party. Though this does not provide a direct test of the accountability of politicians to citizens, it suggests that the punishment of incumbents who fail to deliver in certain aspects of public policy is a critical tool that may allow Mexicans to align their interests with those of their representative governments. The findings, however, suggest a rather strong entrenchment of incumbents from all parties, based on the construction of clientelism and patronage networks, rather than the provision of public goods. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses evidence from Mexico to test two competing visions about how democracy produces responsive government. Electoral theories of democracy, such as accountability theory, posit that democracies are responsive to the public interest because citizens can use elections as a means of controlling politicians. Participatory theories explain levels of responsiveness as a function of a citizenry?s ability to articulate demands and influence politicians through a wider range of political action. I test hypotheses derived from these two theories, using an original dataset that combines electoral, socioeconomic, public-financial, and demographic indicators for virtually all of Mexico?s 2400 municipalities, from 1980 to 2000. Although most recent research on Mexico has emphasized the importance of elections as instruments of democracy, my data show that electoral competition has little effect on municipal government performance. Non-electoral forms of participation, on the other hand, are closely and strongly correlated with government performance. Most surprisingly, the data show no evidence of an interactive effect: a competitive electoral environment does not appear to be a necessary condition for participation to be influential. I argue that Mexico?s institutional context is responsible for the failure of elections to influence government responsiveness in Mexican municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent wave of political transitions has often led to competitive elections, but not always to the minimal institutional guarantees of civil and political rights or the responsive policy outcomes that are generally associated with democratic regimes. Scholars have offered a range of explanations for the differences in the quality of these new democracies. Aspects of socioeconomic structure, institutional configurations, and the strategic choices of elite actors have each been proposed, but these hypotheses are rarely systematically tested against each other. In this paper, I draw on the experiences of Mexico’s thirty-one recently empowered state governments in the years since that country’s pivotal 1988 presidential election to provide just such a test. My statistical analyses indicate that legislative pluralism, the strength of radical opposition parties, and economic inequality each have an important effect on the quality of new democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the broader theoretical claim that civil society can be thickened (in democratic ways) with international support and collaboration. Case studies of domestic election monitoring organizations in Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru suggest that internationally supported civic organizations can play an important role in mobilizing political participation. There is less evidence to show that they can consistently fulfill other democratizing functions, such as modeling democratic practices and improving communication between government and citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the institutional legacies of the one-party regime in Mexico and Russia respectively as they make the transition to democracy and market economies. Despite their differing histories, the countries are responding to similar globalization pressures, in roughly similar ways. However the Soviet legacy of strict limits on institutional pluralism and lack of a mechanism for ensuring leadership rotation left Russia ill-prepared for the democratic transition in comparison with Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To combat disparities in access to political advertising--an essential challenge for many consolidating democracies where political parties are regionally dominant--many countries now regulate access to political advertising. Since many voters in consolidating democracies are unfamiliar with the policy positions of the major parties, equalizing political advertising opportunities may be especially beneficial to political parties that are not locally dominant. Mexico implemented such a reform in 2007, allocating radio and television advertising slots according to national and state vote shares at the previous election. Using detailed signal coverage data, we combine matching techniques with a fuzzy geographic regression discontinuity design to exploit differences in exposure to political advertising caused by cross-state spillovers to identify the effects of political advertising. We show that political advertising--particularly AM radio--is effective at increasing the vote share of the PAN and PRD, but not the previously-hegemonic PRI. Consistent with our formal model, PAN and PRD political advertising is most effective in the least informed and politically uncompetitive electoral precincts, and when a facing a locally dominant party of intermediate strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After its successful transition to democracy, Mexico has stumbled into a criminal civil war, also known as the drug war, that to date has cost well over 100,000 casualties, most of them consigned to oblivion, without proper investigation or prosecution. Victims have been organizing and protesting, yet ordinary citizens have remained quiet. As I hypothesize, the primary reason for their acquiescence is attitudinal: Criminal civil war destroys the moral foundations of citizen solidarity, which is, the recognition of victims as equal members of the political community. Based on original data from the Mexican 2013 National Survey on Organized Violence, I address two empirical questions. First, how much do citizens care about the victims of criminal violence? I find that average citizens are rather ignorant of and indifferent to their fate. Second, what explains variations in citizen sympathies towards victims? My theory of solidarity under criminal civil war focuses on its cognitive framing. To the extent that citizens hold criminal violence to be selective, an exclusive affair among criminals, they tend to blame victims for their fate and deny them their sympathies. Lineal regression analysis confirms the expected framing effect, even when controlling for complementary explanations, such as victimization, distance to war, class, and political sophistication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crime as a campaign theme was notably absent in the 2012 Mexican presidential race, despite opinion polls that consistently showed it to be one of voters' primary concerns. It seemed a significant disconnect for candidates to neglect the topic, as record levels of murders, kidnappings and extortions had citizens living in fear in many parts of the country. It also diverges from the theoretical consensus that crime is a valence issue in politics and candidates will distinguish themselves based on their degree of competence in addressing the problem. The final months of the previous electoral campaign in 2006 followed this established expectation, but the 2012 race did not. Mexico is not unique in this respect; there is a surprising amount of unexplained variation in the politicization of crime in electoral campaigns in Latin America, where homicide rates are three times the world average and the proportion of voters who consider crime to be the region's most urgent problem has quintupled over the last 15 years. This research addresses the question, "Under what conditions do politicians campaign on crime?" Using survey data from the 2006 and 2012 Mexican presidential races, I argue a lack of voter trust in law enforcement institutions constrains the ability of candidates to differentiate themselves based on competence in combating crime, pushing them towards other possible campaign themes. This excludes the issue from the electoral debate and disallows voters a viable set of alternative approaches to their primary concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the short and long-term effects in enhancing opposition vote propensity in the elections in Mexico. The article presents a study that evaluates the data from the 2000 election. The study suggests that Mexican voters are party-driven and not susceptible to short-term campaign effects. The findings also imply that Mexicans behave like their counterparts in established democracies, where campaign does not affect vote choice.

The article focuses on Mexico's 2006 presidential elections to illustrate that campaign persuasion accounts for the massive pre-electoral vote swing between candidates and played a major role in electing, by a thin margin, a conservative rather than a leftwing president. According to the author, voters were much more vulnerable to persuasive messages than existing theories tailored for studying established democracies would predict.

The article focuses on Mexico's 2006 presidential elections to illustrate that campaign persuasion accounts for the massive pre-electoral vote swing between candidates and played a major role in electing, by a thin margin, a conservative rather than a leftwing president. According to the author, voters were much more vulnerable to persuasive messages than existing theories tailored for studying established democracies would predict.

Why do dominant parties persist in power for decades and under what conditions do challengers expand enough to beat them at the polls, thus transforming these systems into fully competitive democracies with turnover? Unlike in one-party regimes, the world's 16 dominant party systems feature open and meaningful electoral competition; however, dominant parties have persisted despite enough social cleavages, permissive electoral institutions, negative retrospective evaluations of the incumbent, and sufficient ideological space for challengers to occupy. I craft a resource theory of dominance that focuses on the incumbent's ability to divert public resources for partisan use. Using formal theory, I show how asymmetric resources and costs of participation force challengers to form as non-centrist and under-competitive parties. Only when these asymmetries decline do opposition parties expand. I test the theory's predictions using survey data of party elites in Mexico. I also extend the argument to Malaysia and Italy using aggregate data. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Levels of democracy at the subnational level vary significantly in many federations, especially in developing democracies such as Argentina, Brazil, India, Mexico, Russia and South Africa. Instances of subnational authoritarianism are not uncommon in such nations. The literature on democracy and democratization, however, has mainly focused on regimes at the national level. Using quantitative evidence from the 24 Argentine provinces, I test theories of democracy that have been proposed by the national-level literature, and argue, drawing on rentier and fiscal theories of the state, that a key factor explaining variance in subnational democracy is the extent to which the incumbent in each unit benefits from rents. A burgeoning recent literature has studied the regime effects of natural resource rents (such as those produced by oil), and has suggested that, in very poor countries, foreign aid functions as a form of rent that hinders democracy. I argue that, in middle-income federations such as Argentina, the main source of subnational rents is the redistribution of tax revenues collected by the federal government. Rules and practices that disproportionally allocate these fiscal resources to poorer or smaller units provide their incumbents with generous rents that allow them to restrict democratic competition. Thus, fiscally progressive redistribution often results in politically regressive outcomes. A recursive OLS regression model shows that, in Argentina, the larger the federal fiscal (and oil) rents a province receives, the lower its level of democratic competition, even after controlling for modernization and other alternative theoretical accounts of democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the different variants of single-party authoritarianism. There are three distinct classes of single-party authoritarian regimes during the Third Wave, namely "closed," "hegemonic electoral," and "competitive." Among these three, competitive authoritarian dictatorship is most likely to transform into some other form of authoritarianism or to democracy. The transformation of Mexico, Senegal, and Taiwan into competitive authoritarian regimes is discussed.

A flood of scholarship has demonstrated the importance of civil society to democratic transitions, democratic consolidation, and making democracy work. However, if civil society is important for democracy, what are the implications for countries where the state has historically controlled societal forms of organization? This research attempts to understand how civil society grows and develops in Mexico, a country with a traditionally weak third sector, which has grown exponentially since the decline of one-party rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When citizens lack firm dispositions to guide their thinking about politics, it is difficult for them to hold leaders accountable for public policies, and the quality of democratic governance is likely to suffer. In this article, we exploit a recent four-wave panel survey to examine patterns of attitude stability and change during Mexico’s 2000 presidential race. We find that the degree of attitude stability in Mexico depends heavily on the type of dispositions considered: partisan self-identification, presidential approval, ideology, or attitudes about salient public issues. Overall, however, Mexican public opinion is well formed enough on key dimensions for citizens to play the role of political protagonists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Without a majority in the Congress, the president's party looses the ability to direct policy change. With only one third of the vote, the president's party can prevent any initiative from turning into law. Individual opposition parties gain influence under divided government but lack the power to veto policy change. Contrary to what critics of presidentialism have argued, political parties in presidential regimes lack in incentives to cooperate and build policy-making coalitions. Coalition-building depends on the potential gains of cooperation that both the president's party and the opposition parties can capture if they modify the status quo. Two sufficient conditions for coalition-building can be identified: an extreme position of the status quo, and the location of the president's party at the median position. This explains law change and the size of lawmaking coalitions under divided government in Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]