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Contracts … have a major drawback: the transaction costs of arranging and enforcing them. Because of these costs, members of a group may find it more welfare maximizing to honor the default rules that third parties have set. Among the most important discretionary powers of the president has been the naming and removal of governors, the president's premier agents in their respective states. The relationship between the president and the governors has been a peculiar one, defying the system of electoral justice successfully imposed at the federal level and routinely violating the federal pact. This chapter details the president's “hiring” and “firing” of the governors, and the governors' “hiring” and “firing” of the mayors, throughout the twentieth century, demonstrating the strong and arbitrary tradition of presidential imposition (whether “papered over” by elections or not), which was only recently cast aside by President Vicente Fox for a new standard of more gentle executive-branch intervention. I argue through discussion of the aggregate cases of presidential appointment and dismissal, as well as through three case studies from the early 1990s, that if the federal electoral courts discussed in the last chapter offered electoral justice success stories, gubernatorial races epitomized institutional failure during the crucial decades of Mexico's protracted transition. Given this broad pre-2000 range in outcomes of the institutions of electoral justice (ranging from institutional accountability at the federal level to widespread failure at the gubernatorial level), I argue that mayoral races occupy the middle of this spectrum between successful and failed electoral justice outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

… but you must bind me hard and fast, so that I cannot stir from the spot where you will stand me … and if I beg you to release me, you must tighten and add to my bonds. The underdog National Action Party (PAN) unseated Mexico's long-reigning authoritarian incumbents in the 2000 presidential election, but only after preparing decades for the race. The electoral demise of the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) after seventy-one years, ending the longest period of one-party rule in the world, was actually the culmination of a protracted transition to democracy spanning at least twenty-three years. Especially over the last decade, the PAN pushed the authoritarian incumbents to make Mexican elections credible, begging the question of why authoritarians would permit electoral reforms that reduced their capacity for rigging elections, introduced genuine uncertainty into electoral contests, and ultimately, led to the PAN's presidential victory in July 2000. Clearly, authoritarian incumbents have little interest in political liberalization and undertake such policies only when they perceive that they have little other choice to channel social movement opposition into political parties (such as the Brazilian military dictatorship's consciously taken “decompression” starting in the mid-1970s), gather information about regime and opposition support under rapidly changing circumstances (such as the Polish elections of 1990), mollify international critics (such as the People's Republic of China in the 1990s), or use the electoral arena as a means to manipulate the opposition (as in Mexico and Taiwan in the early 1990s and South Korea in the early 1980s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indeed, you won the elections, but I won the count. Before citizens in authoritarian regimes can hand-cast free ballots in fair elections, they often must vote with their feet. In pre-2000 Mexico, disgruntled opposition activists contested fraudulent elections by launching street mobilizations and building occupations. Before they entrusted their grievances to electoral commissions and courts, they took to the streets. This book documents the rise of Mexico's opposition party activists and how they gradually channeled their postelectoral contestation off the streets and into the courtrooms. Mexico's protracted transition from the longest reigning one-party authoritarian regime in the world to a multiparty democracy culminated in 2000 with Mexico's first executive branch alternation since 1929. This is a book about the quarter century of national and local elections preceding the 2000 watershed. However, unlike most work on elections, it considers social movements surrounding elections as much as the contests themselves. Courting democracy in Mexico was hardly a straightforward story about the translation of preferences into votes and votes into seats. Rather, it was a “stop and go” process through which opposition parties did negotiate increasing spaces of participation, but rarely at the ballot box. Elections, especially local elections, served largely as preliminary summations of forces – starting points for the postelectoral negotiation of opposition party participation in public administration subordinate to the ruling Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) authoritarians, the longest continuous one-party state in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]