This book examines political party development and its implications for democracy in Mexico. Wuhs shows how the centre-right Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN) and the centre-left Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD) responded institutionally to the ‘democratic imperative’. He analyses their commitment to internal democracy as parties founded in opposition to the authoritarian rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), and their decades-long struggle to defeat the PRI at the polls – in part by demonstrating to voters their own commitment to democratic norms and practices – and thereby secure electoral democracy. He argues that internal democratising initiatives undertaken by PAN and PRD reformers sometimes produced unexpected, perverse outcomes that compromised these parties' capacity to advance their goal of regime democratisation.
The analysis is based primarily on the author's extensive interviews with PAN and PRD activists, his close examination of various party documents, and relevant survey data. The interview materials are especially useful in establishing party elites' changing goals over time, although they do sometimes give the discussion a ‘top-down’ tone. Wuhs demonstrates an extensive knowledge of the literature on political parties and institutions, and he very successfully situates his case study within broader academic debates on these topics. The book is logically organised and well written.
Wuhs systematically compares the PAN's and the PRD's institutional evolution from the 1980s through 2006 in three areas: their candidate selection processes, their bureaucratic development as party organisations, and their links with civil society. He notes that, as a reaction to PRI rule, both parties generally favoured ‘weak central offices, activist-driven organisations, and decentralised power’ (p. 32). Over time, however, the PRD in particular responded to an increasingly open electoral environment by adopting broadly inclusive rules for selecting its executive and single-member-district legislative candidates. The PAN also sought to identify more electable candidates by liberalising somewhat its selection procedures (especially for presidential and gubernatorial candidates), but it placed more emphasis than did the PRD on maintaining party identity and therefore preserved a stronger role for carefully vetted party members in picking its nominees (particularly for legislative positions). Nonetheless, both PAN and PRD leaders retained tight controls over the choice of proportional-representation legislative candidacies as a means of rewarding key constituencies and building internal party cohesion.
Where these parties' bureaucratic development was concerned, both the PAN and the PRD responded to the demands of competitive, media-centred campaigns by employing the expanded public funding available after 1996 to develop more complex, professionalised administrative institutions. The PAN was much more consistent in this regard than the PRD, which has retained a comparatively fluid party-movement structure.
Wuhs makes an especially valuable contribution in his discussion of the various linkage strategies that the PAN and the PRD have employed vis-à-vis their civil-society allies. Both parties responded to state-corporatist elements of Mexico's post-revolutionary authoritarian regime by insisting on the autonomy of societal organisations. The PAN in particular has long promoted the role of individual cadres in party affairs, while the PRD has formally rejected party control over affiliated groups. At times, however, Wuhs might have examined more critically the claims made by party leaders in this area. For instance, he accepts that PAN programmes such as its 2004 citizen promotion initiative among rural and indigenous populations have been ‘consistent with the party's commitment to the autonomy of parties and civil society: they were openly and steadfastly anti-corporatist’ (p. 100), despite the existence of evidence indicating that the PAN's record in national office since 2000 has included attempts to replicate the same clientelistic ties with social programme beneficiaries for which it long criticised the PRI.
Wuhs' overarching argument is that efforts by the PAN and the PRD to address simultaneously the two dimensions of the democratic imperative have repeatedly produced instances of ‘savage democracy’, in which ‘institutions favouring internal party democracy inhibited the parties’ democratising agendas, or vice versa' (p. 89). For example, the PRD's commitment to radically inclusive candidate selection procedures at times made the party vulnerable to PRI efforts to colonise some local party offices. Similarly, the institutionalisation of internal factions (corrientes) in the PRD's governance structures faithfully represented the diverse leftist tendencies around which the party was founded, but it also condemned the PRD to unending internecine struggles that sometimes undermined its public standing and compromised its electoral effectiveness.
The final chapter offers important reflections on the implications that the PAN's and the PRD's institutional evolution hold for citizen participation in Mexico. Wuhs argues that, by strengthening the position of party leaders and reducing their accountability to rank-and-file members, cumulative transformations in these parties have undermined their representative capacity. Thus, while the consolidation of electoral democracy has empowered political parties, their failure to build stronger ties with their own members has contributed to distrust and alienation from parties as institutions. This development raises sobering questions about the overall quality of political representation and Mexico's future as a democracy.
There are some minor errors in this book – the dates given for Porfirio Díaz's long rule, 1876–80, 1884–1911; the names of the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Lázaro Cárdenas' role vis-à-vis the ejido in Mexico's post-revolutionary agrarian reform – and the author's effort (p. 11, n. 3) to situate the Mexican case in the literatures on authoritarianism and totalitarianism is rather jumbled. Yet on balance, Wuhs makes valuable, original contributions to the comparative politics literature on institutional change and party development and to debates concerning the challenges to democracy in contemporary Mexico.
