What are elections for? In political theory elections are usually described as the means either for holding politicians accountable or – more ambitiously – for aggregating and representing the interests and policy preferences of the electorate. If elections are grossly manipulated they of course do neither, turning instead into cynical exercises of power. Looking beyond elections, and at the reality they seek to hide, then becomes the task of the serious analyst.
This view, or one very like it, used to predominate in the historical study of nineteenth-century Latin America. Yes, these were some of the world's first republics, yes, their definitions of the electorate (at certain times and in certain countries) were more inclusive than anywhere else. But their elections were not deemed worthy of study, for those elections simply masked the region's real social and economic power relations.
This is a view no longer widely held. Edited volumes by Eduardo Posada-Carbó (Elections before Democracy: The History of Elections in Europe and Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 1996)) and Hilda Sabato (Ciudadanía política y formación de las naciones. Perspectivas históricas de América Latina (Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1999)) presented a wealth of evidence about the critical roles that elections played in the political life of nineteenth-century Latin America. Elections were incitements to public discourse and demonstrations, sometimes to rebellion. They structured political conflict and invigorated the region's associational culture. This new view about the role of elections encouraged a significant research programme to take shape. In the case of Mexico, for example, book-length studies by José Antonio Serrano Ortega (Jerarquía territorial y transición política: Guanajuato, 1790–1836 (El Colegio de Michoacán, 2001)), Richard Warren (Vagrants and Citizens: Politics and the Masses in Mexico City from Colony to Republic (SR Books, 2001)), Claudia Guarisco (Los indios del valle de México y la construcción de una nueva sociabilidad política, 1770–1835 (El Colegio Mexiquense, 2003)), and Peter Guardino (The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750–1850 (Duke University Press, 2005)), among others, went on to consider elections in the context of broad changes in political practice, consciousness and sociability associated with the transition from colonial to republican rule.
The contributors to the volumes under review for the most part retreat from such broad considerations. Instead, they offer detailed analyses of the mechanics of electoral practice and, in some of the chapters, of the social composition of the electorate, in nineteenth-century Mexico. (A chapter by Edwin Alcántara Machuca, on the political campaigns leading up to the strongly contested 1850 presidential elections, is the exception.) This is a collection of case studies: each chapter deals with an election, or sometimes a few elections, in a particular place (a municipality or district) and time period. Municipal, congressional (at the state and federal levels) and presidential elections all get their due. Volume 1 contains ten chapters covering the period between the 1812 and the 1857 Constitutions. Within this period the coverage is uneven – only two of the chapters (by Sonia Pérez Toledo and Cecilia Noriega Elío) deal at least partly with elections during the centralist era. Volume 2 contains seven chapters on elections under the auspices of the 1857 Constitution, two of which are about the Reform period, one about the Restored Republic, three about the Porfiriato, and one about the transition from Restored Republic to Porfiriato.
This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the history of elections in Mexico. Some of the discussions – for example, on the exact number of stages (three or four?) in the indirect elections of the Cádiz era – can seem not merely technical but fussy. But the questions that recur throughout the collection should be of interest to all historians of the practice of politics in nineteenth-century Mexico. How were elections carried out? Who got to control the physical spaces where voting took place? Who voted and who got elected? What controversies arose over electoral practice, and who got to decide on those controversies? (The answer to that last question was itself sometimes controversial.)
Some of these questions have clearer answers than others. An 1894 voter list from the town of Campeche allows Fausta Gantús to provide information both on the occupations of registered voters and on the number of members of each occupational group who actually voted. We thus get a fascinating glimpse into the social composition of Porfirian voters. We learn, for example, that voting was particularly prevalent among sastres (tailors, 32.6 per cent), empleados (clerks, 26 per cent), and plateros (silversmiths, 25 per cent) and by no means uncommon among jornaleros (day workers, 15.8 per cent) and labradores (farmers, 15 per cent) (vol. 2: pp. 199–201, Anexo 2). On the basis of this information, Gantús argues for the significance of the participation ‘of individuals from the popular classes and of certain groups from the middle classes’ (vol. 2: p. 181) in local elections during the height of the Díaz regime.
What is harder to know is how independent, or self-directed, such popular voters ultimately were. Allegations of vote-buying or patrimonial voter mobilisation are documented throughout the two volumes. (During the Restored Republic and Porfiriato, there were sometimes reports of more brazen methods of fraud, such as the stuffing of ballot boxes and intimidation of electors.) Evaluating these complaints is a difficult task: the practices they denounced did not themselves leave a paper trail. The exclusive focus on electoral practice by most of the authors here becomes a problem; more attention to the social relations and political practices surrounding particular electoral contests might have allowed an empirically-informed assessment of whether voters were responding to pressure by social superiors or to their own perceived interests when casting their votes. Indeed, Irving Reynoso Jaime's unique attention to the social context of local elections – he documents the electoral dominance of hacendados in the district of Cuernavaca during the Cádiz and first federalist periods – makes his perhaps the strongest of the chapters included in these volumes.
Overall this is a valuable collection of case studies of elections that will be of interest to any scholar writing about the history of politics in nineteenth-century Mexico.
