Transitions to democracy have proved to be deadly for many authoritarian party organizations. The democratization of one-party states, such as the former communist regimes, often witnessed the swift demise of ruling parties. This is the case because a competitive environment represents a crucial challenge for party organizations born and raised in authoritarian regimes. Yet not all breakdowns of authoritarian regimes were created equal, and in some instances, hegemonic parties began their adaptation before they were ousted from power through free and fair elections. The story of those organizations that, against all odds, managed to thrive in these new conditions deserves further investigation.
Democratic transitions present former authoritarian parties with a clear threat, and they can either adapt or die in response. This threat materializes from two key sources: supporters and party elites. A successful adaptation must both brand itself as a viable option for voters and prevent elites from fleeing the organization. The latter threat is most pressing in institutionalized parties in which the ossification of their structures is expected to be more prone to rupture than to adaptation. If these expectations ring true, the successful survival of the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, Partido de la Revolución Institucional) represents an interesting puzzle.
In this book, Joy K. Langston proposes an institutional explanation to understand the PRI’s successful adaptation to democratic competition after 70 years of hegemonic rule. Her argument points to the institutional features of Mexico’s political system that permitted some PRI groups to thrive and cooperate during the gradual transition to democracy. Given that many of these institutions were created well before the opening period, these built-in incentives were, for the most part, both unintended and unanticipated. In addition to these institutional characteristics, Langston argues that the PRI benefited from its lack of programmatic identity, which helped it position itself between the leftist PRD (Partido de la Revolución Democrática) and the conservative PAN (Partido Acción Nacional).
Langston shows that Mexican federalism and the mixed-member electoral system used for federal legislative contests, alongside public funding for politics, posed incentives for the PRI’s two sets of leaders to cooperate. Having provided a rich history of the PRI’s inner key players, the defeat of the functionalist (corporatist) fractions, and the rise of territorial leaders, Langston demonstrates how the PRI’s governors and the federal party authorities (CEN, the National Executive Committee) finally shaped the party into what it is today. A dual dominant coalition provides both the structural flexibility that goes with the party’s ideological laxity and the capacity to reconcile two alternative poles of power, state and federal.
After neoliberal reforms placed more resources in state governments, federalism and legislators elected in single-member districts empowered Mexican governors. When the PRI lost the presidency in 2000, this defeat did not permeate all levels of government, and most states (thanks also to nonconcurrent elections) remained in the hands of PRI governors. During the 12-year period that the party did not control the federal executive, governors held the upper hand over their states and their single-member legislators, helping them run their campaigns and mobilizing territorial networks for their advantage. However, since 1989, the PRI has not controlled all the states, and in those cases where the state executive was in the hands of the PAN or the PRD, the national party leaders played the role of supporting candidates, thanks to generous public funding.
The PRI national leaders were also in charge of helping candidates in multimember districts whose limits transcended state boundaries and whose closed-party lists underscored party identification rather than a personal vote. In sum, governors and the CEN needed to cooperate to win votes, and this kept the PRI elite together while the PAN ran the federal administration. After 2012, when the PRI returned to the federal government, the president undertook some of the tasks carried out by the CEN in the two former sexenios, but the governors are still important sources of power that cannot be simply overridden by the federal executive.
Langston traces her argument through history with a focus on the party as an organization. She does an outstanding job of dissecting the groups within the party and presenting maps of key actors at time different periods. After a gradual opening to democracy, in a context of strict term limits to all elected offices, governors and the CEN became the master puppeteers behind mobilizing voters and winning votes. In the book, even though it remains part of the puzzle, less attention is dedicated to voting behavior. Why did Mexican voters not fully desert the PRI after democratization? According to Langston, the answer lies in the PRI’s ideological flexibility and decentralized (yet nationalized) structure. This left the party in a privileged position to cater to pragmatic and independent voters—estimated to be roughly a third of Mexican citizens—who were not fully aligned to the more programmatic choices offered by the PAN and the PRD.
This book advances many contributions to the study of political parties in general and the former authoritarian parties in particular. It also provides support to the notion that institutionalized organizations may be flexible enough to adapt to changes in the environment. In the case of the PRI, flexibility is a product of a nationalized yet decentralized structure and of a pragmatic ideology that allows the party to profit from its nationwide brand recognition. Langston’s argument is thus parsimonious and persuasive. However, for a case in which the political opening develops over more than a decade and was so tightly controlled by the PRI at the federal level, the argument would have benefited greatly from an inclusion of time considerations in the theory. By time considerations, I specifically mean the pace of the transition, which significantly differentiates the Mexican case from other swift transitions, such as those from communist rule.
Moreover, given that federalism and governors take a central place in the argument, it would have benefited from a research design that included multilevel features. For example, Langston argues that the PRI’s capacity to keep winning votes is due to a coordinated endeavor of governors and federal party elites. This provides an ideal setting for a research design of cross-subnational comparisons in Mexico. It could have provided the variance needed to show how this coordination worked in states ruled by PRI governors and states ruled by other parties. In a nutshell, for an argument in which territorial considerations are crucial, it leaves readers in the dark about the extent of the comparative advantage of legislative candidates running in the former.
The evidence the book presents rests on secondary sources and Langston’s impressive fieldwork, undertaken over a long time and in a large number of interviews. The direct quotations were extremely interesting and provided not only a nice illustration of the argument but also much-needed evidence for the theoretical claims. However, I missed reading more of these. I felt that interview quotes were scarce and mostly buried in footnotes. In sum, the book’s argument, albeit compelling, would have been even stronger if it had been supported by a more direct link between expectations and evidence.
The PRI’s successful adaptation to competitive politics, as retold by Langston, is an achievement underpinned by a set of institutional features: the reactivation of federalism, both by economic crises and democratization; a single-member electoral system for the federal chambers; staggered state elections; strict rules that render the creation of new organizations pretty difficult; and the rigid term limits that impede legislators from creating a personal electoral connection with voters. As it is, her argument is convincing, and its logic is impeccable. Yet the future will bring important tests for it. The re-election of federal deputies, among other offices, is expected to create incentives for legislators to cultivate a personal electoral connection with their constituents. Gubernatorial power over candidacies may thereby be weakened over time. Re-election can also promote the professionalization of legislators, which, in turn, may affect committee allocations and diminish the power of national party leaders over the legislative delegations. In this context, changes in the institutional rules that once helped consolidate shared goals for the dual leadership of the party, the CEN and the governors, may now bring new challenges as the PRI approaches its one-hundred-year mark.
