Election specialists and Latin Americanists alike will welcome this edited work on Mexico’s 2012 presidential election. It should be viewed as the third in a series of outstanding analyses of three Mexican presidential elections: Mexico’s Pivotal Democratic Election: Candidates, Voters, and the Presidential Campaign of 2000 (2004), and Consolidating Mexico’s Democracy: The 2006 Presidential Campaign in Comparative Perspective (2009). They remain the most thorough evaluations in English of the three campaigns. All three are linked methodologically, using original panel surveys throughout the campaign period to measure changes in voter preferences; thematically, providing overwhelming evidence that campaigns matter significantly in electoral outcomes in Mexico; and comparatively, within Mexican politics, and among countries, such as Eastern European democracies, which have recently emerged from authoritarian eras.
This work consists of 11 chapters, nine of which are specific analyses of Mexican campaign politics, and the remaining two chapters, creating a contextual introduction for this event (Chappell Lawson) and a broad, comparative, collective assessment of the central conclusions (Jorge Domínguez). A refreshing aspect of these overviews is that the editors have performed this task in each volume, joined by Alejandro Moreno in Consolidating. Thus, they are cognizant of the arguments made previously since the pathbreaking 2000 election ending the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) seven-decade rule.
Lawson and Domínguez both agree that voter preferences changed significantly during these campaigns, altering the outcome of the 2000 and 2006 elections. The frontrunner at the beginning of the 2012 campaign remained the winner at the election’s conclusion; nevertheless, many voters still altered their preferences. A major shift characterizing the 2012 election that distinguishes it from its immediate predecessors is that partisan attachments were weaker. An equally important conclusion, which both editors also identify, is that Mexican voters share a strong tendency to choose candidates on the basis of qualities related to performance. It is refreshing that Domínguez readily corrects his earlier findings based on the current volume’s conclusions. Many of the contributors also correctly indicate that voters evaluate characteristics that inform the candidate’s ability to govern (Kathleen Bruhn’s chapter, p. 37). In highlighting this finding, perhaps it would be more elucidating to emphasize that the public’s perception of the most important issues facing Mexico—economic variables (poverty, unemployment, inflation) and security issues (violence, drugs, organized crime)—have not significantly changed since 2000. Most Mexicanists would argue that the present administration’s failures have comparatively little to do with its policies, and much more with their ineffective implementation.
An important change in the 2012 election, compared to its predecessors, is social media’s increasing role. The three leading candidates of the major parties—PRI, the National Action Party (PAN), and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)—actively used Twitter and Facebook to communicate to their likely supporters. Domínguez and Moreno explore in detail the impact of a student-oriented social media campaign, #YoSoy132. They demonstrate from the panel surveys that it reduced Enrique Peña Nieto’s lead and boosted that of his strongest opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (PRD), but reversed its influence late in the campaign. As an uncited survey revealed, one explanation for this rejection was the belief that this independent movement was linked to a political party. The fact that only 12% of Mexicans currently have confidence in political parties can be attributed, in large part, to their reputation before 2000. The importance of social media in electoral campaigns is also tempered by the fact that data on Mexicans who are actual Twitter and Facebook users clearly demonstrate that they are well educated, enjoy higher incomes, and are urban residents, and that they express little confidence in any Mexican institutions.
A broader issue, which many of the authors touch on, and far more significant to Mexico’s future, is the extent to which the variables they analyze adversely affect Mexico’s democratic consolidation. The work of many Mexicanists has documented the declining respect for or faith in the democratic political model. Jim McCann, who has contributed to all three volumes, cites the revealing Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) data, which should be widely used with these panel surveys, suggesting that Mexicans have become “more pessimistic about the workings of multiparty democracy” (p. 99). A second important finding is that nonpartisan voters, a significant percentage of likely voters since 2000, is a growing segment, a conclusion Kenneth Greene emphasizes. As he suggests in his notes, an “amazing 86.2% of voters changed vote intention at least once in the four-wave 2000 study and 45.2%” in the 2006 study (p. 149). Greene’s finding takes on greater significance if the reader was aware of the fact that the distribution of partisan voters among the parties in all three elections has remained more or less the same. PRI boasts the largest percentage of strong, partisan voters, followed by the PAN and the PRD. In a three-party system, two candidates have won the election with less that 39% of the vote. PRI, therefore, has an easier task in convincing a smaller percentage of the independent voters to support its ticket. PRD, on the other hand, typically would have to more than double its partisan vote to win.
The volume also addresses two essential components of recent Mexican elections, violence and corruption. The chapter on “Drugs, Bullets, and Ballots” provides completely unique data on the empirical impact of violence on voter turnout. The authors estimate that drug-related violence “lowered turnout by around three percentage points in the country’s most violent localities” (p. 155). They demonstrate how such a small figure can have dramatic consequences for electoral outcomes.
While it is impossible to note all of the new and significant findings that are thoroughly researched in the comparative literature, I would offer two observations. It can be argued that since Mexico’s Evolving Democracy was published two and a half years after the election, it would have been useful for more of the contributors to link their findings and analyses to the lack of democratic consolidation and the structural changes that are impacted. Noting the significance of the Pact for Mexico (an agreement among the three parties to pursue a specific policy agenda) in greater depth is an example. Further, almost no mention whatsoever is made of traditional demographic variables. Most important of these is gender, which is only mentioned three or four times. A valuable Mitofsky survey of the 2009 congressional elections revealed that on a state-by-state basis, up to 10% more women than men voted in that election. Why did it not continue to be the case in 2012? We do not know. Their level of participation has potential implications for democratic consolidation given their significant differences from men in conceptualizing democracy. In the chapter on corruption and clientelism, it would be worth noting to the readers that recent LAPOP surveys clearly demonstrate that link between the existence or perception of corruption and the degree of willingness to pay a bribe. In short, more emphasis on the consequences of these electoral findings for Mexican democracy writ large would enhance even more this fine volume.
