In this carefully crafted book, Kenneth Greene presents and solves what he calls the “puzzle” of dominant parties: Why do such parties persist in power for decades and, conversely, why do they fall from power, even when the opposition fails to unite against them? He argues that existing theories tend either to overpredict or underpredict the creation and success of opposition parties; hence, they fail to explain the establishment of equilibrium dominance or why dominance ever evolves into a competitive democracy, without either the collapse of the incumbent regime or its transformation into a one-party state. Greene develops a theory to fill this gap in the literature by explaining the general phenomenon of single-party dominance. He demonstrates how this theory applies to the case of Mexico as well as to other countries with dominant parties.
Greene distinguishes dominant party systems from both fully competitive democracies and fully closed, one-party authoritarian systems. Dominant party systems are hybrids, he says, in which the incumbent has exercised power for at least “one generation.” As in fully competitive democracies, dominant party regimes hold regular and meaningful elections; the key differences are that full democracies have a greater number of competitive parties and hold fairer elections, resulting in an outcome that is not a foregone conclusion. As in fully closed, authoritarian systems, a dominant party may resort to repression; however, since dominant parties base their legitimacy on popular consent, they are freer, less repressive, than one-party systems, which ban all pluralism.
According to Greene's resource theory of single-party dominance, dominant parties persist in power because they have resource advantages that tilt the electoral playing field in their favor. These “hyper-incumbency advantages” derive from monopoly access to public funds, which allow dominant parties to pillage state coffers for partisan purposes. The incumbent's resource advantage varies with the size of the politically controlled public sector. The greater the state's role in the economy and the more the dominant party can exert political control over the public bureaucracy, the more opportunities it has to recruit voters and potential challengers through patronage. Patronage ensures the incumbent repeated victories at the polls. Outcome-changing fraud and/or repression, which would place a political system in the fully closed authoritarian camp, are not necessary because of the dominant party's pre-electoral advantages. Such authoritarian measures are also not desirable, since they might encourage opponents to join revolutionary or social movements, rather than form political parties.
That opposition parties form at all becomes part of the puzzle, given the imbalance of resources. If candidates and activists do a cost-benefit analysis, weighing both the possibility of winning an election and the costs of participating, why join an opposition party? The answer, Greene finds, is that they participate in order to express their strong ideological differences with the incumbent. Greene reveals how the dynamics of political recruitment lead challengers to create small, resource-poor, ideologically polarized, organizationally rigid, anti-status-quo niche parties. The very nature of opposition parties makes it hard for them to attract voters or to coordinate efforts with other parties in order to defeat the incumbent, which is apt to form a catchall, centrist party. Thus, the “political economy of dominance” explains the persistence of dominant parties.
Equilibrium dominance breaks down, in Greene's analysis, when dominant parties' resource advantages erode, typically because of privatization. When governments begin selling off state-owned enterprises, the dominant party loses opportunities for funding and clientelism. This creates a more level electoral arena and, in turn, may cause the system to become a fully competitive democracy. However, when dominant parties can no longer buy enough votes to guarantee electoral victories, they may resort to fraud or repression, in which case the system may break down into a one-party regime.
Applied to Mexico, this framework explains why the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) long held and then lost its position of dominance. The PRI came to power in 1929 and remained powerful for decades, despite the existence of opposition parties that competed in regularly held elections. The National Action Party (PAN) formed to the right of the catchall PRI, and the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) and its predecessors formed to its left. Under what other analysts have called a “party dictatorship,” the PRI permitted limited criticism and allowed social movements and opposition parties some room to maneuver as the institutionalized opposition to the party of the institutionalized revolution. The PRI could safely hold elections and maintain its predominance because of skewed media coverage and tremendous disparities in campaign resources. Mexican opposition parties were constrained by their niche-party origins and non-centrist appeals; most notably, on economic policy the PAN strongly embraced promarket policies and the PRD strongly embraced pro-state policies. Hence, popular dissatisfaction with the PRI did not readily translate into support for opposition parties. The result was a remarkably stable regime, especially by Latin American standards of the time, but with only the outward appearance of democracy.
The opposition's—and democracy's—crucial opening came in the 1990s, when market-oriented reforms, especially privatization, decreased the state's control over the economy, and a smaller federal bureaucracy meant fewer patronage jobs at the PRI's disposal. In this unprecedented context of a fair market for votes, the PRI lost its controlling position in Congress in 1997 and, in 2000, lost the presidency. Greene argues that Mexico has transitioned from a dominant party authoritarian regime to a fully competitive democracy.
Why Dominant Parties Lose offers an essentially top-down perspective on democratic transition, focusing on resources available to dominant parties at the national level. This suggests that Mexico's economic “performance debacle” in the 1980s (20), the revival of civil society, institutional engineering, and other factors are of secondary importance, at best. These are the focus of the work of many others. For instance, in Electoral Competition and Institutional Change in Mexico (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), Caroline Beer analyzes the bottom-up dynamics of Mexico's democratization and makes the case that democratic openings at the state and local levels affected national politics in significant ways. As opposition parties and democratic enclaves spread geographically, she argues, authoritarian spaces (along with the PRI's reach) necessarily shrunk. Other analysts have shown how the election of opposition party members in some key municipalities enabled them to challenge centralized control over resource distribution and political careers. From the vantage point of the municipality, the unevenness of the transition is evident. These very different perspectives on Mexico's transition point to the rich and lively discussion to which Greene has added an important work.
Greene offers a cogent and compelling argument, supported by statistical analysis, mathematical models, and in-depth interviews. He organizes his book such that “less technically inclined readers” can skim short sections yet grasp how the formal models contribute to his argument (28, 34, 37). The author's methodology and writing style—which, though clear, is fairly dense—may limit the book's interest to undergraduates. Nonetheless, it is a significant volume for graduate students and faculty who are interested in Mexico, the other countries analyzed (Italy, Japan, Malaysia, and Taiwan), political parties, or the burgeoning literature on democratization.
