In this book, prolific Mexican politics scholar Roderic Camp questions how democracy in Mexico has impacted elite circulation and the composition of the nation's governing class. Using an unrivaled data set of 4,500 officeholders over 75 years of Mexico's history, which he has refined over decades, Camp reaches some remarkable but well-founded conclusions. Indeed, The Metamorphosis of Leadership in a Democratic Mexico may be the best contemporary study of the sociological, demographic, and political characteristics of a nation's ruling elites anywhere. In taking on the elusive concept of leadership in a measured and scientific manner, and in considering the effects of democratic transition on the composition of those who govern, the book offers important generalizable lessons for political scientists, sociologists, and anyone interested in political elites, leadership, governance, and democratic transitions. And, like much of Camp's extensive corpus of more than 30 books, this monograph is an absolute must for scholars of Mexico and Latin America.
In each chapter, the author uses this massive data set, in which he codes biographical data on most of Mexico's high-level elected and appointed officeholders over seven decades, to answer several big and important questions relating to the circulation of ruling elites during Mexico's democratic and authoritarian eras. While elite influence and circulation is erroneously taken for granted in many democracies, any Kremlinologist would tell us that in authoritarian regimes, kinship connections and interest affinities among elites can be decisive, not to mention some of the only “hard data” available. The overall picture that emerges is of an increasing circulation of ruling elites, with greater educational and career backgrounds, class and “family” origins, and greater gender variation under democracy. Several of the findings are unprecedented and fascinating.
Perhaps Camp's most original finding is based on a clever framing of a big-picture issue that the Mexican case may be uniquely qualified to address, given the violent social revolution of 1910 and the uncontested democratic transition election of 2000: “violence and democracy: which produces change?” Camp (p. 151) describes three twentieth-century shifts in elite composition, with the first, after the Mexican Revolution, comprising “a movement away from determining leadership on the basis of who exerts the greatest control over the means of violence to an emphasis on controlling political institutions through non-violent means…. [This] shifts the task of political recruitment away from military academies…. [P]ublic universities and preparatory schools in the capital overwhelmingly replace these former military sources of recruitment and socialization.” In the second shift, the “Generation of Salinas” (1988–94) gravitated overwhelmingly to the social sciences of economics and public administration (as opposed to the political “fixer” lawyers of the Alemán Generation and the glory-bathed generals who ran Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s), creating schisms between these technocrats and the more traditional grassroots populists. The Salinas technocrats had been studied before, notably in Miguel Centeno's excellent 1994 text, Democracy Within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico, but only Camp has been able to contextualize and trace their evolution over time. In particular, he identifies a third generation of postdemocracy technocrats, who emerged in opposition parties after the elite division of the Salinas years, which “opened up leadership pools to a more diverse group while continuing to focus on [academic and professional] specialization” (p. 153).
The overall answer to “violence versus democratization” is that Mexico's postdemocratic political leaders (elected officials at all levels, national government–appointed cabinet and agency heads and deputies, and Supreme Court judges) are more geographically diverse (more rural), less nepotistic (fewer fathers among elites), and more middle-class oriented (rather than concentrating in lower and upper classes). These conclusions dovetail with results the author observes with regard to what he calls “democratic demographics.” He finds that in addition to their greater geographic, kinship, and class diversity, democratic elites circulate more across elected positions (as more national politicians emerge from the ranks of state legislators as well as mayors and governors) and come from a wider range of educational institutions.
Somewhat counter to the notion of extensive circulation among Mexico's power elite under democracy, Camp does find that in democratic Mexico, the electoral route is only partly open to rural candidates from humble origins, like teachers and old-time union leaders, who served as interlocutors between the increasingly technocratic elites and the political bases. The Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) used to encourage this kind of interlocutor, and may again, I would argue, under President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012–18). But according to Camp's findings (not yet updatable for Peña Nieto), the role of the humble-origins electoral populist is “a career channel that has essentially disappeared in recent years” (p. 101). Politicians from humble backgrounds do continue to achieve some elected offices, but “politicians who are products of middle-class families are much more dominant in the executive branch at the highest levels as cabinet secretaries and assistant secretaries” (p. 100). In other words, there are limits to the elite circulation gains brought by democracy, at least in Camp's case, and probably most others. But the author has added degree of elite turnover and frequency of elite rise from humble origins as parsimonious new measures of democracy.
Some chapters are stronger than others. For example, the chapter on the generation of politicians who came to power with President Miguel Alemán (1946–52) seems intent on repositioning this unheralded president's place in history, but is insufficiently contextualized. And the chapter tracing changes in the biographical characteristics of Mexico's governors is not as remarkable as the others. But the remaining nine chapters are all excellent, and at least three are transcendent.
Another quibble is that Camp nowhere summarizes or describes his massive data set in a comprehensive manner. The reader is not even given the total number of cases from which the author draws his conclusions until page 65, and we are nowhere told exactly how the data were compiled (from what sources, etc.), precisely which elected and appointed positions count, what percentage of the total universe of possible cases are represented, and whether any bias exists in the data collection (for example, whether earlier administration records are as complete as later ones). While a short appendix discussing the data and their collection would have been immensely useful, Camp finesses this imprecision because, as he points out in a page 6 footnote, the political biographies (if not the data from their coding), are all available in his separate but meticulously collected Mexican Political Biographies (2011).
Camp's emphasis on the ideas behind the data summarized on dozens of simple tables, rather than on the data collection itself, does contribute to his effort to make sure that readers grapple with the real issues underlying the argument of The Metamorphosis of Leadership. And judged on these, its own terms, it is a big book indeed. For understanding the effects of democracy on elite circulation, I know of no better book in comparative politics/political sociology in the last decade, or since C. Wright Mills, for that matter. Rather than being flummoxed, like many of us, at the lack of concrete information available for social scientists to parse prior to Mexico's democratization, Camp extends his nuanced analysis of authoritarian Mexico forward, drawing new conclusions by comparing ruling elite characteristics during authoritarian, transitional, and democratic periods. The book opens a whole new research agenda and offers some caveats about the limits of democracy.
In his next project, it would be fascinating for Camp to cross local electoral results with the political biographies, thus allowing him to test whether the new geographical diversity of Mexico's ruling elite corresponds to the electoral strongholds of Mexico's three parties, just as the authoritarian-period PRI and its appointees seemed to come disproportionately from traditional PRI bastions and Mexico City. Whatever the results, it is a tribute to Camp that we can even think in such terms. Democracy has a great impact on elite circulation, although it does not seem as promising in getting poor and rural aspirants noticed as much as we would have hoped. We in the United States social science community, and those from other longtime democracies, might be surprised if we utilized Camp's method to reassess power elites and meritocracy even closer to home. But until others find the energy, intellectual breadth, and cleverness Camp puts into framing his questions, devising his measures, and collecting his data, we will have to content ourselves by analyzing and generalizing from this powerfully written book, its innovative approach, and the author's refreshing willingness to use his extensive data to address big questions.
