Savage Democracy: Institutional Change and Party Development in Mexico

Mexico finally shed its authoritarian past with the victory of the PAN candidate Vicente Fox in the 2000 election. But the consolidation and growth of democracy in Mexico have been complicated by the institutional residues of the past. Steven Wuhs’s investigation of the PAN and PRD begins by depicting how the PRI functioned and then, in successive chapters, compares how PAN and PRD leaders reacted to the PRI’s institutions in choosing rules for selecting candidates to run for office, organizing their party’s bureaucracy, and linking to groups in civil society. What he shows is that “savage democracy has undermined the nomination of electable candidates, fostered intense intraparty factions and fights, and interfered with the development of party organizations capable of mounting effective campaigns.”https://inspire.redlands.edu/oh_books/1038/thumbnail.jp

Paths and Places of Party Formation: The Post-Unification Development of Germany’s CDU

Maps of electoral results across the Federal Republic of Germany show remarkable stability over the postwar period. While historical social cleavages are the foundation of western Germany’s stable electoral geography, in the five eastern states crucial events in 1989 and 1990, largely independent of social structural factors, established particular trajectories of party formation that shaped p9arties’ electoral success. Drawing on interviews with political elites and archival documents, I use a critical juncture analysis approach to explain the temporally and spatially contingent nature of party formation processes in eastern Germany after 1989. This analysis shifts debates about party formation from the questions of when and why, to how and where parties form, while also explaining the origin and persistence of territorialized party systems

Inclusion and its Moderating Effects on Ideas, Interests, and Institutions: Mexico\u27s Partido Accion Nacional

This article examines the moderation of the Mexico’s National Action Party in the context of democratization. Founded in 1939 as a confessional party, by the 1990s the PAN had moved toward the political center – retaining its Christian-Democratic identity and ideals but also making institutional appeals to the broader voting public in Mexico. This article explains the segmented process through which the PAN moderated in response to inclusionary reforms promulgated by Mexico’s authoritarian regime. In some cases, those reforms merely aggravated internal tensions in the party. But other reforms repositioned the PAN vis-a`-vis its competitors, Mexican civil society, and the Mexican voting public, and triggered institutional changes that enabled the PAN to build political momentum in advance of the country’s 2000 democratic transition. Employing an institutional process-tracing approach, this article examines how shocks in the PAN’s competitive environment reverberated inside the organization: how they affected the relative power of factions in the party, how they were mediated by existing party institutions, and how they related to the party’s ideological goals. Those crucial intraparty processes, I argue, influenced whether the PAN, as an organization, responded to those exogenous shocks in terms of its competitive behavior, and conditioned how the PAN responded when it did so. The case of the PAN demonstrates that parties may respond to inclusionary reforms or other exogenous shocks in relatively uncoordinated and unsystematic manners

Competition, Decentralization, and Candidate Selection in Mexico

This article examines how political context affects the strategic choice of nomination rules, using data from federal and state-level legislative elections. Our analysis indicates that competition affects the selection rules parties adopt. Overall, parties are most likely to use open selection rules when they think they will win, largely due to the effects of activist competition over coveted nominations. However, state-level party leaders have not been consistently empowered by decentralization. Although state- level party leaders do have nonnegligible influence when it comes to the selection of local legislative nominees, they have more influence in those states that are the most dependent on the federal government for resources. Competitive context continues to be a stronger predictor of selection rule choice than decentralization