Parallel authoritarian powers: an explanation of Mexico’s authoritarian regime breakdown

ABSTRACT

Many scholars suggest that dominant parties enhance authoritarian regime resiliency by regularizing and directing the distribution of spoils, careers, and policy among members of the authoritarian coalition. This article challenges this assertion by providing a novel mechanism to explain why, under stress, some dominant party regimes are more likely to break down than others. The argument posits that an autocracy’s capacity to fend off systemic crises increases when elites who control the power to make decisions locate themselves in the same organization (for example, the military, the bureaucracy, a political party) as elites in charge of implementing these decisions. If elites of these types locate in different organizations (what I refer to as a “parallel power” arrangement), in the face of systemic adversities elite collective action suffers and, consequently, regime resiliency decreases. I illustrate the applicability of the argument in the case of Mexico’s party-based autocracy. The stability of this regime was fatally damaged when, in the presence of systemic challenges in the 1980s and 1990s, the state’s bureaucracy – in charge of making decisions – decided to enact economic and electoral policies against the wishes of the elites in the dominant party, who were in charge of implementing many of these decisions.

KEYWORDS:

• Despotic power
• infrastructural power
• authoritarian regimes
• dominant parties
• Mexico

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the following persons for their insightful comments and suggestions: Dan Slater, Kenneth Greene, Monika Nalepa, Juan Fernando Ibarra, two anonymous reviewers, and participants in the Comparative Politics Workshop of the University of Chicago. An earlier version of this article was presented at the University of Michigan in May 2014.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

José Antonio Hernández Company http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2106-2177

Notes

1 Slater, “Iron Cage.”

2 For the purposes of the article, I define “collective action problem” as any situation in which elites would be better off collaborating with each other but refrain from doing so because of incompatible interests among them.

3 Slater, Ordering Power.

4 Mann, “The autonomous power,” 188–9. See also Fortin-Rittberger, “Exploring the relationship”; Slater, “Iron Cage.”

5 Callahan, Making Enemies, 212.

6 I assume that nature randomly determines the type of arrangement, either fused or parallel, each autocracy will have after its inception.

7 Grzymala-Busse, “Time Will Tell?” 1279.

8 Haggard and Kaufman, The Political Economy.

9 Pepinsky, Economic Crises.

10 Greene, Why Dominant Parties.

11 Ansell and Samuels, Inequality and Democratization.

12 Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.

13 For example, Brownlee, Authoritarianism; Svolik, The Politics; Magaloni, “Credible Power-Sharing.”

14 Geddes, “What Do We Know.”

15 Brownlee, Authoritarianism, 37–8.

16 Svolik, The Politics, 12.

17 Magaloni, “Credible Power-Sharing.”

18 For example, Reuter, The Origins; Cooper, “Dominant party.”

19 Geddes et al., “Autocratic Breakdown.”

20 The approval rates of the presidents’ policy initiatives in Congress suffice to make clear that it was them and not party politicians that controlled the despotic power in the autocracy. Casar, “Building the Executive Dominance,” 33 shows, for example, that in a random sample of 64 policy initiatives introduced to the Chamber of Deputies between 1964 and 1972, 36 (56.2%) were presidential initiatives with an approval rate of 100%. By contrast, the PRI introduced only eight initiatives (12.5%) and just three were approved.

21 Salinas de Gortari, México, 766.

22 Hernández Rodríguez, Historia, 84–8.

23 Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy, 15.

24 Padgett, “Mexico’s One-Party,” 1001.

25 Acción Nacional, “Vida nacional.”

26 The analysis in this section derives from a dataset of the career patterns of all the functionaries who worked in a cabinet-level post between 1946 and 2000. I obtained the data from Camp, Mexican Political Biographies. To create Figure 1, I adopted the following coding rule: a person that spends at least six continuous months in a post, either in the bureaucracy, elective office, or a party position, is considered to have that career pattern.

27 See also Smith, Labyrinths of Power.

28 Langston, “Why Rules Matter,” 490–5.

29 Gillingham, “We Don’t Have Arms,” 153.

30 Padgett, “Mexico’s One-Party.”

31 Data in Almada, La administración, 79.

32 Langston, Democratization, 136–7. This author shows that PRI governors, in fact, became major players in the party in the 2000s because they had the prerogative to choose candidates to compete in plurality races in single member districts. Langston does not thoroughly analyse the quarrels between bureaucrats and Priístas at the end of the twentieth century. Yet, her theory about “authoritarian party survival” complements my argument by elucidating how some PRI factions quickly ended the president’s control over the party in the late 1990s: in those years these actors began to control critical assets which reinforced their autonomy from the bureaucracy, for example, PRI governors obtained plentiful budgetary resources after Zedillo, facing the Peso Crisis in 1995, decided to decentralize fiscal responsibilities and devolved the provision of large-scale services, such as healthcare, to the states.

33 Hernández Rodríguez, Historia, 101–2.

34 Lustig, Mexico, 173–200.

35 Eisenstadt, Courting Democracy, 37.

36 Greene, Why Dominant Parties, 5.

37 Interview with the author. Mexico City, Mexico. March 2014.

38 Pacheco, “Los sectores.”

39 Langston, “Why Rules Matter,” 498, n. 30.

40 Salinas de Gortari, México, 772.

41 Lustig, Mexico, 96–113.

42 Quoted in “Mi misión.”

43 Hernández Rodríguez, “The Partido,” 90.

44 “La recuperación.”

45 “Busca PRI.”

46 “El PRI establece.”

47 “Ponen fin.”

48 “Se rebelan.”

49 “Consuman rebelión.”

50 “Ahora a ‘justificar’.”

51 “Zedillo no fue.”

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José Antonio Hernández Company

José Antonio Hernández Company is an assistant professor in the School of Government at Tecnológico de Monterrey. His research interests include democratization, the origins of opposition parties in autocracies, authoritarian institutions, and clientelism and vote-buying in newly established democracies. His research has appeared in Latin American Research Review, Latin American Policy, Foro Internacional, and various edited volumes. He received his PhD in Political Science, specializing in comparative politics, from the University of Chicago in 2015.