Toward Mexico's Democratization: Parties, Campaigns, Elections, and Public Opinion / Elites, Masses, and the Struggle for Democracy in Mexico: A Culturalist Approach

Latin American Politics and Society, Winter 2002 by Klesner, Joseph L

Dominguez, Jorge I., and Alejandro Poire, eds. Toward Mexico's Democratization: Parties, Campaigns, Elections, and Public Opinion. New York: Routledge, 1999. Tables, figures, index, 258 pp.; hardcover $75, paperback $23.95.

Schatz, Sara. Elites, Masses, and the Struggle for Democracy in Mexico: A Culturalist Approach. Westport: Praeger, 2000. Tables, bibliography, index, 143 pp.; hardcover $58.

On first inspection, these two recent volumes on democratization in Mexico might look very similar in approach. A careful reading, however, reveals that they follow rather diametrically opposed paths to explaining democratization. The seven young scholars Jorge Dominguez brought together for the volume he and Alejandro Poire edited share the assumption that democratization was taking place as they wrote. Their studies examine, as the subtitle implies, party and party system development, campaign strategies, electoral politics, and the role of public opinion in shaping the emerging democratic regime in Mexico. Having concluded that democracy is on its way, Dominguez, Poire, and their coauthors draw on the literature of electoral politics and public opinion in the United States to guide their research questions and their methodological approaches.

Sara Schatz, in contrast, approaches Mexican democratization from the macro-level perspective of comparative political sociology, drawing heavily on Max Weber and the studies he inspired by the generation of sociologists and political scientists writing in the 1950s and 1960s about the first wave of democratization in Europe. Her research question thus becomes, why has Mexican democratization been delayed? Her referents are European cases and examples of non-Leninist, single-party regimes, with Mexico being the most prominent case but Taiwan and other Southeast Asian and African cases offering additional examples.

Schatz understands the term delayed primarily in comparison to levels of socioeconomic development in democracies; Mexico proves to be politically backward in comparison to its level of socioeconomic development. "Macrosociological structural theories of democratization" (p. 5), such as those offered by Lipset, offer the theoretical referent for Schatz's characterization. She explains the delay as the result of "authoritarian statist structuring of voter alignments and forms of political organization," which effectively divides opposition voters among political parties and inhibits the formation of opposition alliances. Democratization in such settings "involves the continual, ongoing, social struggle over the incremental extension of political rights" (p. 13).

Rejecting chronological or other organizing principles in favor of a "sociological" analysis, Schatz examines three arenas of democratic struggle: electoral politics and voter alignments, the development of judicial review, and the struggle for political citizenship rights. In exploring the third of these, Schatz begins with the notion that "the social struggle for the extension of political citizenship rights is subject to the dialectical tension between content-oriented and process-oriented approaches to justice" (p. 78). She then analyzes the struggles to promote the integrity of the electoral process, to extend democracy within the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), to extend suffrage to Mexicans living abroad, and to establish rights to autonomy for indigenous peoples in Mexico.

Schatz arrives at the not-very-surprising conclusion that "democratic elites" (by which she means opposition leaders), even though they differed in their "substantive" (that is, policy) goals, converged on a process-oriented democratizing strategy (namely, promoting the integrity of the electoral process) because they concluded that "the calculabilty of the administrative procedures associated with the secret ballot increases the likelihood of support for these elites' substantive goals" (p. 83). Other analysts, eschewing this excessive Weberian jargon, might simply say that opposition elites converged on a minimalist definition of democracy-the selection of authorities by means of elections-when they recognized that more maximalist strategies offered little hope of success. Schatz rightly gives much credit to the Alianza Civica for its efforts to eliminate electoral fraud, but she ignores the long struggle of opposition parties, especially the National Action Party (PAN), to do the same.

In the same chapter, Schatz examines the efforts of supporters of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) to establish legal pluralism for indigenous communities, and notes that the federal government was unwilling "to formalize new rights to indigenous self-government and the attendant rights to collective property" (p. 97). What Schatz seems to miss about the convergence around the integrity of the electoral process, on the one hand, and the failure of convergence on legal pluralism, on the other, is that the Mexican constitution is, at base, a liberal document. Liberalism can easily support the principle of one person, one vote (even within the former ruling party), but it cannot so easily admit legal particularism.