Electoral Competition and the New Party System in Mexico

Latin American Politics and Society, Summer 2005 by Klesner, Joseph L

ABSTRACT

Mexico's former opposition parties had specific social bases that would not, on their own, have catapulted either opposition party into power. In the 1990s, specific regional bases of support developed for the parties, reflecting their efforts to develop their organizations more locally. Nationally, this led to the emergence of two parallel two-party systems, PAN-PRI competition in the north and center-west and PRD-PRI competition in the south. In parallel, a proregime-antiregime cleavage came to dominate the Mexican party system, which, combined with local-level opposition efforts to oust the PRI, created new incentives for the opposition parties to abandon past emphases on ideological differences and to act like catchall parties instead. The regime cleavage fostered the dealignment of the Mexican electorate, a process that promoted the development of catch-all parties. Movement within the parties to behave like catch-all parties has not come without internal tensions, but electoral dynamics prove powerful inducements to catch-all behavior.

Vicente Fox's triumph over the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico's July 2000 presidential election surprised many observers-academics, journalists, and politicians alike. The PRI's 71 years of control over Mexican politics rested on its unusual capacity to mobilize votes, albeit not always by legally recognized methods. The PRI's demise had long been predicted, but the ruling party continued to pull out victories well into the 1990s, leading most analysts to expect that the PRI would find a way to win again in July 2000. At the same time, the PRI's longevity also reflected the weaknesses of Mexican opposition parties. Their principal debilities included the limited social bases of the National Action Party (PAN) and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and campaign strategies seemingly not intended to reach beyond those social bases.

Yet the PAN's Fox won convincingly over his main rivals, the PRI's Francisco Labastida and the PRD's Cuauhtémoc Cardenas (running in his third presidential race). Fox's victory reflected the emergence over the previous decade-and-a-half of a profound new cleavage in Mexican politics, centered not on socioeconomic differences and social issues but on the issue of the one-party regime's future. Fox and his team devised a strategy to capitalize on this proregime-antiregime cleavage, but his stunning success is only the most prominent example of changes in Mexico's parties that add up to the emergence of a new party system. The dynamics of this new party system put less emphasis on the ideological or programmatic characteristics of contending parties than on the capacity of those in opposition-whether at the national, state, or local level-to frame an election in anti- and progovernment terms. President Fox and his party learned this lesson in stark terms when the PAN lost more than 50 seats in the Chamber of Deputies in the 2003 midterm elections.

Mexico's parties have developed distinctive social bases over years of contesting elections, as this article will demonstrate. For the former opposition parties, those social bases reflected the policies advocated in party platforms. Those social bases, however, have not formed the main basis for Mexican voter choice. Indeed, Fox would never have won if he had relied only on the PAN's past voter base. Moreover, although economic conditions may have shaped Mexican voting decisions in past elections (Poiré 1999; Magaloni 1999; Buendia 2000), they hardly laid the basis for Fox's upset win in 2000. The Mexican economy was experiencing robust growth in 2000, and President Ernesto Zedillo enjoyed high approval ratings, hardly grounds for voting out Zedillo's handgroomed successor.

Instead, the regime issue increasingly focused the decisions of Mexican voters in the 1990s. One manifestation of the electorate's new orientation was the emergence of regional strengths for the opposition parties. Regionalism in party voting emerged from opposition strategies designed to build party strength by winning at the local level. This, in turn, required that the parties emphasize a "throw the bums out" message, which reinforced the proregime-antiregime cleavage in the electorate. A second manifestation of this division, clear in the 1997 congressional elections and the 2000 presidential contest and continuing into the 2003 congressional elections, has been vote switching, especially among independents and oppositionists, many of whom cared less whether they voted for the PRD or the PAN than that they voted against the PRI, at least until the PRI was voted out of the presidency. Fox benefited greatly from vote switching, but his party's candidates have also suffered as voters have switched back to the PRI or the PRD in elections since July 2000.

In short, economic voting cannot explain Vicente Fox's victory, nor can social class or other social cleavages account for the swing of voters in 2000. Instead, to understand fully the Fox win, we must consider a combination of forces. Central to the analysis here is partisan clealignment, a process at work for the past 15 or more years. With more independent and weakly attached voters in the electorate in the 1990s, the parties (including the PRI) were forced to adapt their campaign strategies to capture the floating voters now available to the opposition. As a result, the parties have come to resemble catch-all parties to a much greater degree than they did before, although struggles persist within the parties between those who advocate ideological consistency and coherence and those who would adopt whatever tactics and messages will bring victory.