➜ geographical distribution of power unitary state ➜ relationship between legislature and executive presidential ➜ executive president, directly elected to one term of 6 years ➜ executive election system plurality (first-past-the-post) ➜ legislature bicameral: chamber of deputies (lower house), senate (upper house) ➜ legislative election system mix of single-member-district (smd) and proportional representation (pr) ➜ party system 3 competitive parties (pri, pan, prd) ➜ judiciary supreme court
Until the 1990s, Mexico fit firmly into the category of developing countries, characterized by the “third world” designation given to most of the poor world, which wasn’t firmly aligned with the United States of America or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Mexico was a one-party authoritarian regime without much hope for reform. Yet events of the 1980s and 1990s transformed Mexico’s political and economic structures to bring about a modern day example of democratic transition. While Mexico continues to navigate many of the problems of the developing world, and its authoritarian tendencies are not fully removed, there are plenty of reasons for cautious optimism in seeing Mexico as a model for others around the world hoping for a similar transition. Mexico is an excellent example of the struggles involved with development and democratization that much of the world is currently experiencing.
Mexico is a federal republic, borne out of two major revolutions. The first established Mexico as a newly independent country from Spain in 1821, and the second removed a military dictator in 1911, beginning Mexico’s transition to constitutional republicanism. Authoritarianism did not end in 1911, however, as a single political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), came to control every aspect of the political process for most of the twentieth century. The transition away from one-party authoritarianism to democracy began in the 1980s and 1990s, and increasingly, real federalism, dividing powers between the national level and state level, is apparent.
Mexico has one of the most diverse climates in the world, with mountain ranges, deserts, beautiful coastal beaches, fertile valleys, high plains on plateaus, and rain forests all packed into one country. Many parts of the country are divided from one another by mountains and deserts, so regional divisions play a large role in Mexican politics. Mexico has a relatively small amount of arable farmland, making development after independence slow and difficult, but recently, natural resources with accessibility and uses in the modern world are being discovered. (Oil is one major example.) These resources, like the silver discovered by Spanish colonial masters in the 1500s, are not for the most part bringing prosperity and development to the broad Mexican population, but are bringing tremendous wealth to a small elite at the top of society. Much of Mexico’s history has been defined by sharing a massive 2,000-mile-long border with one of the most powerful countries in the world, its northern neighbor, the United States. The length of the border is somewhat symbolic of the degree to which Mexican foreign policy concerns are directed toward the United States, compared to Mexico’s other southern neighbors (including Belize and Guatemala). Historical territorial disputes between the two countries have given way to economic and immigration concerns, but there is no doubt that Mexico still feels the domination of its North American “Big Brother.”
Mexicans are a somewhat diverse people, but they are strongly unified by many shared political values and traditions. There is a deep sense of nationalism and Mexican identity rooted in:
The history of Mexico breaks neatly into three distinct eras, each separated by a major revolution that reshaped the regime. Changes to the regime, though, did not alter the major themes of Mexican political history, namely, authoritarianism and the system of patron-clientelism.
The first Spanish conquistador in Mexico, Hernan Cortes, arrived in 1519, capturing the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and imposing direct rule over the people of the surrounding territory. Spanish soldiers who were not allowed to bring their European families to the New World quickly mixed with the native population, creating a new mestizo ethnicity of mixed European and native ancestry. Today, mestizos make up over 60 percent of the population of Mexico, with Amerindians descended from the native population making up most of the remainder. The Spanish imposed a strict social structure based on a rigid racial hierarchy, shown below.
The Spanish strongly incentivized and, in other cases, forced conversion to Christianity among the native population. Spanish missions became population centers where agricultural work and meals were organized.
Mexico’s effort to win independence from Spain began in 1810, but it didn’t achieve full recongition of its status as an independent state until 1821. The rigid hierarchy of the Spanish system became the impetus for revolution when Father Miguel Hidalgo, a Spanish priest, organized an army of 90,000 poor indigenous farmers to fight against the Spanish army for the right to grow crops prohibited by the law to protect Spanish imports. Hidalgo’s army was defeated and scattered, and Hidalgo himself was executed, but other Mexicans, especially criollos with limited opportunities in colonial society, joined the revolutionary fervor sweeping Latin America to overthrow colonial rule. Spain recognized Mexican independence in 1821, but Mexican politics became highly unstable. Armed bands of camarillas led by strongmen generals (called caudillos) competed for territorial control, and there was constant bloodshed from the fighting between rival camarillas. Presidents changed as often as the seasons, with vice presidents often leading coups against presidents, and presidents often leaving office to fight off rebellions in other parts of the country. There were thirty-six different presidents between 1833 and 1855. One of them, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, assumed the presidency on ten different occasions, usually leaving office to engage in fighting somewhere only a few months into a term. During this time period, the United States capitalized on Mexico’s instability, seizing massive amounts of Mexican territory in the north and west, including the annexation of Texas in 1845 (years after the Texas war for independence from Mexico), the Mexican Cession (after the Mexican American War, 1846–1848), and the Gadsden Purchase in 1853.
Battles emerged in Mexico between conservatives, mainly aristocrats with land ownership and ties to European nobility, and liberals (republicans) who opposed aristocratic privileges and wanted Mexico to move toward constitutional democracy. Both sides hoped for stability, but fighting between them continued to exacerbate instability in Mexico’s politics. Conservatives seemed to win in 1864 when Napoleon III of France invaded to place an aristocrat, Maximilian I on the throne as Emperor of Mexico, but Maximilian was overthrown by a liberal general, Benito Juarez, who assumed the presidency and restored the Mexican Republic.
The instability did not end until the reign of President Porfirio Diaz (1876–1911), a period known as the Porfiriato. Diaz, a general in Juarez’s army, plotted a rebellion against the government after losing the election for president in 1871. After successfully overthrowing the government in 1876, he ran for president, promising to serve one term only, and step down after the results of free and fair elections. He did not fulfill his campaign promise of non-reelection, and controlled the country for the next thirty-five years. Underground political critics cleverly changed the placement of the comma in his campaign slogan Sufragio efectivo, no reeleccion (“Effective vote, no reelection”), making it instead, Sufragio efectivo no, reeleccion. Despite his broken promise, the Porfiriato had its supporters. The characteristics of the Porfiriato included:
In 1910, calls to hold a new presidential election and remove Diaz from office sprang from two major groups: elites frustrated by their own inability to advance their interests in Diaz’s regime; and ordinary, poor, displaced Mexicans frustrated with their station in life. Diaz blocked efforts to hold the election, and popular opposition swelled until he was forced to leave the presidency in 1911. Diaz’s abdication kicked off nearly a decade of instability and civil war between rival camarilla factions vying for power in Mexico. The defeat of many of these generals, including Emiliano Zapata and his peasant army in the south and Pancho Villa and his soldiers in the north, allowed northern constitutionalists to draft the Constitution of 1917, which remains the governing document of Mexico to this day. Violence continued after the constitution was passed, and the desire of the revolutionary generals to end the violence led to the creation of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1929. The leaders of the revolution agreed to essentially “share” power among themselves. The first three presidents of Mexico after the formation of the PRI were all generals directly involved in leading the constitutionalist forces. While each president served his single six-year term (sexenio), other former generals and revolutionary leaders would hold other major positions in government. Each president would willfully step down after one term, and give power to the next leader. While theoretically any candidate from other parties could compete for the presidency in elections as well, the giant umbrella of the PRI enclosed so many of the most influential leaders that the competition was meaningless. The party acted as a massive patron-client network and brought an end to the fighting among Mexico’s caudillos.
Mexico’s history in the 20th century is largely characterized by the establishment of authoritarian one-party rule by the PRI, followed by a gradual transition to democracy that culminated with the first opposition party victory in a presidential election in 2000.
The most eventful sexenio of early PRI rule was that of Lazaro Cárdenas, who was president from 1934 to 1940. Cárdenas was a charismatic former general of the Revolution. He campaigned for the presidency across the entire country to build an independent power base of loyalty among the people, as opposed to his predecessors who mostly stayed confined in Mexico City. Cárdenas’s reform agenda centered on three areas:
The leftist policies of Cárdenas were combined with an effort to concentrate power in the hands of the presidency, mainly by state corporatism. Groups that represented the interests of peasants, labor, industry, the middle class, the military, and others were invited to meet with the president and policymakers to share their input, but only the preferred guests of the president would be invited. These groups strongly benefited from a cooperative relationship with the government, and other independent groups were left out of negotiations.
By 1946, the president/generals who had founded the PRI had each concluded their terms, and a new generation of leaders was emerging. President Miguel Aleman reversed Cárdenas’s ejido system and ISI, and put Mexico on a path of development through liberal reforms, including the encouragement of entrepreneurship and inviting foreign investment into Mexico once again. The next few decades were characterized by presidents who continued moving economic policy back and forth between the leftist model of Cárdenas, and the right-leaning model of Aleman and the new Mexican middle class. By the 1970s, the old “dinosaurs” of the PRI’s early generation (called politicos) were losing power within the PRI to a new generation of educated, technical experts (called technicos). As the technicos seized power in the party, the PRI settled on a neoliberal model of economic reform through private entrepreneurship, a limited role for the government, privatization of nationalized industries, and free trade. These reforms set the stage for the “Mexican Miracle” of the 1980s, in which Mexico’s GDP grew substantially, and developing countries around the world pointed to Mexico as the model for solving their own economic woes. Unfortunately, most of the growth of the 1980s was the result of high oil production and inflated oil prices, which came crashing down in 1982.
The collapse of oil prices in 1982 made it incredibly difficult for Mexico to repay the debts it had incurred to develop its national oil industry, and the debt became such a burden, Mexico was forced to ask for help from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF agreed to a set of loans to help Mexico avoid default, but in exchange, demanded the imposition of a structural adjustment program. Structural adjustment required Mexico to stop running annual budget deficits. Mexico had to privatize many state-owned companies to raise cash, cut its government spending substantially (and lay off many government employees or cut their pay), and further open its borders to foreign competition and free trade. While President Miguel de la Madrid (1982–1988) carried out these reforms, the 1980s were a difficult decade for average Mexicans. GDP grew by only 0.1 percent per year during his term, while inflation averaged 100 percent per year. Many refer to the 1980s as the “lost decade” for Mexico.
When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposes a structural adjustment program, they typically require reductions in government spending (including salaries and pensions of government employees), privatization of state-owned assets, and liberalization of trade policy.
The PRI maintained its hold on power during all of this economic difficulty thanks to its corporatist hold on power networks across the country, but also through vote rigging. When the results of the 1988 election were being counted, the government said the computers had crashed, characterizing it as a “breakdown of the system.” Before the “breakdown,” early results indicated that the leftist opposition was winning, but once the computers were up and running again, Carlos Salinas de Gortari was announced as the winner. Former President Miguel de la Madrid has since even admitted to what was once a long-held open secret, namely, that the PRI had rigged the 1988 election and burned all the ballots in 1991 to hide the evidence.
Salinas’s administration lacked legitimacy from the beginning, thanks to the stolen election. Despite domestic perceptions that his administration was one of the most corrupt in Mexico’s history, Salinas did manage some major reforms, including signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—a free-trade agreement with the United States and Canada—and privatizating major state-owned banking and telephone companies. The privatization of Telmex is often cited as an example of corruption in Salinas’s administration. Carlos Slim Helu, a close friend of Salinas, was able to acquire a large number of Telmex shares without paying for them up front, but rather by paying installments every year on the revenue of the phone company. Carlos Slim Helu is now the second richest man in the world.
By 1990, pressures from angry Mexican citizens and international stakeholders like the United States pushed the government to create a truly independent election regulating body; the Federal Election Institute (IFE), which is today known as the National Electoral Institute (INE), was meant to ensure that the 1994 election would not carry the stigma of 1988. Mexico also allowed international observers to monitor the 1994 elections for the first time. Yet 1994 was a tumultuous year for Mexico. The very day that NAFTA went into effect, southern indigenous rebels calling themselves Zapatistas in honor of Emiliano Zapata started an armed uprising against the Mexican government in the state of Chiapas. The front-running PRI candidate was assassinated in what remains a mysterious crime. The value of the peso imploded against the dollar as foreign investors began to flee the country. The 1994 election was considered the most free and fair in Mexico’s history to that point, but the PRI candidate, Ernesto Zedillo, still won, likely because voters simply chose stability over the fear of what might happen if Mexico were governed by a party other than the PRI amidst all the turmoil.
Finally, after seventy-one years of continuous rule, the PRI was defeated in a presidential election in 2000, when Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) won the presidency. This election represented a milestone for Mexican democracy, proof that opposition candidates could win in the new system. Many heralded this moment as the nail in the coffin for the PRI, but the PRI has not gone away; rather, it has reinvented its message and its appeal to reclaim a prominent place in Mexican politics.
Mexico is in transition from a long history of authoritarianism and corporatism, attempting to build a democratic and pluralist political culture. While this cannot be accomplished overnight, Mexico has made observable progress in building a political culture in which broader citizen input is increasingly significant to political outcomes.
The population of Mexico is highly urbanized, with 79.2 percent of the population living in cities. There has been a massive wave of migration away from the countryside to the cities in the last few decades. Most of this movement is related to industrialization and modernization in Mexico, in which the best job opportunities are increasingly in cities. NAFTA accelerated this trend as well, as international firms located factories (called maquiladoras) in the north of Mexico to take advantage of low-wage Mexican labor, exporting tariff-free to the American market just across the border. Urbanized Mexicans have a higher literacy rate and higher incomes than their rural counterparts. They display different voting behaviors, as well. Recent elections have indicated a greater willingness of rural voters to continue supporting the PRI, while urban voters have been more likely to cast votes for the opposition to the right (PAN) and left (PRD). Rural voters seem more concerned with short term gain, and the ability of PRI candidates to curry favors from the patron-client network seems to convince rural voters to stay loyal to the party. Urban voters have been more likely to support major reforms to remove the patron-client power base of the PRI, even if it means their candidate can’t bring federal dollars to their city. These trends are in flux, however, as many urban voters turned to the PRI in 2012. Nonetheless, rural voters remain the base of PRI support in the electorate.
Mexico is divided along many significant social cleavages. Mexican political culture, however, is still largely unified by a strong national identity, shared language (Spanish), and common religion (Catholicism).
Mexico is deeply divided economically, with a Gini coefficient of .43, one of the highest in the world for a country with a large population. The highest-earning 10 percent in Mexico earn 39.2 percent of all national income, and average twenty-seven times the income of those in the bottom 10 percent. NAFTA was partially a cause of rising inequality in the 1990s, as new job opportunities working for multinational firms emerged in the north and border area but had little effect on growth or employment in central or southern Mexico. More recently, inequality has declined somewhat as small entrepreneurial ventures (rather than factories) across the country are driving most of the growth now. Despite a GDP per capita of over $10,000, more than 30 percent of Mexicans still live on less than $5 per day.
About 65 percent of Mexicans identify as Mestizo, 17.5 percent identify as Amerindian, and 16.5 percent identify as predominantly white or European descent. Mestizos tend to be in control of most wealth and political power in Mexico, and reside in all parts of the country. Amerindian or indigenous descendants also reside in many parts of the country, but are most concentrated in the southern region, where many still even speak indigenous languages, as well as Spanish. The Amerindian population is much poorer on average than other groups, and often feels neglected and isolated from policymakers who are primarily Mestizo. This is evidenced by the ongoing troubles with the EZLN Zapatista Movement, an armed resistance group that has periodically established autonomous municipalities in the south consistent with the leftist ambitions of the group.
All of these can be somewhat characterized as coinciding cleavages, since the Mestizos live primarily in more prosperous cities in the north, while Amerindians live in poorer rural communities in the south. The coinciding nature of the cleavages make political conflict more likely between the groups, and leaves the minority group (the indigenous Amerindians of the south) more disaffected and susceptible to separatist impulses.
The transition from authoritarianism to democracy and from state corporatism to pluralism, in addition to growing prosperity in Mexico over the last three decades, is rapidly expanding the opportunities for political participation in Mexico.
The PRI operated on a system of patron-clientelism based closely on the networks of support from the camarillas of the generals who established the PRI. The PRI organized all of the authorized groups it would work with into three categories: labor, peasants, and middle-class business. (The latter consisted mainly of government employees, initially.) These groups would be allowed to voice their concerns to the government as long as they never challenged the PRI.
Although Mexico was clearly a corporatist system during the one-party rule of the PRI, the country has transitioned to an increasingly pluralist system during its democratic transition.
There were cracks in the system early on as many groups outside the PRI’s corporatist umbrella still publicly voiced frustration with the PRI, but relatively few Mexicans were involved in civil society until later in the twentieth century. One of these opposition voices was the National Action Party (PAN), founded in 1939 by a group of discontented businessmen opposed to the massive expansion of the state into economic matters under Cárdenas. As Mexico developed economically and liberalized the political system in the late twentieth century, Mexico’s civil society system was increasingly pluralist, with citizens free to join groups and pursue political, charitable, religious, and recreational causes without much restriction from the state. Whereas only about 2,500 civil society organizations existed in Mexico in 1994, by 2008 there were over 10,000. The largest number of these organizations are religious in nature (about 25 percent of the total), evidence of the central role the Catholic Church continues to play in the country.
Protests have been a regular feature of Mexican political participation, both during the authoritarian period, and in the modern transitional period. Some of the most notable instances of protest include:
Mexico’s democratic transition has involved the creation of a few new institutions, but has mainly occurred by reforming existing institutions dating back to the Constitution of 1917.
Mexico’s election system and political culture have developed what is essentially a three-party-system, with the PAN on the right, the PRI in the relative center, and the PRD on the left of the ideological spectrum.
The PRI was created in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution by competing caudillos who sought to unite their rule and share power rather than continue with the instability and bloodshed that had characterized politics in the early twentieth century. It ruled Mexico from 1929 until 2000, the longest continual rule for any political party in the world so far. Its longevity can be attributed to its favorable media relationships, a corporatist patron-client network that did favors for local constituents, and, in some elections, outright fraud. The PRI was infamous around the world for its election-day events, in which it would provide free entertainment and food to people in exchange for a vote for the PRI. Even after the PRI lost the presidency in 2000, it continued governing most of the states. The PRI regained control of the national legislature in the 2009 elections, and then regained the presidency in 2012 with the election of Enrique Peña Nieto.
The PRI still maintains a strong patron-client network, especially at the state level of government, which serves as an important basis for the support they receive in elections. However, its national candidates now run on an ideological platform trying to convince voters to support their agenda, much like the other political parties. This is a departure from the past, when the PRI could be characterized as a dominant party (sometimes referred to as a “party of power”), with no definitive ideology other than to get reelected and stay in power. The pendulum of the PRI’s mid-twentieth-century presidents vacillating between state-driven and market-driven economic policy is evidence of the PRI’s ideological flexibility. The ideology of the modern PRI is usually characterized as centrist, or center-right, embracing recent capitalist and globalizing reforms, while advocating for welfare policies to address the needs of lower class Mexicans. The voters most likely to cast votes for the PRI in the last three presidential elections were working-class or rural Mestizos, with the most strength in the central region of the country.
The PAN was formed by business leaders frustrated with PRI repression and corporatism, and functioned as the PRI’s opposition to the right until winning the presidency in 2000 with the election of Vicente Fox, followed by Felipe Calderón in 2006. PAN never held a majority in the legislature, but held a plurality of seats from 2000 to 2009 before the PRI regained control. The PAN has supported a consistently right-leaning ideology in its economic policy, including free enterprise, privatization of national industries, trade liberalization, and small government. Fox had difficulties implementing most of the PAN agenda due to gridlock in the legislature, and in some observers’ opinions, his own unwillingness or inability to navigate governing Mexico without the PRI’s corporatist network.
The PAN is also the socially conservative party in today’s Mexico, usually enjoying support from Catholic Church leaders because of the party’s stances against abortion and same-sex marriage. Voters most likely to support the PAN in Mexico are those who live in the northern region, those who are regular practitioners of Catholicism, those who work in the private sector, and those who make better than average incomes.
The PRD has acted as the PRI’s opposition to the left since it broke away from the PRI as a splinter movement after the fraudulent 1988 election. It has generally supported an ideology centered on human rights and social justice for disadvantaged groups in Mexico, drawing particular support from the southern region with the highest concentration of poor and indigenous Mexicans. The PRD also performs well in urban areas, but its strength has dwindled as Mexico’s labor unions are declining in power because of globalization and free trade. PRD candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, almost won the presidency in 2006, after which Obrador called upon PRD supporters to gather in Mexico City to protest the results. He was the runner-up once again in 2012, distantly behind PRI candidate Peña Nieto. Obrador has since left the party to form another called the National Regeneration Movement, and the PRD barely managed to cross 10 percent of the vote in the PR portion of legislative elections in 2015, after getting well over 20 percent in recent elections.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, formerly of the PRD, created MORENA after his loss in the 2012 elections. MORENA is an acronym for Movimiento Regeneración Nacional, or National Regeneration Movement. It is a coalition of leftists and the evangelical right of Mexico, and it participated in an election for the first time in 2015, running in races for the Chamber of Deputies, and winning a total of 47 out of 500 possible seats. It competed in Mexico’s elections for the first time in 2018, backing Obrador; MORENA also claimed the most seats of any party in Mexico’s Senate and Chamber of Deputies.
Mexico is a democratic federal state, and its people elect officials at many different levels and different branches at each level. The principle of non-reelection was once built into every office at all levels, but reforms signed into law in 2014 will now allow legislators to be reelected to a limited number of terms. Governors and presidents may still only serve a single sexenio.
Mexico’s president is directly elected every six years in a single ballot plurality system. Under PRI rule, it was typical for an incumbent president to choose his successor, and party machinery would fall in line to arrange the orderly election of his choice. Today’s elections are generally believed to be free and fair, though there are still some allegations of irregularities. Each party nominates one candidate for the presidency, and voters cast their vote. The candidate with the most votes wins the presidency, regardless of whether the candidate received a majority or simply a plurality. This system has come under scrutiny in the last two elections, as presidents were able to win with only 36 percent (Calderón in 2006) and 39 percent of the vote (Peña Nieto in 2012). The system never produced results like this previously, as PRI candidates for president would rarely receive less than 70 percent of the vote, and would often receive well over 90 percent. The modern three-party competitive structure makes it difficult for any candidate to govern with a majority “mandate” from the people, and many recent presidents have faced questions about the legitimacy of the circumstances of their election. Election observers from the EU made a recommendation after the 2006 election to convert to a two-ballot majority system, holding a run-off between the top two candidates if no one receives a majority in the first round, but there has been no progress toward such a reform to this point. Under the principle of non-reelection, presidents may not run for a second term. In previous elections, candidates needed to be affiliated with a nationally registered political party in order to run, but starting with the 2018 presidential election, independent candidates could run as well.
Mexico’s presidential election is a single-round first-past-the-post plurality race, so the candidate with the most votes wins the presidency, regardless of whether or not the candidate has a majority.
| Election Year | Winning Candidate | Winning Candidate’s Party | Winning Candidate’s Vote % | Runner-up Candidate | Runner-up Candidate’s Party | Runner-up Candidate’s Vote % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1982 | Miguel de la Madrid | PRI | 74% | Pablo Emilio Madero | PAN | 17% |
| 1988 | Carlos Salinas de Gortari | PRI | 51% | Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas | FDN | 31% |
| 1994 | Ernesto Zedillo | PRI | 49% | Diego Fernández de Cevallos | PAN | 26% |
| 2000 | Vicente Fox | PAN | 43% | Francisco Labastida | PRI | 36% |
| 2006 | Felipe Calderón | PAN | 36% | Andrés Manuel López Obrador | PRD | 35% |
| 2012 | Enrique Peña Nieto | PRI | 39% | Andrés Manuel López Obrador | PRD | 32% |
| 2018 | Andrés Manuel López Obrador | MORENA | 53% | Ricardo Anaya | PAN | 22% |
Mexico elects members to two legislative houses of the Congress of the Union, called the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. There are 500 members in the Chamber of Deputies, each elected to a three-year term, 300 of whom are elected from single-member-district (SMD) constituencies based on which candidate gets a plurality (not necessarily a majority), and 200 of whom are elected by proportional representation (PR) from a party list. While these legislators used to serve one single three-year term, as of 2018, they are allowed to run for up to four terms.
Mexico’s legislative election system mixes elements of the single-member-district system and the proportional representation system for both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.
There are 128 total senators in the Senate of the Republic. Each of Mexico’s 31 states plus the federal district (Mexico City) elects three senators, comprising the first 96 seats. The parties can run two candidates each in a state, and the candidates run as a pair. Whichever party wins the most votes in the state will send both of their candidates into office. The third seat for each state goes to the party with the second most votes, naming a candidate from an official party list submitted in advance. The party list must include women on at least 30 percent of its list, according to an IFE rule from 2000. The remaining thirty-two seats in the Senate are awarded in a PR system based on the party’s performance in a nationwide vote. Starting in 2018, senators may run for one additional term after their first.
While under PRI rule, it was relatively easy for the PRI to manage elections to ensure a large legislative majority; however, Mexico’s legislature has been characterized by gridlock since the reforms of the 1990s. No single party has held a majority of both houses since the 2000 election, though the PRI has managed to construct governing majorities from 2009 to 2018 by forming coalitions with smaller parties. Currently, MORENA’s coalition has majority control of the Chamber of Deputies, but no coalition has a majority in the Senate.
At the state level, each of Mexico’s 31 states directly elects a governor to a six-year term, though the years of the election are staggered state-by-state. Voters also elect deputies to state congresses, and local officials such as mayors. These races were once completely controlled by the PRI, but have become competitive in Mexico’s democratic transition.
The PRI’s arrangement of state corporatism meant that only groups integrated into the PRI’s system could influence policymaking, but reforms in the 1980s and 1990s broke this model down and led to the rise of an independent pluralist interest group system. One example of this theme was the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the workers’ union pillar of PRI corporatism. CTM used its position in the PRI establishment to substantially improve workers’ living conditions from 1940 to 1982, but the collapse of oil prices and the onset of austerity imposed by the IMF substantially reduced the power of the union, especially as PRI administrations negotiated and signed free-trade agreements. As unions lost power within the PRI to the new technico elites, the CTM increasingly took a conservative stance opposing any change to the status quo of PRI domination, and was perceived by workers to negotiate disputes in favor of the employer more and more often. Workers turned to independent unions as the legitimate voices for their concerns, and the CTM is now just one of many voices drawing attention to labor concerns.
The PRI manipulated the media to secure favorable coverage throughout its time in power. There was no central state media agency, and the variety of media outlets were privately owned. The PRI would provide direct subsidy payments to friendly media outlets, often paying journalists directly to write particular stories. PRI candidates for office and state-owned companies controlled by PRI-connected executives would advertise exclusively in cooperative media; official announcements, state industry ads, and PRI campaign ads could account for as much as two-thirds of revenue for many media companies. The result was that it was nearly impossible for an outlet to stay in business without cooperating closely with the PRI.
Media became increasingly diversified and independent of the PRI in the 1980s as structural adjustment austerity limited the state’s ability to pay for expenses like media coverage, and most of the state subsidies to media were eliminated. Today, there are many options for Mexican news consumers in print, radio, television, and digital outlets. During the presidencies of Zedillo, Fox, and Calderón, the media demonstrated independence in its willingness to criticize the administration, drawing particular enjoyment covering Vicente Fox’s many public gaffes. The 2012 election revived many Mexicans’ concerns about media bias in favor of the PRI since Televisa, Mexico’s largest media conglomerate, used much of its programming and print to cover Enrique Peña Nieto as governor of the state of Mexico, setting him up as an early frontrunner for president, and then generally covering him favorably on the campaign trail.
Mexico’s state institutions were created by the Constitution of 1917. While Mexico’s political culture and functional political processes have changed dramatically, the structural institutions have remained in place.
The president of Mexico is elected to a single six-year term, and acts as both the ceremonial head of state and as the head of government. Historically, almost every president of Mexico was a general with his own armed power base. After the Revolution, the Constitution prohibited presidents from having served actively in the military for at least six months before the election. The Constitution gave the president broad powers, in addition to the massive influence presidents would exercise over PRI party affairs. The Mexican executive was often characterized as a “six-year dictatorship,” as presidents would fill every level of government with political loyalists, creating a massive patron-client network with the president at the top.
The president is central to the Mexican political system, possessing most of the power at the federal level of government.
Today, the president’s powers are more limited by the Constitution. The president has the power to:
The president remains central to the Mexican political system, but not to the extent he was in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, Mexican citizens still often see the president as all powerful, and responsible for all political outcomes, positive and negative.
The Mexican Congress of the Union is both structurally and functionally bicameral, with both houses exercising meaningful power in policymaking. It served as a “rubber-stamp” body generally approving every presidential initiative during most of the PRI’s rule, but developed into a check on the president’s power after 240 opposition party deputies were elected out of 500 seats in the 1988 election. By 2000, gridlock became the new norm in the legislature, and Presidents Fox and Calderón had a difficult time enacting reforms even with the PAN holding a plurality through 2009. Enrique Peña Nieto had similar difficulties with his PRI party leading in seats after 2012.
The highest court in Mexico’s judiciary is the Supreme Court of Justice, which is composed of eleven judges appointed to fifteen-year terms by the president with the consent of the Senate. Judges may be nominated for additional terms. The judges at lower-level courts are appointed by the members of the Supreme Court of Justice. The system of judicial appointment used to be part of the PRI’s patron-client network; however, reforms in 1995 created a merit system of competitive examinations for prospective judges to prove their qualifications before they may be nominated. These reforms are creating an increasingly independent judiciary. The Supreme Court of Justice also possesses the power of judicial review to strike laws down as unconstitutional; however, they may only exercise this power after either one-third of the Congress, one-third of a state congress, or the attorney general asks them to review the law. Mexico’s legal system is based on code law. Most legal questions are answered by detailed legal codes enacted into law by Congress or by presidential decree. Judicial precedent does not play a role in the interpretation of laws as it would in a common-law system.
Many Mexicans have a difficult time trusting the courts as an institution because of the long history of patron-clientelism and corruption in the courts. Felipe Calderón attempted to crack down on corruption in the judiciary, but there are still frequent complaints against judges. Most of them are relatively minor, and most are related more to a lack of competence among state level judges than to large-scale corruption. There are still troubling cases in which it appears judges have been either bought off by drug cartels, or threatened with violence in exchange for favorable rulings and lenient sentences for their members. Trials were not even held publicly until a 2008 reform that required them to be public by 2016.
Mexico’s bureaucracy employs over 1.5 million people in federal service. The bureaucracy was once part of the patron-client network, and was generally regarded as corrupt and incompetent. When the head of an agency would be reassigned to a new agency as a new president took office, in many cases, the entire staff of the agency would transfer with them, meaning most bureaucrats were not familiar with their jobs. Mexicans would enter interactions with bureaucrats with an expectation that bribery would be necessary to get the approvals or certifications.
The bureaucracy during PRI one-party rule was largely part of the president’s patron-client network, but during the democratic transition, it has become increasingly non-partisan and professionalized. However, the bureaucracy is still notorious for corruption and inefficiency.
When the PAN took power in 2000, one of their first orders of business was to attempt to professionalize the bureaucracy and codify its procedures. The result was a massive codification of regulations called trámites (trah-mee-tehs), which established procedures meant to prevent ineptitude in the bureaucracy. By Calderón’s presidency, Mexicans had become incredibly frustrated with the massive number of trámites, making repeated trips to government agencies, and waits in long lines necessary for even the most basic approvals for things like trash collection. One Mexican reported having made twelve trips to a local agency and paying $250 in bribes to get approval to paint his house. The Calderón government held a national contest offering a $50,000 cash prize to anyone who could identify the most unnecessary trámite, and received over 20,000 nominations. Despite Calderón’s efforts to trim government, there are still over 4,200 trámites on the books, and Mexicans are estimated to have paid more than $2 billion in bribes to bureaucrats each year recently.
Mexican politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were dominated by the military. Nearly every head of state from independence through 1946 was a general before ascending to the presidency. The Constitution attempted to reduce the political influence of the military with a provision stipulating that no military authority may perform “any functions other than those that are directly connected with military affairs.” Military officers were required to be out of the military for at least six months before taking any other official position in government.
The Constitution establishes the president as supreme commander of the military. Ensuring the subordination of the military was a priority for the early PRI presidents to prevent the instability and constant threat of coups that had plagued Mexico prior to the formation of the PRI. Presidents Cárdenas and Calles, both former generals themselves, rotated the command posts of their generals frequently to prevent any of them from building an independent base of political power in any region. Generals were also provided with lucrative positions running some of the state-owned companies to prevent them from getting into politics. Today’s military is largely professional and depoliticized, firmly under the control of the democratically elected officials, with no sign that they will intervene in Mexico’s political system anytime soon.
During PRI rule, Mexico was constitutionally federal, but state governments were essentially puppet governments under the president’s patron-client umbrella. Election reforms giving voters real choices about who would run their state have allowed the states a new independence and significance. Each of Mexico’s thirty-one states elects its own governor and congress, and also has its own state judicial system. Much like the president, governors can serve only a single six-year term, and legislators may serve only one term at a time, though they may run for election for additional nonconsecutive terms. Mexico is now both constitutionally and functionally federal. States wield a broad array of powers within their borders today.
A few decades ago, Mexico was easily classified as a less-developed or developing country with an authoritarian political system. Mexico’s transitional state has created new policy concerns, which voters and political elites must navigate in order to ensure the survival of the reformed regime.
Since the fiscal crisis of 1982 requiring IMF intervention, Mexico’s economic policies have moved in a decisively neoliberal direction. Mexico has embraced globalization and free trade as a major component of its development strategy. NAFTA was initially tremendously successful in bringing new higher-wage jobs to the northern region especially, and also to maquiladora districts where factories may import raw materials duty and tariff free, and export to any market around the world with no restrictions from the Mexican state. The early successes slowed as the United States increasingly traded with China and other low-cost manufacturers; whereas maquiladora factories were once responsible for 17 percent of employment in Mexico, they have been on the decline since 2000. Factories in Mexico still pay very low wages, but in many cases, they remain the best option for employment. The effectiveness of NAFTA in Mexico is still hotly debated. While Mexico’s economy has grown, it has only been at a rate of about 1.5 percent per year since NAFTA took effect, and the gap between rich and poor has widened. On the other hand, some estimates indicate that costs of basic household goods such as food and clothing have been cut in half, allowing many Mexicans to live much better than before the agreement. Poverty has increased. Subsidized U.S. agricultural products flooded the Mexican market and put many farmers out of business, perhaps contributing to the wave of illegal immigration into the United States. At the same time, agricultural exports from Mexico into the United States have tripled since NAFTA, indicating it may be creating more farm jobs than it has cost. NAFTA will likely remain a source of political conflict for many years going forward.
Part of Mexico’s strategy to deal with rising poverty is a program called opportunidades. The government has made cash payments directly to mothers in poverty, provided that their children attend school regularly and adhere to certain nutritional guidelines. The program has been highly successful, and has been imitated by many other developing countries.
Another regular conflict in Mexican economic policy is what to do with the parastatals—large state-owned, yet independent business operations, most of which were created after the influx of oil revenue in the 1970s. Parastatals gained a reputation for their high costs and inefficiencies, but were protected from foreign competition through 1982. The fiscal crisis required Mexico to eliminate many of its trade barriers as terms of structural adjustment, and parastatals began losing huge sums of money against their far more efficient competitors. The government sold about two-thirds of these firms into the private sector in the 1980s and 1990s. President Fox attempted to privatize many of the rest, including the largest and most significant, the national oil company, Pemex. Fox was unable to get this agenda passed through Congress, and Pemex has remained a source of frustration for its inefficient production and operating losses that the state must subsidize. President Peña Nieto has reformed the oil market by allowing limited foreign competition against Pemex, as foreign oil exploration companies are now allowed to drill in Mexico on a limited basis. Pemex pays about one-half of its revenue to the government in taxes, which funds about one-third of Mexico’s annual budget. Peña Nieto is attempting to change the tax structure in Mexico to make it possible for Pemex to survive competitively against foreign companies, while at the same time weaning the government off of dependence on Pemex revenue.
Since 2006, Mexico has been engaged in a “war on drugs” in response to a wave of violence that overtook many cities, mostly in the north, and remains ongoing. The primary issue is the power of drug cartels competing for control over distribution networks into the United States. The strategy of the cartels usually involved bribing local officials, including the police, to ignore the activity of the cartel. As Presidents Fox and Calderón attempted to root out local corruption, cartels saw opportunities to move into territory previously held by other rival cartels, and the conflicts between cartels became incredibly violent. Local officials and reporters who attempt to stop cartel activity or identify cartel members are regularly murdered in brutal fashion. Estimates are that between 60,000 and 120,000 have died so far from drug-related violence. Presidents Fox and Calderón both used the Mexican military to carry out high-profile campaigns against the drug gangs, and though he criticized the strategy for bringing about too much bloodshed, Peña Nieto followed a similar strategy with much more success. Many worried if Mexico was becoming a narco-state in which the drug gangs wielded more political power than legitimate authorities in some parts of the country, but the situation appears to be stabilizing, and many of the high-profile leaders of the cartels have been brought into custody.
Corruption is a major problem in Mexico, as it has been for many decades. On the Corruption Perceptions Index in 2017, Mexico ranked 135 out of 180 countries measured. This problem was highlighted in 2014 when forty-three students were kidnapped, and burned to death in the small town of Iguala. Federal investigators eventually traced the kidnapping to the Iguala police, and to the mayor and his wife who ordered the kidnapping for fear that the students were going to disrupt an event where the wife would announce her plans to run for mayor to succeed her husband. The president himself has not been immune to corruption concerns. A large mansion was built for the First Lady by a contractor who later received part of a $4.3 billion rail contract from the government. In 2015, near the middle of his presidency, former President Peña Nieto was estimated to be worth over $3.3 million, which seemed questionable for someone who worked in civil service for his entire career to that point. Congress passed a new anti-corruption law in 2015, creating new oversight and penalties for officials and companies engaged in corruption. Whether this law will begin the reversal of longstanding impunity in Mexico remains to be seen.
Historically, Mexico’s foreign policy has been extraordinarily bilateral, with most of its attention focused on the relationship with the United States. There are lots of reasons why the United States is such a huge focus. More than 90 percent of Mexico’s exports are to the United States. Some 2.1 percent of Mexico’s GDP comes from remittances, payments sent back into Mexico from workers (many undocumented) in the United States. Meanwhile, Mexico is only the third largest trading partner of the United States. The two countries were negotiating expansion possibilities for NAFTA in 2001, but after the terrorist attacks on September 11, priorities for the United States changed from economic integration to counterterrorism and security.
U.S. President Donald Trump criticized what he perceived as unfair trade imbalances and economic outcomes for the United States in the NAFTA Treaty. His threats to pull the United States out of the agreement led to negotiations with both Canada and Mexico. These negotiations concluded with minor modifications to tariffs and quotas in a few industries of concern, including automobile manufacturing and dairy products, but without major sweeping changes. The agreement is now referred to as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, as opposed to NAFTA, though its final approval is still pending while each national legislature is given a chance to ratify the new agreement or reject it.
Another difficult issue between the two countries is immigration. Mexican presidents have long supported a loosening of U.S. immigration restrictions to allow Mexican guest workers. Yet, no guest worker program was ever created by the United States, and it constructed a massive border fence meant to prevent additional illegal immigration from Mexico. President Calderón compared the construction of the fence to the Berlin Wall. Many U.S. policy responses significantly push the boundaries of Mexico’s sovereignty, with American police, military, drug enforcement agents, and drones patrolling Mexico in search of drug-related criminals.
Mexico is increasingly diversifying its international relationships, signing free-trade agreements with 44 different countries since NAFTA. Mexico also joined the World Trade Organization in 1995, and increasingly asserts itself on the international stage at forums like the United Nations.
*Note: Terms with an asterisk (*) are those that consistently appear on the AP Comparative Government and Politics exam as tested concepts.
Recent Mexican history has been characterized by
Structural adjustment, imposed on Mexico by the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s, required the Mexican government to
Compared to the other countries of study, Mexican society is the most
The 2000 election represents a turning point in Mexican history because
A Mexican voter who owns a business, is devoutly Catholic, and resides in the northern border area would most likely cast a vote for which one of the following parties?
Both the Mexican and Russian presidents
Mexico’s legislative election system
Which of the following is true of Mexico’s judiciary?
Mexico’s state governments
The foreign policy of Mexico