Increased attention to the electoral process marks a significant shift in the study of Mexican politics. This change reflects in part the Mexican government’s greater emphasis since 1977 on electoral reform as a means of promoting (and controlling the pace and direction of) political liberalization. However, recent interest in elections is also due to the widely shared expectation that electoral gains by the opposition reflect sociopolitical tensions resulting from continuing economic crisis, austerity measures, and efforts to redefine Mexico’s economic development strategy.
Arturo Alvarado’s edited volume makes several important contributions to the study of contemporary Mexican politics. First, it examines issues that influenced state and local elections in 1985 and that are likely to have a significant future impact on electoral politics, particularly increased entrepreneurial support for the conservative National Action party (PAN) and the PAN’s emergence as a serious rival to the governing Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) in several northern states. Second, the collection’s focus on state-level politics illuminates a subject that is often ignored in analyses of the highly centralized Mexican regime. The volume is especially valuable because research on these topics is generally unavailable to an English-language audience.
Most of these essays examine the political context surrounding the 1985 elections in the northern states of Chihuahua, Nuevo León, San Luis Potosí, Sonora, and Tamaulipas. These contributions reveal both the extreme variability of sociopolitical conditions even among states in the same region and the severe obstacles that government and PRI control over political and economic resources pose to opposition movements in their efforts to win control of state and municipal offices. Nevertheless, Alberto Aziz Nassif’s essay on the consolidation of PAN’s electoral strength in Chihuahua and Enrique Márquez’s contribution on traditional middle-class protest movements in San Luis Potosí suggest that opposition movements sometimes survive defeat and come to play a central role in state politics. Jeffrey W. Rubin’s essay on the development and evolution of a multiclass opposition movement in Oaxaca offers a similar conclusion. Moreover, the public opinion survey data presented by Alberto Hernández Hernández and Tonatiuh Guillén López suggest that PAN’s high level of support (rivaling that of PRI, and surpassing it in some cases) among youth and middle- and upper-class groups in northern urban areas constitutes a permanent political challenge to PRI dominance.
Overview essays by Juan Molinar Horcasitas and Carlos Martínez Assad place these conclusions in a broader context by emphasizing both the increasing competitiveness of the Mexican electoral process as a whole (particularly in urban areas) and the limitations of electoral reform as a strategy for promoting broad political change. However, despite the occasional comments offered by individual contributors, the volume lacks an essay that evaluates the overall impact of economic crisis on national politics and on future prospects for political liberalization.
