This volume highlights the growing disjuncture between Mexico's recently accelerated transition to democracy at the national level and what is occurring at the state and local levels in many parts of the country. Subnational political regimes controlled by hard-line antidemocratic elements linked to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) remain important in late-twentieth-century Mexico, even in an era of much-intensified interparty competition. The survival and even strengthening of state and local authoritarian enclaves in states like Puebla, Tabasco, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chiapas, and the Yucatán raises serious questions: To what extent will failure to democratize in states and localities where little or no political change has occurred constrain or disrupt the national-level democratization process? How can Mexican leaders engineer a deconcentration of political power and a fiscal decentralization that do not simply strengthen authoritarian elites in the periphery?
Drawing on recent field research in ten Mexican states, the contributors show how the increasingly uneven character of democratization in Mexico can be a significant obstacle to the completion of the process in an expeditious and low-conflict manner.
"Treatments of subnational politics in Mexico and other Latin American countries have been tardy in coming, but the recent literature is heartening.... Subnational Politics and Democratization in Mexico is a valuable contribution to that emerging literature."—Edward J. Williams, American Political Science Review
"[This book] brings out the diversity of regional experiences and complements a focus on electoral processes with an interest in popular movements and identities."—Rob Aitken, Bulletin of Latin American Research
"This collection makes a major contribution to the comparative study of democratization.... Analytically, the causal arrow between national and subnational political change can go both ways, and this volume begins to disentangle the complex threads that link a nation's center to its regions." —Jonathan Fox, American Journal of Sociology