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2. Centralization and Informal Power
- Penn State University Press
- Chapter
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By 1980, Mexico was—formally, at least—one of the most centralized large countries in Latin America. The federal government controlledroughly80to90percentofpublicexpenditures .1 Incontrast,municipalities accounted for only 1 to 2 percent of public spending, and these local governments had few formal functions, powers, or resources. Then, beginning in the early 1980s and lasting for two decades, Mexico underwent a dramatic process of decentralization. However, municipalities did not suddenly emerge out of nowhere.2 Local spaceshavealwaysbeenanessentialelementofMexico’spoliticalsystem.Therefore , before we seek to understand the effects of decentralization on democracy, we need to know something about how state power was constructed historically in Mexico and how the state was embedded in society.3 Although formal power was highly centralized prior to the 1980s, informal power was much more diffuse and contested. The political system that operated in Mexico from the 1920s through the 1990s was designed to channel conflict within a single political party that was closely tied to the state. This system created a set of broadly understoodinformalrulesforsettlingdifferencesamongdivergentpoliticalleaderships 2 Centralization and Informal Power 1. See fig. 3.4 for detailed information and sources. Federal expenditures were around 90 percent of all public expenditures if we include semiautonomous companies owned by the government, whereas municipalities controlled only 1 percent. If we factor out the state-owned companies, the federal government spent roughly 80 percent and municipalities around 2 percent. 2. The argument that municipalities were always significant actors in Mexico’s political system contrasts markedly with Grindle, Going Local. 3. Joel Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue, eds., State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Peter B. Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). andallowedeachtomaintainaconsiderabledegreeofautonomywithintheparty. It effectively linked citizens to the political process through complex chains of intermediation that maintained a tight control on the nature of demands and the degree of dissent. Thissingle-partyhegemonicsystem,however,wasbuiltonahistoryofattempts to reconcile the need for a strong state with the continued influence of local and regional caciques. It merely represented a more successful and durable attempt to do what national political leaders had sought to do for decades: ensure that the centrifugal forces of political power were loyal to central authority in return for the former’s continued dominance as intermediaries between citizens and the state. This attempt finally succeeded in consolidating the national government ’s dominant role, although it was one built in large part on informal power rather than formal institutions and on indirect citizenship rather than a direct relationship between citizens and the state. Centralization avoided the fragmentation of the country, but the state remained relatively small and severely limited in its ability to promote the kind of development that could benefit the majority of citizens. Indeed, total public expenditures in Mexico remained below the average for Latin America and far below that of more developed countries, suggesting that centralization did not produce a strong central state as much as it did weak subnational governments. Centralization, State Building, and Citizenship Both centralism and regionalism have been strong currents in Mexican history since the colonial period. The interplay between these two opposing forces, and the way they have been negotiated over time, have shaped the nature of citizenship and the relationship of state power to citizens. In colonial times, the Spanish crown sought to achieve administrative centralization as a means of control and of optimizing the extraction of resources. This conflicted with the reality of colonists who had been granted control of large tracts of land and indigenous communities, which also maintained a degree of autonomy over their internal affairs.4 Moreover, the Castilian model of governance, which privileged a strong 28 State Formation and Political Change 4. As Lorenzo Meyer has observed, “Great distances and abrupt geography played in favor of local interests, as did the relative weakness of the crown, which always needed resources and had a small army. The disputes among local groups, classes, and races, and the legitimacy of the crown vis-à-vis any other form of authority favored the interests of the center.” Meyer, “Un tema añejo siempre actual: El centro y las regiones en la historia mexicana,” in Blanca Torres, ed., Descentralización y democracia en México (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1986), 23. [34.204.181.19] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:22 GMT) central bureaucracy located in the colonial capital, conflicted with the legacy of the municipio libre (free municipality) as the basic unit of...