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Chapter 9 THE PRIMARY ELECTIONS “BONUS” IN LATIN AMERICA  John M. Carey and John Polga-Hecimovich Imagine you are the leader of a political party in a democracy that will hold presidential elections next year. Your goal is to put forward as strong a candidate as possible. The decision as to how to select that candidate falls to you as supreme party chief. You can draw on your wisdom and gut instincts and unilaterally anoint a standard bearer. You can summon an executive council to a smoke-filled backroom to deliberate and make the call. You can convene a party congress or convention and devise a decision rule that accommodates participation by the party’s army of activists and militants. Or you can call for a primary. If you do so, there are further considerations. Should participation be limited to your registered partisans, or perhaps include independent voters , or even all voters without regard to partisanship? And will you resist any temptation to try and rig the contest in favor of your preferred contender? The decision of how to decide on a candidate is rarely taken in so simple a manner, by an party dictator divorced from the context of politics in a given country at a given time. But parties in most presidential democracies—and, at the subnational level, where regional executives are popularly elected— confront something like this choice on a regular basis. Moreover, there is reason to think the decision matters, not only to how participatory the overall electoral process is but also to the relative strengths of the candidates selected. Consider the campaign leading up to Mexico’s July 2006 presidential election . With no internal opposition in sight, the Revolutionary Democratic Party (Partido Revolucionario Democrático, or PRD) handed its nomination to a former Mexico City mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, without a primary, in the fall of 2005. Lopez Obrador held what appeared at the time to be an insurmountable lead over potential candidates from contending parties . The National Action Party (Partido de Acción Nacional, or PAN) of the unpopular incumbent President, Vicente Fox, appeared particularly weak. In October and November, however, the field shifted. First, Felipe Calderón defeated the president’s favored successor, Santiago Creel, in a PAN primary. Attention then shifted to the Revolutionary Institutional Party (Partida de la Revolución Institucional, or PRI), which had dominated Mexican politics for seventy years prior to Fox’s 2000 presidential victory.1 The stage had appeared set for a primary contest between a longtime party boss, Roberto Madrazo, and Arturo Montiel, but Montiel’s campaign collapsed, and he withdrew his candidacy, when financial documents implying corruption during his term as governor of Mexico State were leaked to the press on the eve of the contest. With the field suddenly cleared of viable challengers, Madrazo won over 90 percent of the vote in a vestigial PRI primary against a Lilliputian opponent (Susana Hayward, “2006 Presidential Field Set,” November 15, 2005, Knight Ridder Newspapers Online, accessed at http://www.star-telegram.com). In the wake of these nomination processes, the Mexican electoral landscape shifted substantially. Calderón’s upset victory in a clean and contested PAN primary gave him visibility and momentum, and he immediately surged in the polls, while Lopez Obrador and Madrazo both stalled (Andres Oppenheimer , “Unlikely Mexican Candidate Rises in Polls,” Miami Herald, December 1, 2005 12A). Lopez Obrador had not been chosen in a primary. Madrazo got no boost from prevailing in a contest bereft of genuine competition and stained by a smear of his main opponent that was widely regarded as an underhanded move by the Madrazo campaign itself. Calderón’s postprimary surge endured and in the July 2006 election, he edged out Lopez Obrador by 36 percent to 35 percent, with 22 percent going to Madrazo. A variety of factors may be understood as pivotal to Calderón’s narrow victory —by less than 240,000 votes out of almost 42 million votes cast. At the very least, Mexico’s experience in 2005 and 2006 suggests that a primary that is widely regarded as competitive and democratic can be an asset in establishing a candidate’s credibility and viability against candidates nominated in tainted primaries or by other methods. But if this is the lesson from Mexico, it runs contrary to the conventional wisdom, drawn overwhelmingly from the U.S. experience , about the effects of primaries on candidate competitiveness. The cover of Nelson Polsby’s book Consequences of...

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