Performing on the Mexican Democratic Stage: New Actors, New Scripts

Managing Mexico: Economists From Nationalism to Neoliberalism. By Sarah Babb. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Pp. 320. $35.00 cloth.)

Mexico: The Struggle for Democratic Development. By Daniel C. Levy and Kathleen Bruhn, with Emilio Zebadúa. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. 382. $48.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

Mexico 2005: The Challenges of the New Millennium. By Michael Mazar. (Washington, D.C., CSIS, 1999. Pp. 200. $21.95 paper.)

Party Politics and the Struggle for Democracy in Mexico: National and State-Level Analyses of the Partido Acción Nacional. Edited by Kevin Middlebrook. (San Diego, Calif.: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 2001. Pp. 278. $14.95 paper.)

Zapata Lives!: Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico. By Lynn Stephen. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. 445. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.)

Social Movements and Economic Transition: Markets and Distributive Conflict in Mexico. By Heather Williams. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. 254. $55.00 cloth.)

Since the mid-1990s, a single political feature, the electoral process, has dominated the political landscape in Mexico. Given the outcome of the 1994 national elections, and the creation of a more transparent and equitable playing field for parties and candidates, it is no surprise that the structure and process of elections produced a dramatic shift in emphasis in public perceptions. This perception is clearly shared among academic specialists in Mexico and the United States. ¹ Mexican academics first made this shift, especially focused on state and local elections, the initial locus of democratic change throughout the 1990s, and likely to be the most significant source of additional political patterns in anticipation of the 2006 presidential race. ² Naturally, Vicente Fox's victory in July 2000 established a new benchmark for Mexican politics, and for measuring democratic transformation. ³ The bulk of the six works under review, however, were researched and written before the actual event, even if incorporating its potential consequences in portions of their analysis.

Daniel C. Levy and Kathleen Bruhn provide a fruitful setting from which to identify changing behaviors, structures, and institutions, as well as a helpful linkage to other recent works. Theirs is a thoughtful and provocative introduction to all aspects of Mexican democracy, both theoretically and concretely. In addition, they provide an outstanding bibliography and detailed explanatory notes. This book is based on a comprehensive analysis of much of the literature produced since 1980. Levy, who fifteen years ago co-authored an outstanding interpretation of Mexico's political economy with Gabriel Székely, at that time offered one of the few joint American-Mexican scholarly interpretations available. ⁴ He intended to replicate the insights that collaboration produced by writing the present text with Emilio Zebadúa, another distinguished Mexican author. Zebadúa gave up his equal authorship role, allowing Levy to collaborate with Kathleen Bruhn, whose work on the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) is the outstanding analysis of that organization, and only one of a handful of books on Mexican political parties, a subject much in need of more analysis. ⁵ Two complementary works on the National Action Party (PAN), crucial for understanding the party's background in the Fox victory, can be found in El Partido Acción Nacional, la larga marcha, 1939-1994, ⁶ and Kevin Middlebrook's collection.

Levy's and Bruhn's previous essay in Larry Diamond's Democracy in Developing Countries series, provides a sound basis for Mexico, The Struggle for Democratic Development. ⁷ In fact, its overriding theme is democracy. They assess the interrelationship between democracy and five developmental concerns, historical, political, social, economic and international. The historical section provides a helpful grounding in Mexican political history, including the authoritarian heritage, while the international section is an excellent overview of the United States-Mexico bilateral relationship, and the U.S. impact on democratization in its southern neighbor. The...