The Sources of Democratic Responsiveness in Mexico

Preface

vii p r e f a c e This book is the product of my attempt to broaden my own understanding of how democracy works. I hope that it will broaden the reader’s understanding too. When democracy works well, it produces outcomes—in the form of policies, services, public goods, protections , or some other output—that are beneficial to, and desired by, the citizenry. I refer to the process of generating these outcomes as democratic responsiveness, and my overarching goal is to discover why some governments are better at it than others. Most people who have thought about the problem at all assume that electoral contestation is the primary motor of responsiveness. Politicians care about their future electoral prospects, so subjecting them to the periodic approval of voters forces them to behave as voters would want. That is what I always believed too until I started to take a closer look at the Mexican case. I was quickly confronted with reasons to be suspicious of this electoral worldview, and eventually my skepticism led me to generate a body of evidence that contradicts electoral explanations of responsiveness at the most basic level. In short, in this book I use evidence from Mexico to call into question common assumptions about the ability of elections to generate fair democratic outcomes. This does not mean that Mexicans are “bad democrats” or that the country is somehow unsuited for democracy, although its institutional structure clearly does limit the effectiveness of some democratic practices. Rather, it suggests that Mexicans must be making good use of other, nonelectoral types of influence over government. I offer evidence to suggest that various types of political participation and engagement, which are equally important to democratic practice, can have the effect that is usually attributed to elections. And in spite of contradictory evidence, I leave open the enticing possibility that electoral competition and political participation work in tandem in Mexico, producing better outcomes when used together than either strategy would produce on its own. I have not been able to satisfactorily answer all of the questions that I have posed. But I do believe that I have demonstrated the utility of thinking more broadly about the sources of democratic responsiveness in Mexico and beyond. —————— From the beginning, the research culminating in this book has exhibited a tension: Is it about Mexico, or is it about institutions and democratic responsiveness? Sometimes I feel pressured to insist that the country and the theme are equally important and foundational. But the truth is that the theoretical ideas came first. At a certain point in graduate school at the University of Chicago I became interested in what I thought were some ambiguities in our ideas about democratization, electoral competition , and institutional performance. My thoughts may not have been quite ripe, but they revolved around a fascination with subnational variation in democratic transitions, democratic performance, electoral competition ,andaccountability.Evenwithincountriesthatwerecomfortably labeled democratic, why were there so many regions in which government displayed authoritarian tendencies and remained unresponsive to the public interest? And why was there so much variation from one town, city, or state, to the next? Obviously this was similar to Robert Putnam’s puzzle; but the types of variation that I noticed encompassed much more than institutional performance and could be observed just about anywhere one turned. Now, I do not disavow the logic of case selection that I describe in chapter 1. But I see no harm in acknowledging what is usually kept quiet, which is that my focus on Mexico owes as much to chance and good fortune as it does to a rigorous search for an ideal and uniquely suitable case. During the years in which I was developing an interest in these puzzles and a theoretical framework that might help to explain them, I had only a diffuse interest in Latin America and no particular viii Preface Preface ix expertise in Mexico. As I began to consider an appropriate case (or cases) for my emerging research agenda, I considered everything from Brazil, Argentina, or Venezuela to countries outside the region, including Indonesia and India. As I argue in chapter 7, I think the general approach I have employed here can help us to understand subnational politics in many other countries as well. But one has to start somewhere, and I was at an impasse. In a chance conversation on the fifth floor of Pick Hall, my good friend...