Mexico’s much vaunted “transition to democracy” is conventionally thought to have taken place in the period bounded by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas’s successful but stolen presidential bid in 1988 and Vicente Fox’s election to the presidency in 2000. Cárdenas had broken away from the authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to run an independent, pro-democracy campaign that sparked the founding of a left-of-center opposition party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the following year. Fox, in contrast, capitalized on a nonpartisan “useful vote for democracy” to bring the conservative National Action Party (PAN) to power for the first time, reversing more than seven decades of the PRI’s single-party rule.
While there is a great deal of truth in the dating of this “transition,” there is a great deal of oversimplification as well. “Democracy” is a political system whose most fundamental characteristic is the existence of mechanisms that guarantee its constant renovation and renewal—not only of the individuals who happen to be in power, but also of the rules of the democracy itself.1 A democratic polity thus allows for the broadening of representation and the resources to guarantee citizens’ rights, always as a process and not as a definitive achievement.2 Both of these processes—constant renovation and a broadening of citizens’ rights—remain weak and problematic in Mexico.
The presidency and the country’s long-ruling “official” party, the PRI, were the pillars of an authoritarian political power consolidated during the second half of the past century. The power of the president came from his control of the official party and of the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government. The PRI, for its part, was able to win elections, both at the federal and local levels, because of the president’s ability to coordinate all three branches of the federal government—executive, legislative, and judicial. This gave him “meta-constitutional” powers, which allowed him great influence in designating local functionaries, from municipal presidents to state governors. But perhaps the greatest power of the president came from his ability to name his own successor, guaranteeing the continuity of the regime and at the same time its “ordered renewal.”3
This authoritarian, though inclusive, arrangement thrived for more than 70 years in the form of a stable political system that was the envy of many Latin American countries. Nevertheless, authoritarianism disguised as political democracy permitted an extension of corruption, not only because high-ranking PRI politicians enjoyed remarkable levels of personal impunity, but also because the party found it literally necessary to “corrupt” the democratic institutions embedded in Mexico’s constitution to make sure that these could not function as spaces for the expression and defense of the citizenry.
Thus, the struggle for Mexican democratization has never involved the restoration of democratic institutions, which truthfully never functioned as such, but has instead involved attempts to transform the many democratic institutions that have been malfunctioning since they were founded in the long wake of the Mexican Revolution. It has been a struggle to democratize the legacy of the Revolution. It gives meaning to the name of the center-left party that arose in 1989, following Cárdenas’s campaign for the presidency: Party of the Democratic Revolution. Now that there is a genuine, though uneven, process of democratization under way in Mexico, as in Latin America as a whole, we can see that eradicating corruption, or at least reducing it significantly, has been an indispensable objective in this process.4
But democracy is not simply a set of political institutions. More than 20 years ago, the political philosopher Norberto Bobbio warned of the risks incurred by a democracy in the absence of an active, critical, and well-organized citizenry that continually pressures its country’s rulers and the leaders of its political parties. He argued that the citizenry loses interest in political debate when “politics is sequestered by just a few citizens, the richest and the powerful, in order to satisfy their interests and perpetuate their mandate.”5 In such cases, even when they exist in a formal sense, democratic institutions are meaningless.
This is what we are up against today. The political culture of the 21st century, in Mexico and the world over, has been characterized by widespread apathy and cynicism, especially among the younger generation. And the apathy and cynicism are even greater in countries where social differences and poverty have increased over the past decade, because the citizens of those countries believe that their governments are generally not in a position to make decisions regarding their resources. All Latin American countries, for example, regardless of their degree of democratic consolidation, have had to endure the negative effects produced by economic policies dictated from abroad by international financial institutions. These economic measures, known as the Washington Consensus, have led to the deterioration of wages; growing unemployment; the abandonment of agriculture; a decrease in welfare policies in the areas of health, education, and housing; and, in general, unequal income distribution.
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All this is taking place in the context of “globalization,” a process that has deepened the complexity of capitalist development and modified the fundamental concepts upon which the construction of traditional nation-states was grounded. Power, sovereignty, territory, and self-determination are all being redefined in this era of global capitalism. With the development of instantaneous communications—impossible to control within the “national space” under state administration, which has occurred thanks to satellite technology—globalization reflects the “expanding scale, growing magnitude, speeding up, and deepening impact of transcontinental flows and patterns of social interaction.”6 This has led to a decomposition of social and political identities and a real modification of the meaning of national borders. The breakdown of the state as a territory within which power is wielded is directly responsible for the discrediting of “politics” at the national level, because the population realizes that, in the final analysis, the institutional actors (political parties and rulers) are not making the real decisions. All this has given rise to new political actors, new political environments, and new opportunities.
Since the dimensions of countries’ political arenas came to be modified, the concept of what is “national” has taken on new meanings; political actors have lost certain resources and gained others. Traditional actors on the left, like unions, progressive parties, and the state itself, have lost resources and strength, while others, like the media and financial capital, have become more powerful. Moreover, within nation-states, globalization has spurred a process of decentralization, regionalization, and a reassessment of subnational political units. That is why the left needs a different strategy to successfully insert itself—and the demands of marginalized and nonprivileged sectors—into this new national space.
Political democracy, we should remember, was a gradual conquest of the masses against authoritarian regimes. The electoral rules we know today burst into political life in the 19th and 20th centuries for the purpose of ensuring the realization of popular rights. Today, however, at the outset of the 21st century, we are becoming aware of the limitations of political democracy due to the diminishing confidence in political parties, the use of marketing as a method for winning voters’ sympathies, and because politicians—who were elected by the people—cannot make many of the decisions affecting voters’ needs and desires. Instead, many such decisions are undertaken in international financial centers.
Further, widely touted economic reforms have not lived up to the expectations they generated. In the 1990s, a promise for development was devised in the form of a neoliberal economic model (the above-mentioned Washington Consensus), from which the majority of the population is nowadays excluded. That model recommended budgetary discipline, financial and commercial liberalization, privatizations, and a deregulation framework that at best places the state in a position as a referee between different interest groups. Stronger links to the market have borne fruit at the macroeconomic level, but their effects have not reached many citizens. Neoliberal reforms did not lead to an appreciable reduction in poverty levels; in fact, they increased inequalities and sent large numbers of people into the informal economy due to a lack of formal-sector jobs.
As a result of neoliberal policies, the state has been significantly weakened, having lost its ability to influence, control, regulate, or benefit from transnational processes, or to withstand hegemonic tendencies in economic or political plans being prepared in the centers of financial power. In Mexico today, the state has shown evidence of grave deficiencies vis-à-vis the interests of local and international private powers. The state’s weakness has in turn led to the emergence of new de facto powers and a proliferation of interest groups (especially related to business) acting as powerful lobbies that distort forms of genuine democratic representation. The mass media belonging to business groups with highly diversified economic interests act as “superpowers” limiting the sovereignty of public institutions.
Further, the state has literally lost “pieces of its territory,” which have been occupied by groups conducting economic activities that are not only informal, but illegal. In Mexico—and in many other countries—drug-trafficking groups control significant amounts of resources as well as entire regions, where they wield a level of power similar to that of the state. The proliferation of drug trafficking creates a double-sided problem: On the one hand, the narcos attempt to infiltrate part of state apparatuses and control territories; on the other, their activity attracts the attention of Washington, generating new forms of external pressure.
To achieve a true consolidation of democracy, the state must be able to change and perfect itself on the basis of citizens’ participation. It must do this in the context of a tension between the market economy and a democratic political system.7 We encounter great contrasts in the opinions and historical experiences of different Latin American countries regarding the likelihood that a democratic regime may establish an efficient market economy and, at the same time, create a more equitable and just economic system. Indeed, the experiences of many nations show that the relationship between democracy and the free market is hardly as linear and harmonious as some authors in the late 20th century came to believe. Nevertheless, democracy currently offers better possibilities for developing citizenship in the myriad dimensions with which it has been conceived than other known types of political systems.
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A study conducted on democracy, development, and welfare in 140 countries revealed that the correlation between development and democracy is strong, though not definitive. Once a country achieves a level of development associated with per capita incomes of $2,500 to $3,000—as with Mexico, Portugal, Algeria, or Costa Rica—democracy makes a difference, not so much because a democratic setting guarantees a higher degree of development but because of the type of development achieved. In democratic countries, income distribution is more equitable and wages are higher. Dictatorships, in contrast, grow on the basis of greater capital investment and lower wages: Since they can repress the workers, they can pay labor poorly and use it rather inefficiently. Even though there may not be major differences between a dictatorship and a democracy in their general level of development, democracy does make a difference in the specific characteristics assumed by the development process, like employment, social policies, and productive investment.8
In Mexico, elections functioned for many years to lend legitimacy to an authoritarian regime in which only one party had realistic chances of winning. Gradual democratization resulted from a series of small victories achieved by citizens and opposition parties, each of which strengthened their chances of further gains. Changes in the institutions have been achieved by way of pressures exerted by social mobilization from below. A mobilization in which the right as well as the left participated consisted largely of civil resistance, like the blocking of means of communication, or the taking of municipal governments. In 2006, the denunciations of electoral fraud and the demonstrations in favor of “the legitimate government” of Andrés Manuel López Obrador can be seen as forms of civil resistance in the face of electoral results that did not enjoy full legitimacy.
This process first occurred at local levels, then at state levels, and finally at the federal level in 2000. In this period there was a great consensus among a broad spectrum of political forces (including the democratic right and left) in the sense of demanding electoral rules that permitted different parties access to power, without a specific concern for the content of the political project of each party.
The demand for political democracy in itself permitted a joining together of political actors of the left and right around questions of democratic procedure without considering too closely the differences between the two broad forces on questions of political economy, religious or secular morality, or ethnic diversity. In 1997, 2000, and 2003 the elections enjoyed reasonable credibility, and many concluded that the political problem had been resolved. But in 2006 the fight for the presidency acquired a much clearer ideological coloration, and it is probably for this reason that the business community, the Catholic hierarchy, and the president himself—institutions and leaders that in 2000 had remained relatively neutral and hadn’t intervened—played an active role in the electoral campaign. A universal complaint prior to the electoral reforms of 1996 had been against the intervention of the president in support of the candidates he favored, and the widespread use of public resources in the campaign. This returned in 2006.
Democratization has brought about a precarious equilibrium between the political forces that had power and those that had fought for power by democratic means. One of the fundamental axes of these changes has been the recognition that “the legitimate form of access to power is the electoral way,” and that all political competitors would respect the institutions of the law. Nonetheless, the elections of 2006 put this belief to the test.
In the long and complex electoral process of 2006, the limits and possibilities of that process came into relief as we saw an intense confrontation that went beyond competition between members of different political parties, as had occurred in 2000. The confrontation of 2006 was not between the right-of-center PAN and the left-of center PRD, but between two coalitions whose positions went beyond the positions taken by the two principal parties. The left that voted for López Obrador and his Coalition for the Good of All wanted a much more fundamental social transformation than that represented by the PRD itself. Therefore, the alternation in power might have represented a completely different political direction of political economy and social policy, close to what has occurred in several other Latin American countries.
With this in mind, we can affirm that while the Mexican transition to democracy began on the terrain of electoral institutions, its consolidation is taking place on the terrain of political culture and of the values of democracy (individual liberties, social rights, pluralism, equality before the law), because in 2006 the post-electoral protest was a way of demanding that the political rights of citizens be recognized. Probably, for those who view the transition as “a pact of elites,” the support given to the winner of the 2006 election, the PAN’s Felipe Calderón, by the leaders and governors of the PRI constituted a signal of “consolidation” because it guaranteed the continuation of the system.9
The institutions and pacts among the elites are important, but a deeper democracy requires that a governing party be accountable to an “active, critical and well-organized citizenry,” and that the political regime be willing and able to incorporate the changes that respond to a society that isn’t static. In Mexico, the regime must prove itself capable of attending to the demands of a population with tremendous inequalities. Elections must be seen as instruments that cannot only change the image of a party, but that can also change the content of its policies and the project of the nation. Only under those conditions will it matter who wins.
Silvia Gómez Tagle is professor-researcher at the Center for Sociological Studies of the Colegio de México in Mexico City. She is the editor of Revista Nueva Antropología.
1. Portions of this essay draw on many of the ideas I developed in collaboration with Enrique Conejero in the introduction we wrote together for a book we co-edited, Democratización y globalización en América Latina (Spain: Universidad Miguel Hernández, 2005).
2. Chantal Mouffe, Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship and Community (Verso, 1992), 13.
3. Jorge Carpizo, El presidencialismo mexicano (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1994), 121–22.
4. Silvia Gómez Tagle, “Public Institutions and Electoral Transparency,” in Kevin Middlebrook, ed., Dilemmas of Political Change in Mexico (San Diego: Center for U.S. Mexican Studies, 2004), 88–95.
5. Norberto Bobbio, El futuro de la democracia (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986), 25.
6. David Held and Anthony McGrew, Globalization/Anti-Globalization (Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 13.
7. Claus Offe, “El dilema de la sincronía: democracia y economía de mercado en Europa Oriental,” Revista del Centro de Estudios Constitucionales no. 12 (May–August 1992): 189–206; José M. Maravall, “Economía y regimenes políticos,” Working Papers, Instituto Juan March, no. 59 (1994).
8. Adam Prezeworski, Michael Álvarez E., José Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-being in the World, 1950–1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 164–68.
9. John Ackerman, “Democratización: pasado, presente y futuro,” Perfiles Latinoamericanos: Revista de la Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Sede México 14, no. 28 (July–December 2006): 117–58.
