Introduction

This chapter explores an important puzzle of institutional reform. It explains why a president got deputies to approve two far-reaching reform bills. The first established the secret franchise, a voter registry, and an electoral tribunal to adjudicate conflicting claims about election results. The second eliminated the ability of parties to distribute ballots on election day. With this reform bill, only the secretariat of the interior could furnish voters with paper ballots. Both sets of reforms strengthened safeguards for opposition parties as well as for voters. Both also increased the uncertainty of political competition.

In line with office-seeking approaches, most deputies did not want to liberate voters from their control. Winning elections was difficult enough. Increasing the number of voters over which they had no information only promised to augment political uncertainty. Indeed, short-term electoral considerations combined with sociological factors to make representatives unwilling to safeguard voters' privacy rights. Even if class was not a central issue in politics, middle-class deputies did not want to make their future even more dependent upon the voting behavior of a largely rural (and onethird illiterate) electorate.

Institutionalist perspectives begin to resolve the puzzle of reform. In the first place, they suggest that the president was likely to back electoral reform to repair the damage done to his reputation. Though no one accused Ricardo Jiménez for ordering Provincial Electoral Councils to tally votes in controversial ways, many blamed him for the fraud that allowed the PR and PfR to send him to the presidency.