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4 - THE POLITICS OF VOTE BUYING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2009

Beatriz Magaloni
Beatriz Magaloni
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
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Summary

There is wide consensus among experts on Mexico about the key role played by patronage politics in maintaining the PRI regime (Ames, 1970; Cornelius, 1975, 2004; Collier, 1992; Cornelius et al., 1994; Dresser, 1994; Fox, 1994, among others). As Cornelius (2004) explains,

[F]rom the party's creation in 1929 until the early 1990s, authoritarian mobilization of voters was a key ingredient of the PRI's electoral success. A steadily shrinking but still crucial bloc of voters, concentrated in the country's most economically underdeveloped electoral districts, routinely voted for the ruling party's candidates in response to pressures from local caciques and PRI-affiliated peasant and labor leaders. Particularistic material rewards – everything from minor kitchen appliances to land titles to public-sector jobs – were routinely and systematically used to purchase electoral support. (48)

Despite the fact that most scholars agree that patronage played a key role in the system, there are significant disagreements about the actual mechanics of vote buying, on the one hand, and its political effectiveness for the PRI's survival, on the other. This chapter deals with these issues. The empirical evidence will come from a systematic analysis of municipal-level allocations from the PRONASOL, a poverty relief program implemented by the Mexican government from 1989 to 1994. The database employed is the first to include municipal-level allocations from PRONASOL distributed to the country's more than 2,400 municipalities during the entire life of the program.

Type
Chapter
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Voting for Autocracy
Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico
 , pp. 122 - 150
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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