By focusing on political institutions to understand the new power-sharing agreement between the national party headquarters and the party's governors, this work explores why Mexico's hegemonic PRI was able to survive out of power after it was ousted from the executive in 2000.

In this groundbreaking study of Mexican public opinion and elections, Jorge Dominguez and James McCann examine the attitudes and behaviors of Mexican voters from the 1950s to the 1990s and find evidence of both support for and increasing independence from the nation's ruling party. They make extensive use of polls conducted during the 1988, 1991, and 1994 national elections and draw from in-depth interviews with leading political figures, including major presidential candidates. Although the 1994 presidential election showed that Mexican citizens are making their opinions known and felt at the polls, Dominguez and McCann argue that Mexico cannot be considered a democracy as long as party elites fail to ensure truly free and fair elections. Democratizing Mexico makes it clear, however, that Mexican citizens are ready for democratic politics.

Summary: This text offers an analysis of Mexico's struggle for democratic development. Linking Mexico's state to Mexico-US and other international considerations, the authors, collaborating with Emilio Zebadua, offer perspectives from all sides of the border.

Tracing the key themes and dynamics of a century of political development in Mexico, David Shirk explores the evolution of the party that ultimately became the vehicle for Fox's success.

Why have dominant parties persisted in power for decades in countries spread across the globe? Why did most eventually lose? Why Dominant Parties Lose develops a theory of single-party dominance, its durability, and its breakdown into fully competitive democracy. Greene shows that dominant parties turn public resources into patronage goods to bias electoral competition in their favor and virtually win elections before election day without resorting to electoral fraud or bone-crushing repression. Opposition parties fail because their resource disadvantages force them to form as niche parties with appeals that are out of step with the average voter. When the political economy of dominance erodes, the partisan playing field becomes fairer and opposition parties can expand into catchall competitors that threaten the dominant party at the polls. Greene uses this argument to show why Mexico transformed from a dominant party authoritarian regime under PRI rule to a fully competitive democracy.

Recent elections in Mexico have seen dramatic changes in public opinion toward political parties. Focusing on the elections of 1994 and 1997, the book evaluates campaign strategies, voting habits, party loyalty and the decline of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). It begins by situating the transformation of Mexico's parties in historical context, then goes on to consider the role of gender and the resurgence of the Mexican left. The contributors, drawn from the U.S. and Mexico, focus on both the strategies of political parties to woo voters, and how voters actually respond. They also develop several methodological innovations for studying public opinion that can be applied beyond the case of Mexico.

This volume highlights the growing disjuncture between Mexico's recently accelerated transition to democracy at the national level and what is occurring at the state and local levels in many parts of the country. Subnational political regimes controlled by hard-line antidemocratic elements linked to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) remain important in late-twentieth-century Mexico, even in an era of much-intensified interparty competition. The survival and even strengthening of state and local authoritarian enclaves in states like Puebla, Tabasco, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chiapas, and the Yucatan raises serious questions: To what extent will failure to democratize in states and localities where little or no political change has occurred constrain or disrupt the national-level democratization process? How can Mexican leaders engineer a deconcentration of political power and a fiscal decentralization that do not simply strengthen authoritarian elites in the periphery?Drawing on recent field research in ten Mexican states, the contributors show how the increasingly uneven character of democratization in Mexico can be a significant obstacle to the completion of the process in an expeditious and lowconflict manner.