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.

Offers a groundbreaking analysis of the distinctive substantive, theoretical and methodological contributions of subnational research in the field of comparative politics.

The democratization of a national government is only a first step in diffusing democracy throughout a country's territory. Even after a national government is democratized, subnational authoritarian 'enclaves' often continue to deny rights to citizens of local jurisdictions. Gibson offers new theoretical perspectives for the study of democratization in his exploration of this phenomenon. His theory of 'boundary control' captures the conflict pattern between incumbents and oppositions when a national democratic government exists alongside authoritarian provinces (or 'states'). He also reveals how federalism and the territorial organization of countries shape how subnational authoritarian regimes are built and how they unravel. Through a novel comparison of the late nineteenth-century American 'Solid South' with contemporary experiences in Argentina and Mexico, Gibson reveals that the mechanisms of boundary control are reproduced across countries and historical periods. As long as subnational authoritarian governments coexist with national democratic governments, boundary control will be at play.

One of the most surprising developments in Mexico's transition to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence. Why did Mexican drug cartels go to war as the country transitioned away from one-party rule? And why have criminal wars proliferated as democracy has consolidated and elections have become more competitive subnationally? In Votes, Drugs, and Violence, Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley develop a political theory of criminal violence in weak democracies that elucidates how democratic politics and the fragmentation of power fundamentally shape cartels' incentives for war and peace. Drawing on in-depth case studies and statistical analysis spanning more than two decades and multiple levels of government, Trejo and Ley show that electoral competition and partisan conflict were key drivers of the outbreak of Mexico's crime wars, the intensification of violence, and the expansion of war and violence to the spheres of local politics and civil society.

This book generates a wealth of new empirical information about Latin American party systems and contributes richly to major theoretical debates about party systems and democracy.

This volume examines violence across Latin America and the Caribbean to demonstrate the importance of subnational analysis over national aggregates.

A comprehensive view of the remarkable transformation of Mexico's political system to a democratic model. The contributors to this volume assess the most influential institutions, actors, policies and issues in the country's current evolution toward democratic consolidation.