Civil Society and Electoral Accountability in Mexico

Abstract

Elections have long been a feature of the Mexican political landscape, but meaningful competition has not. From 1929 to 2000 a single party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), controlled the presidency. Until the late 1980s, that same party controlled all the Senate seats, the majority of seats in the Chamber of Deputies, all governorships and all but a small fraction of municipal offices. Mexico’s democratization process has been characterized by its gradualism, including the evolution of freer and fairer electoral competition. Dramatic improvements in the conduct of elections throughout the 1990s transformed single-party rule to robust multiparty competition. The PRI lost its outright majority in the Chamber of Deputies in 1997 and in the Senate in 2000; the Partido de la Revolucion Democratica (PRD) won the influential Head of Government in Mexico City in 1997, 2000 and 2006; and the Partido Accion Nacional (PAN) won the presidency in two consecutive elections, 2000 and 2006.