Quality of Democracy and Game Theory

Abstract

This article presents several mechanisms that explain the fragility of some dimensions of Mexican democracy. Three empirical problems that constitute challenges to the Mexican democratisation process are explored using game theory: a) the 2006 post-electoral context; b) the fight against drug cartels; and c) the collaboration between citizens and cartels. Each case is linked to a dimension of the quality of democracy: political participation for the first case, and rule of law for the second and third cases. The main argument is that these institutional challenges contribute to the consolidation of a hybrid regime. The article deploys three distinct applications of game theory: to show how the incompatibility between observable behavior and the logic of a game helps to infer types of rationality; to describe how the situational logic determines the interaction between actors; and to display how the interaction of different preferences causes distinct outcomes.