The Metamorphosis of Leadership in a Democratic Mexico

Abstract

Among Mexicanists, Roderic Ai Camp is admired for his extensive knowledge of Mexican political life. This book, an important addition to his legacy, brings together decades of data gathering, research, and analysis in an effort to explain political recruitment and patterns of leadership in Mexico.Camp’s goal is to address two broad questions: How has Mexican political leadership evolved from the 1930s to 2010, as the country gradually transitioned to a plural, electorally competitive political system? What features of Mexican leadership were most altered by democratization? His answers to these questions are based on two impressive data sets compiled over four decades: one consists of detailed biographical information on national leaders (e.g., presidents, cabinet ministers, legislators, judges, governors). Complementing this is a body of extensive analysis of countless published interviews, personal letters, and interviews with the author from this same group of leaders. Together, the data sets provide information on almost four thousand individuals and cover more than a hundred years. The compilation of these data in itself is a remarkable contribution to the field, making Camp’s evaluation and findings a tremendous resource for other Mexicanists.The book is organized around a series of specific questions. In answering those questions Camp provides some important and sometimes surprising insights. For example, because loyalty was such an important predictor of career success in the PRI, it is often assumed that the party rewarded only its militants with electoral candidacies. Yet Camp’s analysis reveals that a surprisingly large number of nonmilitants reached elective office between 1930 and 1980. Later he presents another surprising finding: Mexico’s largely peaceful transition to democracy contributed to broader and deeper changes to leadership patterns than its revolution.These and other insights enrich our understanding of Mexican politics, but the most rewarding parts of the book are those that focus on a specific time period and detail how generational shifts occurred and the impact these shifts had on the future. For example, Camp argues that the presidential administration of Miguel Alemán (1946 – 52) rather than that of Lázaro Cárdenas was the most influential in shaping the political coalition and institutions that came to define the classic PRI system. Here the author brings together a rich array of information from both databases to demonstrate how Alemán’s generation of college-educated pragmatists with a strong commitment to unity, peaceful change, and state-led economic development represented a break from the past and institutionalized the practice of internal debate and negotiation rather than promoting external electoral competition.In some cases, Camp’s findings confirm commonly held beliefs, such as the notion that democratization has created more opportunities for female and middle-class candidates to enter the formal political sphere. But in others, the large amount of data and differences among parties and time periods make it difficult to use his findings as the basis for broad generalizations. As a result, there are a number of instances where the author’s conclusions are more confusing than enlightening. For example, he states: “Democratic transformation has played a role in the distribution of basic demographic characteristics that enhance or detract from such choices, while simultaneously altering as well as reinforcing the existing composition of leading politicians” (p. 102). The recurrence of this kind of statement raises the question of whether the book might have been more effectively organized around a broader theoretical question or different themes (e.g., specific time periods or parties).Another shortcoming of the book is the missed opportunity to examine the implications of the findings for existing arguments in the literature. For example, Camp uses the data to show that a small number of families and geographic locations historically have produced a disproportionate number of politicians and that this pattern has persisted into the democratic era and is consistent across all three major parties. Camp is right to highlight the importance of this finding but unfortunately does not explore its implications for an idea first articulated by Almond and Verba and since echoed by others, that Mexican political culture values ascription over achievement and that this hinders the consolidation of democracy.In the book’s conclusion Camp delves more deeply into the connections between institutional structures, leadership patterns, and party cohesion. It is here also that some of his arguments coalesce most effectively and insightfully, for example in his assertion that education and social/kinship networks are more important than the party when it comes to training and grooming politicians. On balance, these insights outweigh the book’s shortcomings, and Mexicanists will feel rewarded for taking the time to read a book that only Roderic Camp could have written.