Mexican Political Elites Research Articles

¿A quién le importa la corrupción? : importancia y determinantes de la corrupción desde la perspectiva de la élite política mexicana (2009-2018)

Which factors explain Mexican political elites’ preferences towards the importance of corruption and its presence in Mexican institutions? This essay offers an empirical analysis of different factors that have contributed to explain Mexican political elite attitudes towards corruption. In order to do so, we address a quantitative analysis of the importance of corruption from the perspective of the elites, as well as of the existence of corruption in different institutions that are key for democratic consolidation. Using the Latin American Parliamentary Elites Project, we assess diverse dimensions as explanatory variables, offering evidence of its correlation with Mexican elites’ preferences during the last decade

Las élites neoliberales en México: ¿cómo se construye un campo de poder que transforma las prácticas sociales de las élites políticas?

The recomposition of Mexican political elites during the 1980s overlaps with the transformation of a development model that shifted from a basically protectionist and nationalistic model to a neo-liberal and open-oriented one. Such a switch has implied far-reaching changes in the social practices of political elites. Based on a record that contains each high-rank official during the 1988–2014 period, the mechanisms having established a transnational power network crossing from one presidential term to the next are reviewed, as well as those factors that favored the organization of a power field increasingly focused on the border between the national, regional and global spaces. Some of those mechanisms include the international historical context; the creation of working teams with a basically neo-liberal worldview; the trajectories of the high-rank officers; the reforms that have been driven; the fluent transit among public and private positions, and the highly varied relationships established between this group of officials and transnational actors and organizations. It is concluded that the elites’ new social practices do not only hamper and challenge the creation of public goods and autonomous structures with the capacity of planning according to the general interest, but they also encourage institutional depredation.

The 2006 Mexican Elections: Manifestation of a Divided Society?

When the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost the presidency in 2000, the central cleavage that defined Mexican politics in the last 15 years of the twentieth century—pro-regime vs. anti-regime—could no longer guide voters on Election Day. With no PRI to vote out of office (or to defend), Mexicans were impelled to turn their political attention to non-regime issues, such as economic policy, social policy, relations with the United States, and crime control. As Kathleen Bruhn and Kenneth Greene make clear in their contribution to this symposium, Mexican political elites are seriously divided on these issues, while the views of their bases are not far apart.

El proyecto Alemán-Lombardo: la modernización equívoca de la posguerra

Desde el momento mismo de nuestra genesis como nacion, hemos enfrentado un dilema permanente: ?como acceder a la modernidad? Podriamos decir que este es un dilema ontologico, puesto que la construccion historica que es Mexico, sobra decirlo proviene de un choque de civilizaciones. El arraigo y el desarrollo de las culturas mesoamericanas y el caracter de cruzada religiosa que invistio a la Conquista son las causas generales que dieron origen a nuestro ser historico. Es decir, nacimos como la pretendida union de dos cosmovisiones diferentes. Esto que, ademas de muy sabido y estudiado, pareciera no tener que ver con el tema que tratare a continuacion, lo expongo como punto de partida para tener prsente que ese dilema original ha trascendido y sigue trascendiendo nuestra historia.

Schisms in the Mexican Political Elite and the Technocrat/Politician Typology

Los estudiosos han dividido a la élite gobernante mexicana en dos grandes categorías: tecnócratas y políticos. Sin embargo, esta tipología, basada en la preparación profesional y en la trayectoria personal, oculta más de lo que revela sobre las verdaderas escisiones que se dan en la élite. Durante los últimos cincuenta años las divisiones más importantes han sido causadas por diferencias ideológicas, políticas y personales, y no han reflejado la supuesta distinción entre tecnócratas y políticos.

Schisms in the Mexican Political Elite and the Technocrat/Politician Typology

Schisms in the Mexican Political Elite and the Technocrat/Politician Typology

The Marriage of Finance and Order: Changes in the Mexican Political Elite

Recent literature on Latin American political economy appears to echo work of the 1960s and 1970s emphasising technical expertise in government. Sikkink and Geddes, for example, suggest that the role of technical experts and professionalisation of the bureaucracy explain Brazil's relative economic successes in the 1960s.1Conaghan, Malloy and Abugattas focus on the role of technocrats in economic policy—making in the Central Andes.2Following seminal work by Camp and Smith, Hernández Rodríguez presents the latest data on the role of technocrats in the Mexican political elite.3To a large extent, this recent literature on technocrats in Latin America fails to address one of the main issues debated in the earlier literature: the political consequences of increasingly technocratic government. A second problem with recent work is that, when it does address causal issues, it tends to follow the functionalist logic of earlier literature. Using data on Mexican political elites, this article develops a new typology which carefully differentiates the new technobureaucratic elite from other elite groups. The aim is to shed new light on the debate over the implications of increasing technocratisation. Secondly, this study of the rise of a new elite emphasises the role of institutional changes within the government bureaucracy in addition to the state's functional response to changes in its politico—economic environment. This article begins with a brief discussion of earlier general — and Mexico—specific — literature on technocrats.Some analysts of technocracy in the 1960s and 1970s saw technocrats as apolitical specialists whose growing role in society heralded ‘an end to ideology’ and increased efficiency in government.4

The Mexican Ruling Party: Stability and Authority.

List of Illustrations Preface Introduction Birth of the Ruling Party The Revolutionary Party in Power Electoral System, Opposition Parties, and PRI Dominance Internal Organization of the PRI and Interest Group Incorporation Societal Actors Outside the PRI The PRI and Mexican Political Elites Challenges Facing the PRI and Mexico Notes Bibliography Index

Le Mexique dans les relations cardinales. L'exemple des manuels scolaires officiels

Mexico's domestic politics is subject with exceptional intensity to the influence of the international scene, which is fully part of the political consensus. Determined by geography but also by the Mexican political elites since the I9th century, this basic fact is reflected in most national débutes and particularly those bearing on the content of official textbooks. In 1959 and in 1972, the reforms on their content coincided perfectly with the changes in the international context. In both cases, this context weighed heavily on the choice of criteria for textbook development.

Mexican Politics and the Journals

For the past two decades, the standard perception of the Mexican political system was more or less as follows. Following the Revolution and, even more so, the Cardenas presidency the Mexican political elite won the support of most of the country's peasantry and proletariat. Rather than continuing with its revolutionary policies, however, the post-1940 elite (particularly during the presidency of Aleman) used its 'popular' organizations to control rather than represent the masses while initiating a process of capitalist industrializa? tion. Subsequently, the PRI and its ancillary organizations were used to maintain social peace by the notorious process of 'co-optation and control' while income inequality grew alongside the power of the bourgeoisie. All of this was due to the logic of capitalist development to which the course of Mexican politics was increasingly subordinated. However, while earlier writers (Scott, Brandenburg) saw these developments as relatively benign and the more arbitrary and authoritarian elements of the system as on the whole transitional, later writers (Hansen, Johnson, Hellman and, in his later work, Cockroft) concentrated more on the system's repressiveness and remoteness from most of civil society. The watershed of this perceptual change was the Tlatelolco massacre of October 1968. Despite this shift, however, all of these writers implicitly or explicitly accepted the premises of desarrollo estabilisador. Work which was sufficiently recent to take account of Echeverria's presidency tended to dismiss it as an aberration, or as a heroic but doomed attempt to raise the ghost of Cardenas in a radically changed society. Indeed this perspective was shared by most non-academic observers of Mexico until about mid-1982. Faced with developments in and after 1982, it now seems clear that this textbook account of Mexican politics is either incomplete or outdated, and that a change of paradigm is necessary if one is to keep up effectively with the rapidly changing situation in that country. To put it briefly, it is no longer possible to regard Mexican capitalism as a success or to see the Mexican state as uncomplicatedly pro-middle class or pro-bourgeois (still less to see these sectors as uncomplicatedly pro-system). An early example of what will assuredly become a flood of revisionist writing is provided by Olsen (1985). Although the author (or was it the editors?) is excessively fond of post-dependencia jargon, the article does make some important points. It seeks to fit the Mexican economic crisis into the familiar pattern of late ISI crises (cf. pre-1964 Brazil) with the original policy leading to 'demand bottlenecks' and a halt to further expansion. In the Mexican context Olsen sees this crisis developing from the mid-1960s with

Business-Government Relations in Mexico: The Case of the Sugar Industry

Unlike many developing countries, Mexico has managed to avoid both military rule and chronic political instability. A partial, although significant, explanation for Mexico's unique record is the relationship between politics and the market. Whereas it is undoubtedly true that there has been, and continues to be, an for profits' between the government and the private sector in Mexico, the alliance is conditional rather than absolute. When its political costs become so high as to constitute a threat to the existing political order, the political elites alter the terms of the alliance by increasing their regulation of the economic activities of the private sector. To state it somewhat differently, political stability in Mexico has been maintained because of a willingness and ability on the part of political leaders to give priority to political over economic considerations in times of perceived crisis. In order to maintain the priority of the political, however, Mexican political elites have had to ensure that the state avoid becoming the captive of any class or set of organized interests in the society. The relative autonomy of the state from its social bases has therefore been a necessary condition for continued political stability in Mexico. If Mexican political elites had to respond to all the demands made upon them, or even only to those emanating from powerful economic interests, the state would lack the flexibility required to restabilize the political system in times of crisis. For this reason, even during periods of relative calm, Mexican political elites are busy creating mechanisms that can be used to regulate the behavior of their various constituencies when such regulation is deemed necessary to maintain or restore political order. Existing studies of the Mexican political system have tended to emphasize the mechanisms for state regulation and control of lower-class groups, a fact

Mexican Political Elites 1935-1973: A Comparative Study

Scholars are increasingly using biographical data to study political elites in an attempt to penetrate the mysteries of the decision-making process. Determining why and how decisions are made is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks to attempt for not only do decision-makers intentionally obfuscate the process but often do not understand it themselves. Unable to penetrate the minds of the participants or to observe directly decisions being made, scholars often turn to studying the decision-makers (elites) themselves by identifying who they are. Biographical data are used because they form at least part of the definition of an individual; they are relatively easy to obtain; they can be coded and put in machine-readable form; and they lend themselves to statistical analysis. On this basis, the scholar can at least describe an elite group, infer why decisions were made, and suggest who future elites might be (assuming that the recruitment system is based on these variables and does not significantly alter in the future).