Change within continuity: The political economy of democratic transition in Mexico

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Change within continuity: The politicaleconomy of democratic transition inMexicoAdam David Morton aa Department of Politics and International Relations , LancasterUniversity, County College , Lancaster, LA1 4YL, UKPublished online: 04 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Adam David Morton (2005) Change within continuity: The politicaleconomy of democratic transition in Mexico , New Political Economy, 10:2, 181-202, DOI:10.1080/13563460500144736

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Change within Continuity: The PoliticalEconomy of Democratic Transitionin Mexico

ADAM DAVID MORTON

On 5 September 2001 President Vicente Fox Quesada of Mexico received theAnnual Democracy Award from the National Endowment for Democracy(NED) at a Capitol Hill ceremony in Washington DC. The award was heraldedas marking the end of an era in Mexican politics owing to the successful ‘tran-sition’ to democracy following the elections on 2 July 2000. As Fox himselfremarked at the ceremony, ‘it is now required that we not only deepen thevalues that are part and parcel of democracy, but also promote a form of economicdevelopment that serves all and benefits all . . . within the framework of respon-sible economic management’.1

It would be churlish to deny the impact and significance of the end of one-partydominance by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) on the landscape ofpolitics in Mexico, given that the ruling party was in continual power in one formor another for over seventy years. Certainly, the victory by Vicente Fox, backed bythe Partido Accion Nacional (PAN), can be seen as both dramatic and historic,winning as the candidate for the Alianza por el Cambio 42.5 per cent of thevotes cast compared to Francisco Labastida, receiving 36 per cent (representingthe PRI), and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, receiving 16.6 per cent (representing theAlianza por Mexico consisting of the Partido Revolucionario Democratico(PRD) and smaller parties such as Convergencia Democratica, Partido delTrabajo, Alianza Social and Sociedad Nacionalista). At the time, the PRI alsolost its position as the biggest party in the lower house of congress, with 211seats compared to the 223 seats held by Alianza por el Cambio and the 66 seatsheld by the PRD and its allies.2 However, it would also be precocious toassume that the passage of procedural elections in 2000 had ensured either demo-cratic ‘transition’ and/or ‘consolidation’ in Mexico.3 Not the least significant pointhere is how the very process of democratisation came about in Mexico and howthis can be understood given the interest of the NED and additional US foreignpolicy agencies in supporting the proliferation of human rights and democracy net-works in the country. Perhaps the vocal action of the NED reflects and continuesthe earlier hubris of studies on democratisation characterised by heady theories on

New Political Economy, Vol. 10, No. 2, June 2005

Adam David Morton, Department of Politics and International Relations, Lancaster University,

County College, Lancaster LA1 4YL, UK.

ISSN 1356-3467 print; ISSN 1469-9923 online=05=020181-22 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd

DOI: 10.1080=13563460500144736

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‘transition’ to democracy in the 1980s and democratic ‘consolidation’ in the1990s. Yet it has been acknowledged that US administrations across this period,most significantly starting with Ronald Reagan, did not initially extend theirdemocracy promotion efforts to Mexico.4 Indeed, it is significant that the USdid not directly aid opposition parties in Mexico during the reign of the PRI,thereby generating the claim that ‘it appears the United States goes afterunlevel playing fields [only] when the ruling party is one the United States . . .does not like’.5 The purpose of this article is to explore further this swirlingmix of factors and provide an analysis of the detailed, and in some ways specific,process of democratic ‘transition’ in Mexico. Three main sections bring the argu-ment into focus.

The first section situates democratisation studies within more general theoriesof social and political change by developing a critique of such literature revolvingaround issues of democratic ‘transition’ and ‘consolidation’. The second sectionthen turns to consider a more critical alternative to understanding the politicaleconomy of democracy, viewing democratisation as a wider process implicatedin both Cold War structures of power and contemporary conditions of neoliberalglobalisation. This alternative approach is more cognisant of the normative socialcontent of democracy promotion, focusing on the underlying interests at stake inthe constitution of liberal democracies, whilst going beyond the elite-driven viewthat democracy is something practised within the internal remit of sovereignstates. The third section then relates this more critical understanding of democracypromotion to the case of Mexico. The analysis embraces a broader set of issues andactors involved in the process of democratisation by situating the role of globalgovernance institutions alongside local counterparts involved in democracy pro-motion in Mexico. This section draws on semi-structured interviews conductedat such institutions, including the US Agency for International Development(USAID), the NED itself, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and theWorld Bank, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Eco-nomic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), as well as keyprotagonists – such as the Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE), non-governmentalorganisations (NGOs) such as Alianza Cıvica, labour groups and trade unions –involved in the struggle for democracy in Mexico.6

Several contributions are made towards understanding the advance and currentprogress of democracy in Mexico. Principally, it is argued that democratisation isless the product of direct US intervention and more a development springing fromthe internalisation of specific moral and cultural values, codes of conduct andideological transformations in Mexico, all intrinsically linked to the coexistentshift towards neoliberalism. Perhaps one of the most significant issues worth ques-tioning is this very process of internalisation which has changed the connotation ofthe political economy of Mexico. In this sense democratisation can be seen as partof a wider process of deepening hegemonic control.7 The internalisation ofspecific interests in Mexico, linked to both changes in production relations andcultural and ideological forms of democratic practice associated with the rise ofneoliberalism, is presented as a potent expression of a power relationship. Byway of conclusion, some conjectures are advanced about the challenges facingdemocracy in Mexico.

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Democratisation studies: renovating modernisation theory?

By the 1980s concerns about ‘democratisation’ began to replace those of ‘devel-opment’ within the mainstream literatures of political science as well as in thefashioning of US political development assistance. In practice, the Reagan admin-istration launched ‘Project Democracy’ in 1982, in effect grafting a democracyfocus on to political development assistance programmes. The project was initiallybased on a US$65 million proposal to be managed through the State Department,USAID and the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organi-sations (AFL-CIO), although it floundered due to a lack of Congressionalsupport. More modestly, perhaps, USAID subsequently provided, by the late1980s, approximately US$20 million per year for human rights and democracypromotion activities, funds coming in total to roughly US$100 million duringthe years of the Reagan administration, with most granted to recipients withinCentral America.8 In 1983 the NED was created, an ostensibly private non-profit organisation with an independent board of directors, management andstaff based on a bipartisan structure. The latter consists of four separate organi-sations that claim policy autonomy: the Centre for International Private Enterprise,the Free Trade Union Institute, the National Democratic Institute for InternationalAffairs and the National Republican Institute for International Affairs. The initialgrant was US$18 million with the annual budget ranging between US$15–21million across 1984–88 and funds to Latin America amounting to approximatelyUS$25 million over these years, or about one quarter of the size of the US state’sdemocracy assistance programmes in Latin America as a whole.9 The annualbudget of the NED is currently in excess of US$30 million.10 Whilst the 1980swere marked by direct US interventions identified as bringing about ‘democracyby force’ (Nicaragua, Grenada), the shift towards different instruments of politicaldevelopment assistance has been regarded as one of promoting ‘democracy byapplause’.11 What this means is that the political component gained ascendancyover the military component, so that US foreign policy in Latin America seemi-ngly began to break with the anti-communism of the Cold War. According toJean Grugel, ‘by the 1990s pro-democracy strategies were about creating hege-monic control in the developing and post-communist world through consensualagreement or co-optation with key domestic elites’.12

The architecture of modernisation and development theory also underwentmodifications and shifts of emphasis within the academy. Most prominently,the ‘transition’ to democracy paradigm emerged by advocating the construc-tion of vibrant civil societies as supposedly autonomous realms of individualfreedom and association through which democratic politics could proceed. Keyfoundational texts in this literature included the collections, Transitions fromAuthoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (1986) and Democracy inDeveloping Countries (1989), that have been linked to associations within theUS government–university nexus.13 Moreover, a series of continuities can beestablished between this literature and earlier political development theory.

A central continuity is the preoccupation with safeguarding elite power andmaintaining relatively quiescent political subjects within stable states. This iscommonly manifest in a counterposing of ‘state’ and ‘society’ within conditions

Democratic Transition in Mexico

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of political order.14 Emergent here was a doctrine for political development thatwas ‘always policy oriented; . . . [that] always valued political stability morehighly than democracy; and . . . always saw mass participation in . . . new statesas a problem’.15 Essentially, this focus on stability can be regarded as a concernabout ensuring and consolidating formal democracy – holding clean elections,introducing liberal individual rights, creating participatory citizenship – whichis distinguished from popular democracy, based on the introduction and extensionof socioeconomic rights. The overriding stress has become one of constituting anempirical (putatively) non-normative definition of democracy limited to thedescriptive, institutional procedures of electoral rights and democratic govern-ment, understood in a limited sense of the processes of state machinery andparty politics. Robert Dahl is indicative here, outlining polyarchy as an insti-tutional arrangement for the resolution of conflicts among dominant groups,so that democracy is at best seen in a truncated way, facilitating the setting upof the rule of law and judicial reform to strengthen contract rights based on indi-vidual autonomy.16

In this definition there is a sharp separation of politics from economics withinthe gradual extension of formal associational life through democratisationmeasures under elite control. The first significant problem of democratisa-tion studies is, therefore, this division of state (politics) and market (economics).Indicative here is Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan’s identification of five mainarenas in democratic transition and consolidation: civil society is seen as ‘freeand lively’; political society is regarded as relatively autonomous; independenceis granted to the rule of law; the impartiality of a bureaucratic state apparatus isassumed; and the protection of property rights is paramount within economicsociety.17 Larry Diamond, Juan Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset have also expli-citly crafted this sentiment within the democratisation studies literature:

We use the term democracy . . . to signify a political system, separ-ate and apart from the economic and social system . . . Indeed, adistinctive aspect of our approach is to insist that issues of so-called economic and social democracy be separated from thequestion of governmental structure.18

By accepting such clear divisions, the resulting shortcoming is that state (politics)and market (economics) are taken as ahistoric starting points of analysis within anempirically pluralist approach.19 The state is perceived to be in an exteriorrelationship with the market, controlling it separately from the outside. Yet thecounter-argument is that state and market only appear as separate entities owingto the way production is organised around private property relations in capita-lism.20 This implies that the extraction of surplus value is indirectly conductedthrough a contractual relation between those who maintain the power of appropria-tion over those who only have their labour to sell, as expropriated producers, ratherthan by direct political enforcements.21 By neglecting the central importance ofthe sphere of production, democratisation studies thus overlook the historical spe-cificities of capitalism and the vital internal links between state and market, withthe former securing private property within civil society to ensure the functioning

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of the latter. The risk, then, is that an historically specific understanding of liberaldemocracy is formalised and institutionalised in a universal manner, leading todepoliticisation as the economic sphere is removed from political control.Hence there is a failure to question the class structuring of civil society and/orto relate liberal democracy to the historically contingent conditions of capitalistdevelopment. By extension, there is an undertheorising of the state that discountsa more social conception, viewing the state as a material condensation of socialrelations of production formed by historically derived class struggles, and thussituated within broader state–civil society associations.22

Secondly, within the liberal idiom of democratisation studies, analysis is com-monly domestically bound, thus failing to think outside the boundaries of the state.At best, there is a clear demarcation and separation of the ‘internal’ (domestic) and‘external’ (international) levels of analysis. The archetypal example of this can befound in the ‘transitions’ literature where it is clearly stated that ‘domestic factorsplay a predominant role’, thereby inevitably leading to the neglect of social powerrelations beyond territorial states.23 Even in the consideration of the ‘internationaldimensions of democratisation’ there is a clear division of levels of analysisleading to a reification of ‘external actors’ that are regarded as distinct from thesystem of government within ‘a separate, domestically driven process’ of estab-lishing national boundaries.24 The system of territorial states is thereforeabstracted from the bounds of capitalism, which are global in scope. By ascribingseparate logics to the state and the international sphere the opportunity to under-stand how the state has been restructured and penetrated by conditions of com-bined and uneven capitalist development is foreclosed. Most recently, thiswould include how the system of territorial states is being modified by processesimmanent to conditions of globalisation as indicative of the current phase of capit-alism. In reality, much-heralded ‘transitions’ to democracy are a central feature ofsuch adjustments in the political structures of states to the economic changesbrought by capitalist globalisation.25

Thirdly, there is a teleology that underpins the ‘transitions’ under scrutinywithin the democratisation studies literature. Thus ‘no small amount of democraticteleology is implicit in the transition paradigm, no matter how much its adherentsdenied it’.26 This is conceived around a ‘democracy template’ involving top-downchange through elections and state institutions that are again separated frombottom-up change through the strengthening and diversification of an independentcivil society, leading to assumptions about a ‘transition’ from authoritarianism tothe ‘consolidation’ of democracy. Therefore ‘democracy is consolidated whenunder given political and economic conditions a particular system of institutionsbecomes the only game in town’.27 As Ronaldo Munck has put it, ‘history inthese models takes second place to an intricate game played by disembodiedactors’.28

All this leads, fourthly, to the assessment that such institutional modelling isdisconnected from the social power relations in which institutions are rooted:the very structures of power, authority, interests, hierarchies and loyalties thatmake up socioeconomic and political life. In this vein George Philip indicatesthat the importance of the political transition to democracy in Mexico lies in thefact that it did not unhinge the pattern of economic reform whereby neoliberalism


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and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) became ‘the only rulesin town’.29 Overall, it is as a result of the division of state (politics) from market(economics), the separation of domestic and international spheres of analysis, theteleology embedded within assumptions about democratic transition, and an aver-sion to revealing questions of social power and interests in the struggle overdemocracy that one can establish connections between democratisation studiesand earlier modernisation and development theory. Albeit with a significantshift of emphasis, from the state as the centre of social control to supporting theconstruction of conformist civil societies as supposedly autonomous spaces ofindividual association, there are unquestionably lasting legacies.30

It should thus be no surprise that commentators have noted that institutions suchas the NED still have a Cold War outlook marking their direction and substance.31

This is best exemplified by avatars of global capitalism, such as Larry Diamond,extolling the need to win the ‘New Cold War on Terrorism’ through the extensionof a global governance imperative linked to the promotion of liberal democracy.32

Hence we should note the importance of focusing on underlying social powerinterests that are contested within and through democratisation processes. Thenext section now turns to explore a more critical way of understanding the politicaleconomy of democracy. The approach here focuses on the state as constituted byspecific sets of social relations in the context of globalising conditions of trans-national production relations and the convergence of particular class (relevant)interests as intrinsic to the promotion of neoliberalism, which is the backdrop tothe analysis of democratisation processes in Mexico.

The political economy of democracy, globalisation and polyarchy

The tenor of democratisation studies has been depicted so far as one that has con-tinued the assumptions of political development and modernisation theory owingto an overriding preoccupation with maintaining political order in stable states.Furthermore, it has been noted that the identification of capitalism and democracywithin such work is held to be a matter of natural law, ‘rather than as a specificproduct of historical conditions, conflict over the pursuit of interests and classstruggle’.33 Democratisation can therefore be understood as the promotion ofpolyarchy (or low intensity democracy) in terms of the attempt to secure insti-tutional arrangements for the resolution of conflicts between dominant groups.Accordingly, polyarchy in William Robinson’s appraisal refers to ‘a system inwhich a small group actually rules and mass participation in decision-making isconsigned to leadership choice in elections carefully managed by competingelites’.34 Polyarchy represents the institutional definition of democracy presentwithin mainstream democratisation studies as well as the practices of US politicaldevelopment assistance and foreign policy. The spread of polyarchies is upheld asrepresentative of ‘ “really existing” democracies’ which, although falling short ofidealised conceptions of democratic theory, nevertheless provide ‘the baseline forthe contemporary debates about democratisation’.35

What this view indicates is, firstly, a preference for polyarchy understood aspolitical contestation among elite factions for procedurally free elections – anattenuated or hollow form of democracy – which displaces more emancipatory

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and popular demands. Secondly, once the move to separate the economic and pol-itical spheres has been made, there is a contradictory tendency then to reconnectthem by claiming a natural affinity between democracy (free elections) and capit-alism (free markets). Therefore, ‘promoting polyarchy is a political counterpart tothe project of promoting capitalist globalisation, and . . . “democracy promotion”and the promotion of free markets through neoliberal restructuring has become asingular process in US foreign policy’.36 Liberal democracy is thus seen as avulgarisation of representation and accountability through which authority actu-ally constrains freedom whilst imposing obligations and sanctions on thoseinvolved. Hence, to cite Antonio Gramsci,

Democracy, the attempt to moralise domestic and foreign politicalrelations by making of each human individual a citizen responsiblefor social life, initiator and free agent of historical activity, is anideology that cannot fully establish itself in capitalist society.The part of it that can be realised is liberalism, through which allmen [sic] can become authority from time to time as minoritiescirculate.37

What is emphasised here, then, is the organisation of the division of state andcivil society as well as domestic and foreign relations within capitalist society.The institutions of law and private property are precisely presuppositions of thestate in civil society through which the principles of individualism can be consti-tuted and consolidated. Hence there is an ‘isolation effect’ of state policies thatfacilitate the fragmentation and atomisation of social agents through the capitalistlabour process.38 As Karl Marx noted, ‘the separation of the political state fromcivil society takes the form of a separation of the deputies from their electors.Society simply deputes elements of itself to become its political existence.’39

It is not therefore surprising that central to the wider components deemed essen-tial to the constitution of polyarchy and thus a full transition to a market economyis the rule of law and property rights. These factors have been ‘suddenly con-sidered indispensable for democracy, economic success, and social stability’.40

Hence the rule of law is upheld as a bulwark for the effective administration ofjustice and emboldened legislatures within larger processes of democratisation.41

The conventional wisdom is that, whilst ‘aid officials assert that the rule of law isnecessary for a full transition to a market economy – foreign investors mustbelieve that they can get justice in courts, contracts must be taken seriously, prop-erty laws must be enforceable’.42 Participation in liberal democracy, after all, isdependent on the ownership of property.

The challenge, however, is to situate this understanding of polyarchy within anaccount of the particular, and in some ways specific process, of democratic tran-sition in Mexico. After all, democratisation has unfolded in Mexico as an incre-mental process with a heavily organised political opposition in support ofchange apparent across successive elections since as early as the 1970s. Thishistory not only breaks the paradigm of democratic transition theory, based onsudden democratic breakthrough, national elections and new democratic insti-tutions, but also questions arguments about the promotion of polyarchy – for


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instance, that the goal of US policy in any given case is ‘to organise an elite and toimpose it on the intervened country through controlled electoral processes’.43

At issue here is, firstly, the somewhat exceptional status of democratic ‘tran-sition’ in Mexico compared with processes of democratisation in other LatinAmerican states. The Mexican case does not demonstrate a change from militaryauthoritarianism to democratisation evident in so-called ‘third wave’ transitions inArgentina, Chile, Uruguay or Brazil from the 1960s and 1970s onwards.44 Nordoes it relate to the conditions in Central America of widespread civil war, dicta-torship or popular revolution respectively experienced in El Salvador, Guatemalaand Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. The Mexican experience of dominant andcontinuous single-party rule under the auspices of the PRI for over seventy yearsalso sets it apart from the rule of elite-pacted democracies in Colombia andVenezuela that unravelled in the 1970s and 1980s and from the experience ofCosta Rica that has sustained pluralist liberal democracy since the 1950s.Secondly, the promotion of polyarchy in some of these states has involved com-paratively large doses of US political development assistance funds. Forexample, in Chile between 1984 and 1991 the US allocated US$6.2 millionthrough the NED and a further US$1.2 million through USAID for an array of pro-grammes in support of moderate political parties, labour unions, and women’s,youth, business, academic and civic groups. Regional Latin American pro-grammes also involved a further US$5 million to such groups in Chile, withChristian Democrat leaders placed at the head of every ‘civil society’ organisationand project organised by the NED.45 In Nicaragua US$9 million was approved bythe US Congress prior to the pivotal 1990 elections, with US$5 million allocated tothe Nicaraguan Opposition Union (UNO) and other anti-Sandinista groups,US$2.9 million for discretionary NED spending and a further US$1 million forobserver groups. The US publicly acknowledged spending US$12.5 million onthe elections themselves through the NED, although when various amounts of‘circuitous spending’ are totalled, the figure actually nears US$30 million. Follow-ing the elections, a two-year US$540 million assistance package was approved bythe US, consisting of at least US$10 million in political development assistancechannelled through USAID and US$3 million in new NED funding.46 As weshall see, the circumstances of such democratisation assistance and the level offunding are both different from and comparatively larger than in the case ofMexico. Hence we must address the important task of questioning whether theclaims about the promotion of polyarchy are perhaps ‘too broad-brush’.47 Thistask is all the more important, given that some have warned against inflating thepresence of US democracy promotion institutions within Latin America by ascrib-ing too much importance to their role in epochal events. For some, ‘the NED isneither monster nor saviour but rather a modest-sized organisation making amodest but real contribution to democratic transitions’.48

For these reasons the argument now considers issues linked to democratisationprocesses, or the promotion of polyarchy, in Mexico. The aim here is to appreciateand recover a focus on the internalisation of practices and social relations at theheart of the promotion of polyarchy, rather than to stress the direct impositionof such electoral processes. This involves highlighting three challenges tothe polyarchy argument emanating from the case in question, as well as three

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contributions made to the very same argument stemming from the analysis ofglobal governance institutions and local counterparts involved in the strugglefor democracy.

The case of Mexico: from the ‘philanthropic ogre’ to ‘feckless pluralism’?

There has been a long period of historical social struggle in Mexico in the name ofdemocracy that could be dated back to the emergence of the modern state itselfduring and after the Revolution of 1910–20 but would also clearly include politi-cal caesuras such as the student movement and Tlatelolco massacre in 1968, theinsurgencia obrera (labour insurgency) and disaffection among the middleclasses with import-substitution industrialisation (ISI) in the 1970s, the emergenceof new opposition movements following the Ley Federal de OrganizacionesPolıticas y Procesos Electorales (LOPEE) in 1977, and the additional emergenceof urban and rural guerrilla movements in the same decade. By the 1980s the crisisof representation facing the PRI culminated in the fraudulent electoral majorityCarlos Salinas claimed as the presidential candidate in 1988 with 50.4 per centof the vote. There also emerged a proliferation of civic associations, humanrights and democracy networks in Mexico throughout the 1980s and 1990saimed at harnessing popular movements for change. Finally, by the 1990s, therewere indications of strong political party competition in the mid-term electionson 6 July 1997 when the PRI lost its majority in Congress, when key governorshipswent to the centre-right PAN (in the states of Nuevo Leon and Queretaro) andwhen the first election for the head of the Federal District went to the centre-left PRD candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. This all suggests that democratisationin Mexico followed a path far more complex than many explanations mightappreciate. Starting with this complexity, then, three specific challenges arethrown up by the procedure of democratisation in Mexico for arguments focusingon the promotion of polyarchy.

Challenging the case for the promotion of polyarchy in Mexico

Firstly, in more detail, it is clear that even under the above period of the so-called‘philanthropic ogre’ – a time detailed by Octavio Paz as that supposedly domi-nated by the leviathan of state power – there has been a long legacy of democraticsocial struggle in Mexico.49 It is therefore vital not to neglect this history of pol-itical struggle and the efforts and sacrifices that have been made over the years inMexico in the struggle for democracy. To do so would commit the mistake ofassuming that there was a straightforward transmission of imposed principlesand practices in Mexico linked to wider policies of US political developmentassistance and of thus dismissing the long duration of social struggle. Thesestruggles were particularly manifest in the sexenios (six-year terms) of LuisEcheverrıa (1970–76) and Lopez Portillo (1976–82) when the state attemptedto revive its deteriorating legitimacy by responding, at least initially, with a neo-populist programme of political and social reforms. This was well illustrated bythe attempt to embark, under Echeverrıa, on a macroeconomic strategy of ‘shareddevelopment’ within a supposed apertura democrata (democratic opening) to


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forge a populist coalition between national industrialists, peasants, disillusionedlabour sectors, students and the wider middle classes. This was also the periodwhen independent unions articulated the insurgencia obrera (labour insurgency)to question the lack of autonomy and democracy of official unions and to articulatedemands across a variety of sectors beyond purely ‘economic’ concerns.50 At thesame time, the LOPEE came to stand as an attempt to manage political liberalisa-tion within the current of the ‘democratic opening’ by enlarging the arena for partycompetition and integrating leftist political organisations whilst at the same timeinducing them to renounce extra-legal forms of action. The measures, for example,involved the Partito Comunista Mexicana (PCM) obtaining its official registrationas a political party which enabled it to participate legally for the first time (since1949) in the 1979 elections. Subsequently, in 1981, the PCM merged with fourother left-wing parties to establish the Partito Socialist Unificado de Mexico(PSUM).51 Thus the PCM, the oldest communist party in Latin America at thattime, effectively dissolved itself whilst attempting to compete electorally withinthe state parameters of the LOPEE reform.52

Yet the reform was more than just a simple cooptation measure. It has beendescribed as the quintessence of hegemonic practice designed to frame and con-dition the institutional context of opposition movements. The reform constitutedthe construction of a specific legal and institutional terrain that was capable of con-taining popular demands by defining the terms and fixing the boundaries of therules of the game of representation and social struggle.53 This was therefore alimited political opening that was essential at a time of severe social and politicaltension in order to balance stringent austerity measures and thus diffuse wide-spread social discontent.54 The historical context of social struggle for democracyin Mexico and the institutional ensnaring of this process are not therefore easilyread off as an imposition of policy priorities deriving from US political develop-ment assistance initiatives.

Secondly, the role of the NED in Mexico must be placed in context. To be sure,as Denise Dresser has noted, the NED has played a role in supporting variousNGOs in Mexico, from the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotionof Human Rights, the Citizens’ Movement for Democracy, the Mexican Academyfor Human Rights and Alianza Cıvica, the last coming to act as a national coordi-nator for the other organisations.55 Yet, taking the prominent and controversialcase of Alianza Cıvica as emblematic, these direct funds have been comparativelylow in relation to the Chilean and Nicaraguan cases discussed earlier, despiteadmitting the difficulty of tracing additional ‘pass-throughs’ for final recipientsand acknowledging the point that publicly released budgets may be deceptive.Between 1994 and 2000 Alianza Cıvica received US$755,420 from the NED,amounting to 20 per cent of all its funding, along with a linked additionalUS$377,632 from the National Democratic Institute amounting to just over 10per cent of its funding; by comparison, the largest and most significant donorwas the UNDP, providing US$1,786,790 amounting to 48 per cent of all itsfunding (see Table 1). These figures are low, given claims that total US StateDepartment spending under the auspices of democratic development assistance,including USAID and the NED programmes, increased from US$682 million in1991, to US$736 million in 1992, to US$900 million in 1993, or the fact that

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the NED’s budget increased by nearly 40 per cent under the Clinton adminis-tration, rising in 1993 from US$35 million to US$48 million.56

As Sergio Aguayo, a leading figure in the national co-ordination of AlianzaCıvica, has also noted, there was never a relation of exclusivity established withsingle donors (Interview No. 31). Moreover, even during the period of activity in1994 at which time Alianza Cıvica received a large injection of funds as thebackdrop to the presidential elections, the largest grant was still received from theUNDP. The breakdown of figures for 1994 indicates that the UNDP providedUS$1,277,087, or just over 71 per cent of total funding received by Alianza Cıvica,whilst the NED provided US$155,000, or 8.6 per cent of total funding (see Table 2).

TABLE 1. Total funding granted to Alianza Cıvica (1994–2000)57

Foundation Total US$ Percentage

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 1,786,790.00 48.04

National Endowment for Democracy (NED) 755,420.00 20.31

National Democratic Institute (NDI) 377,632.00 10.15

Trusteeship for Democracy 331,764.00 8.92

Inter Pares (Canada) 185,422.00 4.99

International Centre for the Development of

Human Rights and Democracy

140,872.00 3.79

Development and Peace (Canada) 43,665.00 1.17

The Ford Foundation (Mexico Office) 18,352.00 0.49

Different donations 17,647.00 0.47

Angelica Fund of the Tides Foundation

(United States)

17,500.00 0.47

Department of Education and International Affairs:

Fund of Social Justice (Canada)

14,510.00 0.39

Threshold (United States) 13,035.00 0.35

Project Counselling Service (Costa Rica) 6,994.46 0.19

Counsel in Projects and Services (Guatemala) 6,784.00 0.18

Banco Obrero 1,470.00 0.04

Banco Mexicano de Comercio Exterior 1,548.00 0.04

Total 3,719,405.46 100.00

TABLE 2. Total funding granted to Alianza Cıvica (1994)59

Foundation Total US$ Percentage

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 1,277,087.00 71.20

Trusteeship for Democracy 331,764.00 18.50

National Endowment for Democracy (NED) 155,000.00 8.60

Different donations 17,647.00 1.00

National Democratic Institute (NDI) 8,941.00 0.50

Banco Mexicano de Comercio Exterior 1,548.00 0.10

Banco Obrero 1,470.00 0.10

Total 1,793,457.00 100.00


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Yet, despite the large presence of the UNDP in this instance, representatives havenotably downplayed their own role, emphasising the organisation as an ‘insignifi-cantly minor actor’ (Interview No. 21). As Sergio Aguayo has stated, ‘the NEDnever imposed any political conditionality, nor required information that wasbeyond the justification of how resources were spent’. Additionally, he claims thatthe majority of funds received during 1994, amounting to 90 per cent of totalfunding, came from Mexican sources, if one accepts his rather convoluted pointthat the funding received from the UNDP directly relates to a grant given to theUnited Nations by the Mexican state.58 Across the board, then, the emphasis is onUS or global governance institutions having less prominence in Mexico thanmight normally be expected in other countries in Latin America (Interview No.22). This is also further borne out by a study of NED funding to grantees inMexico between 2000 and 2003, which shows Alianza Cıvica receiving a decliningamount over the period from US$246,530 or 35 per cent in 2000, to US$63,696 or 28per cent in 2001, to US$63,000 or 16 per cent in 2002, to US$52,000 or 10 per cent in2003 (see Table 3).60 In rather self-deprecating fashion, USAID representatives weresimilarly at pains to highlight the ‘exceptionalism’ of Mexico, meaning that theirprogrammes were very small and based more on partnership and mutual supportin deference to issues of ‘state sovereignty’ (Interviews No. 6 and No. 7). Represen-tatives from the NED itself have also downplayed their role in promoting democratictransition in Mexico. Carl Gershman, president of the NED, has indicated that pre-cedence must always be given to national processes of maturing democraticdemands (Interview No. 4). Similarly, the role of multilateral institutions impactingon the democratic transition in Mexico was also regarded as ‘close to zero’ withinthe World Bank as events were perceived to have been shaped more by nationalconditions (Interview No. 9). One even bolder claim went as far as to suggestthat the democratic transition in Mexico should be credited to the political partiesthemselves, rather than activist groups within civil society (Interview No. 2).There is clearly dissonance here, then, between the view that the nationalcontext was determinate and the view that the Mexican case underscores the USaim of promoting polyarchy through the imposition of specific institutions andprocedures.61

The third difficulty thrown up by the procedure of democratisation in Mexicofor those arguments focusing on the promotion of polyarchy is linked to the factthat pivotal institutions such as the Instituto Federal Electoral broke the patternof US-based global governance institutions directly funding democracy promotionnetworks by virtue of the financial and operational autonomy it had established bythe mid l990s. This is exhibited by its undertaking of ‘South–South cooperation’projects, through which democratisation programmes of their own were conductedacross the developing world (e.g. East Timor, Bolivia, Ecuador) and the very factthat in any election year the IFE’s budget is US$80 million (Interviews No. 13 andNo. 23). In this instance such funding again stands as comparatively larger thancurrent US democracy assistance programmes in Mexico. Ordinarily, takingthese points at face value, one might be led to the conclusion that the argumentconcerning the direct intervention of US democracy promotion activities inMexico is inflated. However, a more nuanced stance can be developed, namely,that the process of democratisation in Mexico is less the product of direct US

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intervention and more a development springing from the internalisation of specificeconomic, moral and cultural values, codes of conduct and ideological transform-ations in Mexico. Three clusters linked to this theme of internalisation can be ela-borated which advance in a subtler way the central tenets of the polyarchyargument.

Advancing the case for the promotion of polyarchy in Mexico

Firstly, on the issue of funding, officials involved in USAID democracy andgovernance programmes have acknowledged that efforts in Mexico gained

TABLE 3. Total NED funding in Mexico (2000–2003)62

Year Grantee Amount US$

2000 The American University 70,000.00

Alianza Cıvica 246,530.00

Equidad de Genero 22,000.00

International Republican Institute: Asociacıon Nacional

Cıvica Feminina (ANCIFEM)

240,407.00

Oaxacan Indigenous Binational Front 30,000.00

Presencia Ciudadana 87,900.00

Total: 696,837.00

2001 Accion Popular de Integracion Social AC 79,000.00


Fundacion Informacion y Democracia (FIDAC) 47,000.00

Mexican Commission for the Defense and

Promotion of Human Rights

40,000.00

Total: 229,696.00


The American University: Universidad Iberoamericana 70,000.00



International Republic Institute: Asociacıon Nacional


160,000.00

Total: 406,000.00


The American University: Universidad Iberoamericana 50,000.00


Democracia, Derechos Humanos y Seguridad 50,000.00


Instituto para la Seguridad y la Democracia 55,000.00

International Republican Institute: Asociacıon Nacional


174,999.00

Libertad de Informacion Mexico 43,000.00

Total: 511,999.00


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greater significance over the years, leading to a recent switch in priorities from thebottom third in terms of USAID’s financing to the top third (Interview No. 11).Whilst it was admitted that, in comparison with other ‘missions’, the financingof groups is comparatively small in Mexico, the USAID-led ‘Democracy andGovernance Program’ has nevertheless established its largest team in thecountry over its twenty-year history. For instance, it now has the organisationalsupport and infrastructure of 26 officials, in contrast with other projects elsewherein Latin America that sustain 60–80 officials or, for example, in El Salvador,which has several hundred (Interview No. 11). At the same time, despite lowerfunding figures in Mexico, USAID, in its own words, received ‘considerablebank for their buck’ (Interview No. 11). This means that greater impact couldbe sustained with relatively smaller funds owing to an attributed lack of ‘civicculture’ and citizen responsibility in Mexico (Interview No. 12). Whilst it wasadmitted that the US state could act at times like a ‘300 pound gorilla’, it wasalso emphasised that a more subtle and indirect form of financing was preferredby USAID endeavours (Interview No. 11). Additionally, the wider and emerginginvolvement of agencies such as the Ford Foundation, the presence of the Euro-pean Union (EU) and the interest of the Open Society Institute all have to benoted in terms of establishing ‘democracy and governance’ programmes inMexico.

The Ford Foundation has itself claimed a larger presence than the NED inrecent years, announcing that it is now ‘one of the principal counterparts’ onlocal governance and civil society projects. A conservative indication of suchwork covers a base budget in Mexico and Central America of US$2 million perannum, although this is capable of rising to US$5 million, with over 70 per centdirected towards Mexico programme funding activities, e.g. local governancesupport, civil society and public sphere assistance, or increasing the participationof multicultural communities within civil society (Interview No. 27). This is alliedwith the encouragement of micro-financing enterprises, including access to finan-cial services, for low-income groups in urban and rural areas. As one programmeofficer for Development Finance and Economic Security at the Ford Foundationput it:

Access to financial services is regarded as part and parcel of demo-cratisation because full participation in economic, social and politi-cal terms cannot proceed without full participation in financialinstitutions and having access to such resources (Interview No. 32).

Similarly, a major grants programme linked to the European Institute for Demo-cracy and Human Rights is currently focusing on human rights, consolidatingthe rule of law, and reform of the state through the strengthening of ombudsmen.Globally, this EU scheme amounts to E100 million per annum covering thematicpriorities and focus countries. Mexico is one of the thirty-one focus countriesreceiving programme grants of just below E3 million for NGO proposals(focusing on the abolition of the death penalty, defence of indigenous rights,strengthening of the rule of law and democratisation). Similarly, there is thefunding of a micro-projects programme for one year, plans again covering the

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themes of indigenous peoples’ rights and strengthening of the rule of law forgrants up to E50,000. Lastly, there are large target projects linked to multilateralorganisations such as the UN and the OECD. These aim to ensure ‘best practice’on international human rights standards running for two-year periods in liaisonwith the MacArthur Foundation for grants set at E640,000 (Interview No. 24).With forthcoming agreements on strengthening the modernisation and adminis-tration of justice and law enforcement, it is claimed that the EU Commission isset to become ‘the major donor in this area’ (Interview No. 24). Finally, the inter-est of the Open Society Institute has been recently marked in Mexico, deploying atripartite approach to democratisation involving the support of projects focused onNGO assistance; technical assistance on issues of criminal justice reform, dis-crimination issues, human rights, and anti-corruption policies; and freedom ofinformation and reform of the media. Across Latin America, the budget forsuch activities is set at US$15 million, with approximately US$2 million targetedtowards democratisation in Mexico, to be indefinitely continued as long as theannual global budget of the Institute normalises between US$250–300 million(Interview No. 30).

The fact is that in both qualitative and quantitative terms such funding has beencentral to adapting civil society activism in Mexico to the context of formal andincreasingly institutionalised liberal democracy. Key figures central to the activi-ties of NGOs such as Alianza Cıvica, as well as officials within the IFE, have alsonoted that the sort of external financing in the 1990s from organisations such as theNED and the UNDP was absolutely essential to their democracy promotion activi-ties (Interviews No. 13, No. 14, No. 29 and No. 31). It is, then, perhaps surprising,but still disappointing, to witness established authorities at the NED candidlystating that the argument about the promotion of polyarchy in Latin America is‘sheer crap . . . just a joke with flow charts and scatter diagrams that are justcooked up out of some conspiracy theory’ that has no scientific basis (InterviewNo. 5). There is clearly more to the argument than this overly simplistic and dog-matic dismissal. After all, even Sergio Aguayo has gone so far as explicitly toconfirm that ‘the problem of polyarchy’ exists in Mexico ‘in a form of alienationfrom the institutionalised process of democracy’ (Interview No. 31).

Secondly, the condition of polyarchy has received growing and explicit attentionin Mexico. It has not only been regarded as the optimal situation to strive for byrepresentatives of US democracy promotion activities, such as the NED and else-where; it has also been deemed the ‘basic aim’ (Interviews No. 11 and No. 12). Asdescribed by one Latin America specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for Inter-national Peace who was commenting on the democratic transition in Mexico:

Polyarchy is the right system but it should deepen itself over timeso that citizens feel that there is some real connection between theirinterests and their participation within the system and the changewithin that system and their daily lives (Interview No. 3).

Another expert for Grupo de Economistas y Asociados, a consultancy firmfounded in 1990 by Jesus Reyes Heroles, has stressed that the differencesbetween political parties in Mexico are budgetary, not ideological (Interview


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No. 26). The circulation of political parties and elites, one field representative forthe AFL-CIO in Mexico also added, does not amount to a transition (Interview No.16). These are all points that vitiate claims within the Secretarıa del Trabajo yPrevision Social that a plurality in congress is a definite guarantee of democraticpractice (Interview No. 20).

This contrasts with the stance that the problem of polyarchy, as a restrainedform of popular participation, is regarded as one of the main challenges orthreats to substantive democracy in Mexico by some of the actors involved in con-tinual support for democratic change. For instance, coordinators at trade unionssuch as the Frente Autentico del Trabajo argue that there has been no advanceof democracy in Mexico in terms of social development. Similarly, coordinatorsat the Sindicato Mexicanos de Electricistas (SME) balked at suggestions thatany such democratic ‘transition’ had effectively occurred in Mexico, particularlygiven that proposed labour reforms were seen as disciplining workers according toregional drivers such as NAFTA and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (Inter-views No. 17 and No. 19). Whilst the attention of the Fox administration hasincreasingly shifted to proposals to privatise the electrical system and otherenergy sectors in Mexico, opposition organised by the SME and factions withinthe Sindicato Unico de Trabajadores Electricistas de la Republica Mexicanahas been regarded as a more significant demonstration of widening the questionof democratic struggle in Mexico (Interview No. 18). Democracy is thereforeseen less as a ‘measured two minutes’ and more as the conduct of resistances tochallenge, if not restructure, the distribution of power in Mexico (InterviewsNo. 1, No. 25 and No. 28).

Thirdly, one of the most significant conditions in shifting the debate aboutdemocratic transition and the promotion of polyarchy in Mexico has been theissue of internalisation that emerged so widely from participants’ responses.Time and again, it was highlighted that there was an internalisation of particulardemocratic discourses, moral and cultural values, codes of conduct and ideologi-cal transformations in Mexico. Not to be discounted in this process is the veryalignment of interests brought about by neoliberalism. As Sergio Aguayo has indi-cated, ‘democracy emerged in Mexico that was in some way linked to the neolib-eral agenda of globalisation’ (Interview No. 31). Yet the connection is not a simpleequation between ‘free markets’ and ‘free elections’. The long-term emergence ofneoliberal accumulation in Mexico from the 1970s and 1980s onwards has beenaccomplished in part by constituting what can be called ‘a set of internalisedrules and social procedures which incorporate social elements into individualbehaviour’.63 Put another way, neoliberalism has induced a reorganisation in pro-duction relations in Mexico, which has led to the internalisation of certain classinterests across state–civil society relations. Neoliberalism constituted a processof change initiated from above and based on a set of institutional changeswithin the organisation of the state, especially reflected in the Salinas adminis-tration (1988–94).64 Notably this was the context within which ministries suchas the Secretarıa de Programacıon y Presupuesto came to rise to institutionalpredominance within the state. The rise of technocrats through such ministriesof finance ensured policy priorities more attuned to transnational economicprocesses. The exhaustion of the previous ISI development strategy was thus

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taken for granted, ensuring the adoption of a neoliberal accumulation strategyinvolving the policy priorities of macroeconomic stability, market-imposed disci-pline, monetarism and fiscal austerity to guarantee the operation of transnationalcapital. Interests therefore became centred around a transnational nucleus fusingthe concerns of state managers, sectors of the business elite represented by organ-isations such as the Consejo Coordinadora Empresarial that included direct share-holders of large conglomerates tied to the export sector, the maquila (in-bond)strategy of export-led industrialisation fuelled by foreign investment and technol-ogy, and sectoral reform of agriculture that integrated local farmers into a transna-tional system of agricultural production.65 As documented in more detailelsewhere, this transnationalisation of capital, inaugurated during the era of neo-liberalism, promoted a process of internalisation within which interests were trans-lated between various fractions of capitalist classes.66 After all, ‘the internationalreproduction of capital under the domination of American capital’, as Nicos Pou-lantzas forewarned, ‘is supported by . . . various national states, each state attempt-ing in its own way to latch on to one or other aspect of this process’.67 In Mexicothe result was the emergence of a neoliberal state attuned to establishing a series offunctional mechanisms conducive to resolving political disputes within the remitof a polyarchic system. It is this internalisation that ensured preferences for a par-ticularly attenuated form of democracy that then attained the veracity of commonsense in Mexico. A certain notion of democracy thus became hegemonic. As JohnWilliamson stated, ‘economic policy and democracy will benefit if all mainstreampoliticians endorse the universal convergence and the scope of political debate oneconomic issues is de facto circumscribed in consequence’.68

In practice, this has been evident in Mexico whether in the form of an emphasison the ‘enabling environment’ of arrangements such as NAFTA in terms of ensur-ing contract and property rights conducive to democratic principles, or in the stres-sing of ‘civil society diplomacy’ linking global governance institutions to theconstitution of certain values about democracy, freedom and liberty based onthe rights of the individual and the free market (Interviews No. 21 and No. 15).Not surprisingly, this stress also came through Mexico-specialist officials at theIMF and World Bank indicating that the impending ‘second generation’ neoliberalreforms, targeting small and medium-sized businesses as well as energy privatisa-tion, would deepen the identification with formal democratic practices (InterviewsNo. 8 and No. 9). This is where initiatives led by the Ford Foundation and the EUbecome so pivotal thanks to the tying of the rule of law and property rights agree-ments to democracy assistance programmes. The EU, it is claimed, is not aimingto ‘impose any models’, although ‘the rule of law is an integral part of the demo-cratic transition as democratic countries make better trading partners’ (InterviewNo. 24). Similarly, the Ford Foundation’s goal is to build ‘financial literacy’ atthe local level through micro-credit (lending) and micro-financing (credit, insur-ance, savings) in order to realise still further the internalisation of neoliberalism(Interviews No. 27 and No. 32). As USAID representatives reaffirmed, democracypromotion is less about the imposition of ‘our’ system and more the acceptance of‘universal rules of the democratic game’ consisting of investment-related rule oflaw, enforcement of contracts, collecting on collateral and bankruptcy, and over-coming corruption (Interviews No. 6 and No. 7).


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In sum, this stress on internalisation bears out the point made earlier that USdemocracy promotion is based on the illusion of the separation of politics fromeconomics and that it is the internalisation of this illusion that represents thestrength of US hegemony. It is part and parcel of the normalisation of democracybased on the compulsion of states to conform to each other in their internalarrangements through combined and uneven capitalist development. Hence it isnecessary to emphasise both the induced reproduction of capital brought aboutby neoliberal globalisation and the political mediations of this internalisationprocess linked to more indirect influences shaping common conceptions aboutdemocratisation. One of the most salient challenges of democratisation inMexico can therefore be described as the problem of ‘feckless pluralism’: anextreme variant of neoliberal polyarchies linked to an inability to extend demo-cracy beyond plural and competitive elites that are profoundly cut off from theelectorate, thereby rendering politics a hollow enterprise.69

Conclusion: the ‘isolation effect’ of democratisation as individualisation

The attainment of ‘democracy’ in Mexico is not in its imposition, but in itswinning ready and lasting acceptance from the ruled. However, with ‘the word“democracy” . . . what matters is that a bond is being sought with the people,the nation, and that one considers necessary not a servile unity resulting frompassive obedience, but an active unity, a life unity, whatever the content of thislife may be’.70 One of the main challenges facing democratic transition inMexico is therefore common to most of the region of Latin America. It is theproblem of ignoring the contingent relationship between capitalism and demo-cracy leading to the condition and ‘isolation effect’ of extreme individualisation,which has been criticised throughout this argument as emblematic of liberaldemocracies. The main contribution offered here is an analysis of democratic tran-sition that accords due weight to local counterparts involved in democratisationalongside the interwoven involvement of global governance institutions in away that still highlights the specific occurrence of polyarchy in Mexico. Under-standing democratic transition in this way also accords determinacy to nationalconditions but only within the frame of reference of how particular transnationalclass interests intersect, penetrate and gradually gain accordance with nationalpolitical elites. No crude imposition of US imperatives should be transposed onto the process of democratic transition in Mexico. Rather, developments havebeen related to the internalisation of certain principles and norms that springfrom anterior changes to the political economy of Mexico. The internalisationof democratisation is thus intrinsically linked to the hegemony of neoliberalglobalisation. We are witness to a politics of hegemony based on a relationalarticulation of consensual arrangements but by no means the total absence ofconflict.

Clearly, challenges remain. Some have noted that throughout the rest of LatinAmerica the primary challenge is one of ‘democracy in the raw’: taking account-ability almost too literally as in the cases of recent social unrest in Argentina orVenezuela (Interview No. 10). This matches Laurence Whitehead’s recentcomment that ‘the main threat to civil society could come . . . from a majoritarian

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incivility generated by democratisation itself, particularly where the electorate isuprooted and disoriented’.71 Problems in Mexico, though, seem to stem from thelimits imposed by its own institutional character signalled ever since the ‘demo-cratic opening’ of the 1970s. What needs to be questioned is the managed andmeasured institutional emergence of democracy in Mexico and the role that US-based global governance institutions have played in the process. After all, it hasbeen noted that the US interest in democratic transition in Mexico has neverbeen sought at the expense of jeopardising elite rule itself, with the latter alwaysmore interested in maintaining the basic order and controlling populist-basedchange.72 This is most recently evidenced by the alarmist claim of Standard &Poor’s that a victory for the centre-left PRD frontrunner for the 2006 presidentialelection, Manuel Lopez Obrador, would be a source of instability in internationalfinancial markets.73 Given that in the July 2003 mid-term elections the PRIstrengthened its position in the lower house of congress, winning 222 seats com-pared to the 151 seats held by the PAN and the 95 seats held by the PRD, the mainoverriding challenge to democracy is still whether there can take hold an agendaof popular democracy,74 one based on more participatory mechanisms of socialequity and emancipatory demands that go beyond an electoral fixation and thedeeply embedded institutionalised constraints linked to the distinctive materialisa-tion of polyarchy in Mexico.

Interviews

1. Project Organiser, Mexico Solidarity Network, Washington DC (15 April 2002).

2. Ambassador, Mexican Permanent Representative to the Organisation of American States, Washington DC

(15 April 2002).

3. Co-Director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project, Global Policy Program, Carnegie Endowment for

International Peace, Washington DC (16 April 2002).

4. Carl Gershman, President of the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington DC (17 April 2002).

5. Senior Program Officer for Latin America and the Caribbean, National Endowment for Democracy,

Washington DC (17 April 2002).

6. Program Officer for Latin America and the Caribbean, United States Agency for International Development,

Washington DC (18 April 2002).

7. Senior Program Officer for Latin America and the Caribbean, United States Agency for International Deve-

lopment, Washington DC (18 April 2002).

8. Senior Economist, International Monetary Fund, Policy Development Review Department, Washington DC

(18 April 2002).

9. Economist, World Bank, Finance, Private Sector and Infrastructure for Latin America and the Caribbean

Region, Washington DC (19 April 2002).

10. Latin America Correspondent for Institutional Investor (New York) and Emerging Markets (New York),

Mexico City (23 April 2002).

11. Regional Municipal Finance Advisor, United States Agency for International Development, Regional Urban

Development Office, Latin America and the Caribbean, Mexico City (24 April 2002).

12. Team Leader, Democracy and Governance Program, United States Agency for International Development,

Mexico City (24 April 2002).

13. Director of International Liasons and Political Affairs, Instituto Electoral Federal, Mexico City (25 April

2002).

14. Member of the Electoral Council, Instituto Electoral Federal, Mexico City (25 April 2002).

15. Chief of Staff of International Affairs, Instituto Electoral Federal, Mexico City (25 April 2002).

16. American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organisations Field Representative, American Center

for International Labor Solidarity, Mexico City (29 April 2002).


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17. National Coordinator, Frente Autentico del Trabajo, Mexico City (29 April 2002).

18. National Coordinator, Red Mexicana de Accion Frente al Libre Comercio, Mexico City (29 April 2002).

19. International Affairs Officer, Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas, Mexico City (30 April 2002).

20. Secretarıa del Trabajo y Provision Social (Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare), International Affairs

Section, Mexico City (30 April 2002).

21. Resident Assistant Representative, United Nations Development Programme, Mexico City (13 May 2002).

22. Assistant Director, United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Mexico

City (13 May 2002).

23. Principal Officer and General Co-ordinator of the United Nations Development Programme ‘Assistance to

Electoral Observation’, Mexico City (13 May 2002).

24. Rule of Law Project Officer, European Union Commission in Mexico, Mexico City (13 May 2003).

25. Correspondent, El Universal (Mexico City), Mexico City (14 May 2002).

26. Consultant, Grupo de Economistas y Asociados, Mexico City (14 May 2002).

27. Director of Democracy Program for Mexico and Central America, Ford Foundation, Mexico City (14 May

2003).

28. National Coordinator, Mexico Solidarity Network, Mexico City (15 May 2002).

29. Silvia Alonso Felix, Executive Secretary, Alianza Cıvica, Mexico City (16 May 2002).

30. Latin America Program Officer, Open Society Institute, Mexico City (16 May 2003).

31. Sergio Aguayo Quezada, National Coordination, Alianza Cıvica (1994–1999), Mexico City (17 May 2002).

32. Program Officer for Development Finance and Economic Security, Ford Foundation, Mexico City (23 May

2003).

Notes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Special Workshop ‘Mexico: The Fox Administration and the

Future’, Institute of Latin American Studies, London, 7 June 2002; the Annual Conference of the Society of Latin

American Studies, Manchester, 11–13 April 2003; as Guest Speaker at the Universidad Iberoamericana de

Puebla, Mexico, 21 May 2003; as Guest Speaker at the Division de Estudios de Posgrado y Centro de Relaciones

Internacionales, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico City, 11 June 2004; and at the XXVth

International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Las Vegas, 7–9 October 2004. Thanks are

due to those who provided feedback and to Francisco Alarcon Cardenas, Nikki Craske, Randall Germain, and

Ismail Legardien for their support of the research and to Andreas Bieler and William Robinson for detailed com-

ments. The usual caveats apply. The recommendations of two anonymous referees also proved invaluable in car-

rying out further revisions. The research was funded under the auspices of an Economic and Social Research

Council Postdoctoral Fellowship (Ref.: T026271041).

1. President Vicente Fox Quesada, remarks on accepting the 2001 Democracy Award from the National Endow-

ment for Democracy, Washington DC, 5 September 2001, available at http://www.ned.org

2. All figures are from Mexico & NAFTA Report, ‘Fox Wins, Stunning Pollsters and Delighting Supporters and

Markets’, 11 July 2000 (RM-00-07).

3. As assumed by Andreas Schedler, ‘From electoral authoritarianism to democratic consolidation’, in: Russell

Crandall, Guadalupe Paz & Riordan Roett (eds), Mexico’s Democracy at Work: Political and Economic

Dynamics (Lynne Rienner, 2005).

4. Thomas Carothers, In the Name of Democracy: US Policy toward Latin America in the Reagan Years

(University of California Press, 1991), p. 10.

5. Thomas Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve (Carnegie Endowment for International

Peace, 1999), p. 147.

6. These are enumerated in arabic numerals at the end of the article, prior to these notes.

7. Jean Grugel, Democratisation: A Critical Introduction (Palgrave, 2002), p. 118.

8. Thomas Carothers, ‘The resurgence of United States political development assistance to Latin America in the

1980s’, in: Laurence Whitehead (ed.), The International Dimensions of Democratisation: Europe and the

Americas, Expanded Edition (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 126.

9. Carothers, In the Name of Democracy, pp. 226–7.

10. Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad, p. 30.

11. Carothers, In the Name of Democracy, pp. 7–8.

12. Grugel, Democratisation, p. 125.

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13. Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter & Laurence Whitehead (eds), Transitions from Authoritarian

Rule: Prospects for Democracy, 4 vols (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); and Larry Diamond, Juan

J. Linz & Seymour Martin Lipset (eds), Democracy in Developing Countries, 4 vols (Lynne Rienner,

1989). For the government–university nexus link, see William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globali-

sation, US Intervention and Hegemony (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 44–5, 392n.49.

14. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale University Press, 1968).

15. Paul Cammack, Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World: The Doctrine for Political Development

(Leicester University Press, 1997), p. 37. Original emphasis.

16. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 17–32.

17. Juan Linz & Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1996), p. 7.

18. Larry Diamond, Juan Linz & Seymour Martin Lipset, Democracy in Developing Countries: Latin America,

vol. 4 (Lynne Rienner, 1989), p. xvi, as cited Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy, p. 54.

19. Peter Burnham, ‘State and Market in International Political Economy: Towards a Marxist Alternative’,

Studies in Marxism, No. 2 (1995), pp. 135–59.

20. John Holloway & Sol Picciotto, ‘Capital, Crisis and the State’, Capital & Class, No. 2 (1977), p. 79.

21. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge

University Press, 1995), pp. 29, 31–6.

22. Hazel Smith, ‘Why is there no international democratic theory?’, in: Hazel Smith (ed.), Democracy and

International Relations: Critical Theory/Problematic Practices (Macmillan, 2000), p. 29.

23. O’Donnell, Schmitter & Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, vol. 4, p. 19.

24. Whitehead, The International Dimensions of Democratisation, pp. 8–9, 16–17.

25. William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and State in a Transnational World

(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 83.

26. Thomas Carothers, ‘The End of the Transition Paradigm’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2002), p. 7.

27. Adam Przeworksi, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin

America (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 26.

28. Ronaldo Munck, ‘After the Transition: Democratic Disenchantment in Latin America’, European Review of

Latin American and Caribbean Studies, No. 55 (1993), p. 8.

29. George Philip, Democracy in Latin America: Surviving Conflict and Crisis? (Polity, 2003), pp. 197–8.

30. Irene L. Gendzier, ‘Play it again Sam: the practice and apology of development’, in: Christopher Simpson

(ed.), Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War (New

Press, 1998), pp. 57–95.

31. Thomas Carothers, ‘The NED at 10’, Foreign Policy, Vol. 95 (1994), p. 137.

32. Larry Diamond, ‘Winning the New Cold War on Terrorism: The Democratic-Governance Imperative’,

Institute for Global Democracy, Policy Paper No. 1 (2002).

33. Barry K. Gills, Joel Rocamora & Richard Wilson (eds), Low Intensity Democracy: Political Power in the

New World Order (Pluto, 1993), p. 5.

34. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy, p. 49.

35. Laurence Whitehead, Democratisation: Theory and Experience (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 26. The

acceptance of polyarchic procedural democracy is also evident in Joe Foweraker, Todd Landman & Neil

Harvey, Governing Latin America (Polity, 2003), pp. 35–7, 40.

36. William I. Robinson, ‘Promoting capitalist polyarchy: the case of Latin America’, in: Michael Cox, G. John

Ikenberry & Takashi Inoguchi (eds), American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies and Impacts

(Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 313.

37. Antonio Gramsci, ‘Republic and Proletariat in France’, Il Grido del Popolo [20 April 1918], in Antonio

Gramsci, History, Philosophy and Culture in the Young Gramsci, ed. Pedro Cavalcante & Paul Piccone

(Telos Press, 1975), pp. 81–2. Original emphasis.

38. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, trans. Timothy O’Hagan (New Left Books, 1973),

pp. 130–7.

39. Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’ [1843], in: Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney

Livingstone & Gregor Benton (Penguin, 1975), p. 193.


41. Mark Unger, Elusive Reform: Democracy and the Rule of Law in Latin America (Lynne Rienner, 2002).


43. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy, p. 111. Emphasis added.


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44. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratisation in the Late Twentieth Century (University of

Oklahoma Press, 1991).

45. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy, pp. 175–80.

46. Ibid., pp. 223–6, 231–6.

47. Jean Grugel, ‘Democratisation Studies Globalisation: The Coming of Age of a Paradigm’, British Journal of

Politics and International Relations, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2003), p. 266.

48. Carothers, ‘The NED at 10’, p. 137.

49. Octavio Paz, ‘The philanthropic ogre’ [1979], in: Octavio Paz (ed.), The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysan-

der Kemp, Yara Milos & Rachel Phillips Belash (Penguin, 1985), pp. 377–98.

50. Barry Carr, ‘Labour and the political left in Mexico’, in: Kevin J. Middlebrook (ed.), Unions, Workers and

the State in Mexico (Center for US–Mexican Studies, 1991), pp. 136–9.

51. Barry Carr, Mexican Communism, 1968–1983: Eurocommunism in the Americas? (Center for US–Mexican

Studies, 1985).

52. James D. Cockroft, Mexico’s Hope: An Encounter with Politics and History (Monthly Review Press, 1998),

p. 265.

53. Joe Foweraker, Popular Mobilisation in Mexico: The Teachers’ Movement, 1977–1987 (Cambridge

University Press, 1993), pp. 11–12.

54. Kevin J. Middlebrook, The Paradox of Revolution: Labour, the State and Authoritarianism in Mexico (Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 223–4.

55. Denise Dresser, ‘Treading lightly without a stick: international actors and the promotion of democracy in

Mexico’, in: Tom Farer (ed.), Beyond Sovereignty: Collectively Defending Democracy in the Americas

(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 316–41.

56. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy, p. 100.

57. Sergio Aguayo Quezada, ‘El financiamento extranjero y la transicion democratica Mexicana: El caso de

Alianza Cıvica’ [2001], available at http://www.laneta.apc.org/alianza/Conferencia

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid.

60. Although it is noteworthy that a senior NED authority confirmed that the figure in 2000 to Alianza Cıvica

combine a US$90,000 grant from the NED and a US$l56,520 grant initiated by USAID but passed

through the National Democratic Institute owing to concerns about ‘close ties’ to the US embassy (Interview

No. 4).

61. Robinson, ‘Promoting capitalist polyarchy’, pp. 317–8.

62. National Endowment for Democracy, Annual Reports, 2002–2003, availble at http://www.ned.org

63. Alan Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles: The Crises of Global Fordism, trans. David Macey (Verso, 1987), p. 15.

64. Miguel Angel Centeno, Democracy within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico (Pennsylvania State

University Press, 1994), p. 41.

65. Matilde Luna, ‘Entrepreneurial interests and political action in Mexico: facing the demands of economic

modernisation’, in: Riordan Roett (ed.), The Challenge of Institutional Reform in Mexico (Lynne Rienner,

1995), p. 83; and Jonathan Fox, The Politics of Food in Mexico: State Power and Social Mobilisation

(Cornell University Press, 1992).

66. Adam David Morton, ‘Structural Change and Neoliberalism in Mexico: “Passive Revolution” in the Global

Political Economy’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2003), pp. 631–53.

67. Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, trans. David Fernbach (New Left Books, 1975),

p. 73.

68. John Williamson, ‘Democracy and the “Washington Consensus’”, World Development, Vol. 21, No. 8

(1993), p. 1331.

69. Carothers, ‘The End of the Transition Paradigm’, p. 11.

70. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs & Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans.

William Boelhower (Lawrence & Wishart, 1985), p. 206.

71. Whitehead, Democratisation, p. 84.

72. Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad, p. 147; and Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy, p. 113.

73. Standard & Poor’s, ‘Mexico: Politics from a Credit Rating Perspective’, available at http://www.

securitization.net

74. ‘Putting the brakes on change’, The Economist, 12 July 2003, pp. 46–7.

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Change within continuity: The political economy of democratic transition in Mexico