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Competition came to Mexico’s new democracy
with unexpected fury in the nation’s 2006 presidential election. Until recently Mexico was the bastion of the
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), where opposition parties could
rarely hope to gain half as many votes. But in the
July 2 presidential election, Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party
(PAN) edged Ándres Manuel López Obrador of the Democratic Revolutionary Party
(PRD) by a mere 233,831 votes, or 0.58% of the more than 41.5 million cast. The PRI’s candidate, Roberto Madrazo, finished a distant
third. Calderón took this razor-thin margin after a
fiercely competitive campaign marked by lavish media spending and the use of
negative attack ads. López Obrador has contested the
outcome from the time the polls closed until the present, calling his
supporters into the streets on several occasions to put pressure on the
electoral authorities to recount the votes; staging an “election by
acclamation” in which those present at a rally on Mexico’s Independence Day
“elected” López Obrador by a show of hands; and scheduling an “inauguration”
ceremony on November 20, the anniversary of the onset of the Mexican
Revolution. While López Obrador challenged the
preliminary outcome, Calderón had to wait patiently until the Federal
Electoral Tribunal (TRIFE) declared him elected on September 5, fully two months after the ballots had been cast.
The articles in this symposium offer
analysis of several key features of the 2006 Mexican elections and their
impact on Mexican politics: the economic context in which the elections
took place, the partisan and ideological cleavages revealed in the electoral
results, the divergence between elite polarization and mass moderation on key
issues, the decline of the former ruling party (the PRI), post-electoral
mobilizations by López Obrador, and the meaning of the elections for the
development of Mexican democracy. The authors provide non-technical
analysis of important new sources of data: the Mexico 2006 Panel Study, the
Mexico 2006 Candidate and Party Leader Survey, and Reforma's Exit
Poll.
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Introduction
Joseph L. Klesner
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About the Authors
Kathleen Bruhn is
associate professor of political science at the University
of California, Santa Barbara. She
is the author of two books on Mexican politics, most recently, Mexico: The
Struggle for Democratic Development (with Daniel C. Levy). She is currently completing a manuscript on urban
protest in Mexico and Brazil.
Todd A. Eisenstadt teaches political
science at American University's School of Public Affairs, where he is also
principal researcher of the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID) Higher Education and Development Program grant: “Uniting
Law and Society in Oaxaca, Mexico: A Research and Teaching Program.” He is the author of Courting Democracy in Mexico:
Party Strategies and Electoral Institutions, and several articles on Mexico's
democratization.
Kenneth F. Greene
is assistant professor of Government at the University
of Texas at Austin. He is
Co-Principal Investigator on the Mexico 2006 Panel Study and author of the
forthcoming book Defeating Dominance: Party Politics and Mexico's
Democratization in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press,
forthcoming).
Joseph L. Klesner
is professor and chair in the Department of Political Science at Kenyon College. He
has recently published articles on Mexican politics and on political
participation in Latin America in the Latin America
Research Review, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, and Latin
American Politics and Society.
Joy Langston is a
research professor at the Center for Teaching and Research in Economics
(CIDE) in Mexico City. Her research centers on political parties in Latin
America and Mexico,
and her work has been published in Party Politics
and Comparative Political Studies.
Chappell Lawson is
associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and non-resident Fellow at the Pacific Council on International
Policy. He is the co-editor (with Jorge Domínguez)
of Mexico's Pivotal Democratic Election and author of Building the
Fourth Estate: Democratization and the Rise of a Free Press in Mexico.
Alejandro Moreno is
professor of political science at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de
México, ITAM, and head of the department of surveys at newspaper Reforma,
both in Mexico City. He has published over 30 articles in journals and edited
volumes and is the author of Political Cleavages , El Votante
Mexicano , and Nuestros Valores, as well as co-author of Human
Values and Beliefs, with Ronald Inglehart and Miguel Basáñez.
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