Invisible Thresholds to Democracy: Mexico

The article, “The Demise of Mexico’s One-Party Dominant Regime” describes not only the slow breakdown of the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI), but it also the creation of democracy and the difficulty of pinpointing when a country officially transitions. The PRI lost power when they lost the 2000 election but were unable to intervene with the results due to the IFE, which was created in 1994. The IFE is a non-partisan institution that would ensure the integrity and legitimacy of the elections. Why would they agree to an institution that would tie the PRI’s hands to electoral fraud and change of election results? The PRI would rather hand electoral power over to the IFE and have the opposition accept the election results instead of having the opposition question results that could be fraudulent. They believed they would win future elections either way, so they might as well do so in a way that would satisfy the opposition. As the trend seems to go in Latin American politics, they miscalculated their popularity and, therefore, their chances of winning future elections. So, when they lost the 2000 election, they were unable to intervene and change the election results as they did in the past, due to the IFE. This agreement with the IFE led to their eventual loss in power and to the creation of democracy in Mexico.

We have many definitions of democracy but, what is the threshold a country must cross in order to receive “democracy status”? A one-party dominant system must be considered an authoritarian state as for there are not fair elections, there is no real competition to their power, and the cost of entry into the political arena is too high. Although Mexico claims they have been a democracy for a while, they couldn’t have been considered a democracy until the one-party regime actually loses an election and peacefully hands power over to the opposition. I believe that the creation of democracy in Mexico occurred at some point between the creation of the IFE and the 2000 election. Of course, there are many reasons the PRI lost popularity in Mexico (the debt crisis, peso crisis, modernization, globalization and liberalization of trade, etc.), but they would not have lost their grip on Mexican politics if it wasn’t for blocking their own involvement in elections by creating the IFE. The example of Mexico and the PRI shows that simply having elections does not necessarily make a country a democracy. There are other factors to be considered. There may not be a set-in-stone threshold from authoritarianism to democratization, which makes it difficult to determine when a country becomes a democracy, but there are slow incremental changes that move a country closer and closer to democracy.