The political history of nineteenth-century Mexico largely mirrored that of other Latin American countries marked by chronic instability, factionalism, and civil war. The social revolution of 1910–1917 disrupted this pattern, setting Mexico on a distinct political trajectory. As the most far-reaching form of conflict over regime type—one that mobilizes entire societies—social revolutions leave a deep and lasting imprint on political life. Post-revolutionary regimes derive their legitimacy from the destruction of the ancien régime and typically treat any opposition as a betrayal of the revolutionary project itself. As a result, questions about the very nature and boundaries of political power dominate political life, while substantive policy issues recede into the background. This enduring preoccupation with the “regime question” (Ahmed 2025), in which political cleavages are primarily structured around conflicts over electoral rules and executive constraints, remains among the Revolution’s most durable legacies.
While much of the region lurched between mass-mobilizing movements and exclusionary military dictatorships for most of the twentieth century, Mexico’s post-revolutionary regime had already consolidated power by the 1930s. Elsewhere, political instability bred ideologically polarized environments where political actors mobilized around opposing policy programs, even as these conflicts forced one side underground or exposed them to violent repression (Cameron and Goenaga 2023). Instead, the Mexican post-revolutionary regime, embodied by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), absorbed dissenters into its organizational structure, resorting to open violence and exclusion when cooptation failed. Opposition actors thus learned to survive inside the system, contesting the rules of the political game to expand their access to power, rather than advancing distinct programmatic agendas.
That stability, however, came at a price with long-term effects that still shape Mexican electoral politics. The centripetal tendencies of the Revolution, the politics of co-optation of the post-revolutionary regime, and a protracted democratization process reinforced the tendency of political actors to mobilize primarily for access to office rather than for policy change. Programmatic competition has surfaced at times, but has rarely anchored party identities for long. Conflicts over the “rules of the game” continue to overshadow substantive policy debates; parties behave primarily as office-seeking rather than policy-seeking actors, and the party system is characterized by pragmatic coalitions and frequent party switching. These features of Mexico’s electoral politics continue to hamper the democratic representation of the citizenry.
Opposition Politics under the Post-Revolutionary Regime
Mexico’s Revolution did not yield a rotating cast of military rulers or the closure of electoral politics. Instead, it produced a civilian successor party—first the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), then the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (PRM), and finally the PRI—that monopolized elections for decades. The result was a distinctive form of electoral authoritarianism: regular voting under a system whose rules and resources were controlled by the ruling party. Where other large and industrialized countries in the region experienced spells of military tutelage and populist mobilization, Mexico’s hallmark was civilian continuity buttressed by controlled competition.
There were two core components to this architecture with long-term consequences for the institutionalization of opposition politics and the quality of democratic representation: corporatist incorporation through a vast patronage machine, and a mix of legal inclusion and clandestine repression of dissent rather than outright prohibition of opposition voices.
The 1910-1917 Revolution is conventionally seen as the birth of a new political order. Yet, in certain ways, it deepened rather than dismantled the localized patterns of political loyalty and solidarity that shaped nineteenth-century politics (Goenaga 2015). The victorious factions of the armed conflict constituted a fragmented landscape of militias led by regional strongmen with diverging ambitions. Ideological commitments certainly motivated some of these actors,[1] but political imperatives soon prevailed.
After a decade of civil war, the post-revolutionary regime began in the late 1920s to restore order by aligning the interests of a coalition of powerful actors with its own survival. The creation of the PNR in 1929 was a first step toward centralizing authority, offering local strongmen the support of a national organization in their efforts to control local and regional offices, the possibility to pursue a career in national politics, and access to profitable business opportunities as the state embarked on the reconstruction of the country (Garrido 1982). In 1938, the PNR became the PRM, transforming from a loose coalition of local bosses to a corporatist, mass-mobilizing party. The PRM absorbed organized segments of the peasantry, labor, the lower-middle classes, and the army into its four constituent sectors, effectively removing regional strongmen from the center of power. This centralized the exchange of loyalty for rewards, creating a vertically integrated system of patronage. Over the following decades, this system distributed extensive benefits to members and supporters of the ruling party. Agrarian reform, labor rights, and public sector employment benefitted regime supporters at the expense of large segments of the population, including landless peasants, informal workers, and the unemployed (Brachet de Márquez 1994, 33–34).
As the economy recovered in the late 1930s, large business conglomerates remained vital to the regime’s survival, not only for capital but for employment and industrial production. President Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940-1946) institutionalized their role by granting major business associations consultative powers and supporting new industrial elites through protectionist policies, monopolistic privileges, and subsidized credit. Over time, both new and old business groups acquired sufficient power to influence economic policy to their advantage, while organized labor—firmly subordinated to the ruling party—offered little resistance (Haber 2006).
The transformation of the PRM into PRI in 1946 completed the corporatist order, situating the party at the center of a dense network of unions, peasant leagues, and professional associations that distributed state benefits across a cross-class coalition of supporters. The PRI’s federal structure further reinforced this system. Governorships, social funds, media access, and procurement networks flowed through party channels. This architecture discouraged stable ideological alignments within or outside the PRI, incentivizing opportunistic alliances and conflicts over the allocation of resources and power instead.
The second distinctive element of the post-revolutionary regime was how it dealt with dissent. Political opposition in Mexico survived through highly controlled legal inclusion rather than outright prohibition. From the 1940s to the 1990s, parties could register and compete, but under rules—on registration, media access, public funding, and seat formulas—that the PRI administered and periodically “reformed.”
Sporadic episodes of programmatic opposition rarely endured: e.g., the dissident railroad workers and public teachers in the late 1950s, the student movement of 1968, the guerrillas of the 1970s. The costs of openly challenging the regime were high, as it meant losing access to state benefits to face the sharp edge of state repression (Langston 2002; Magaloni 2006).
Opposition forces generally resorted to “strategic compliance” to survive and gain some political access within the system (Eisenstadt 2003; Schedler 2006). Based primarily in the Northern states, the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) was formed in 1939 as a conservative, liberal-Catholic political force with support from the business class. Initially mobilizing against the PRI’s anti-clerical stance and state-interventionist economic policies of the 1920s and 1930s, the PAN’s economic platform gradually converged with that of the PRI as the latter shifted rightward, especially after the 1970s. PAN candidates continued to run in elections, often denouncing fraud but accepting the results. Other parties formed to group factions of the revolutionary family that lost ascendance within the PRI, such as the Partido Auténtico de la Revolución Mexicana (PARM) or the Partido Popular / Partido Popular Socialista, which served as a satellite opposition, sometimes running their own candidates (with PRI consent) but more often endorsing the PRI’s candidates in elections.
Opposition actors thus learned to comply enough to stay in the game, contest the rules, and negotiate incremental openings. This cultivated a repertoire centered on access and electoral engineering rather than head-on ideological confrontation. The best example of this pattern is arguably the 1977 Political Reform, which legalized banned parties (such as the Mexican Communist Party) and introduced a share of seats in the legislature to be allocated through proportional representation. The mixed electoral system allowed for some representation of opposition parties in Congress but also discouraged them from coordinating behind single candidates that could challenge PRI dominance in a district (Magaloni 2006, 177).
By the end of the 1960s, the corporatist party-state began to show its limits. Major economic crises, followed by neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, deepened popular discontent. In such a context, programmatic disagreements overlapped with demands for democratization. Within the PRI, the Corriente Democrática—later to become the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD)— broke away in 1988 in opposition to the technocratic elites that now controlled its leadership. The PRD mobilized around demands for greater democratic openings and a reversal of neoliberal economic policies. The PAN, meanwhile, capitalized on the openings achieved at the local and state levels to push for full-fledged competitive politics, even while sharing much of the PRI’s policy agenda. Mexican politics thus became dominated once again by the “regime question”—the mobilization of opposition forces to renegotiate the rules of the game (Magaloni 2006).
Unlike many Latin American countries, where democratic transitions were marked by clear episodes of collapse of military regimes or mass protest, Mexico’s transition unfolded through a gradual sequence of institutional reforms negotiated from within the existing order. Following the 1977 Political Reform, Mexico’s piecemeal democratization unravelled with the reforms of 1986 (expansion of proportional representation, creation of electoral college), 1990 (modernization of the voter registry and creation of the Instituto Federal Electoral, IFE, still under the Ministry of the Interior), and 1996 (turning the IFE into an autonomous organism and upgrading the status of the electoral courts). This protracted democratization process has continued after the consolidation of competitive politics through successive rounds of elite bargaining to redefine electoral administration, campaign finance, and representation rules.
The Revolutionary Legacies on Mexican Democracy
Since the 1990s, Mexico’s electoral politics have been structured less by ideological or programmatic competition than by recurrent disputes over the design and autonomy of electoral institutions. A brief period of programmatic competition emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the end of PRI dominance briefly encouraged parties to differentiate themselves along ideological and policy lines. During this window, the PAN presented itself as the party of liberal market reform and political modernization, while the PRD articulated a left-wing alternative centered on social rights, state activism, and opposition to the neoliberal economic agenda embraced by technocratic groups within both the PRI and the PAN. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, these years now appear as a brief exception. The regime question—the enduring conflict over electoral rules and constitutional constraints—not only remained a central source of political contention, as seen in the prolonged dispute over the 2006 election results, but also resurfaced as the dominant theme of Mexican politics amid recurrent battles over institutional neutrality from 2015 to the present.
The persistence of the regime question in Mexican politics reflects both the origins of opposition parties in the struggle to open the system rather than in distinct policy agendas, and Mexico’s protracted democratization, which turned control of electoral institutions into a stand-in for control of the state. This characteristic of Mexican electoral politics has shaped the party system in three distinct ways that undermine the quality of democratic representation.
First, when in government, political parties have tended to seek institutional reforms to secure their electoral advantages, while parties out-of-government have sought to limit incumbent advantages through institutional engineering. Each alternation of power since 2000 has reignited battles over who oversees elections and how their autonomy is guaranteed. The reforms that created and restructured the IFE and later the National Electoral Institute (INE) have generated persistent disputes over appointment procedures, budget, and oversight powers. The 2007–2008 reforms limiting paid media advertising, the 2014 creation of the INE to centralize electoral management, and the “Plan B” reforms proposed by the López Obrador administration in 2022–2023 all reproduced similar dynamics in which the governing party sought to redefine the referee of the political game. What in other democracies became technocratic questions—budget lines, media regulation, auditing mechanisms—in Mexico became recurrent partisan battlegrounds. Every administration has claimed to democratize or “perfect” electoral rules, but such reforms have simultaneously reflected deep mistrust toward political opponents and the institutions designed to oversee them. The tendency to structure competition around institutional rather than programmatic issues also explains the peculiar form of electoral dominance that has reemerged under the administrations of the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena). The party has revived features of the old PRI—control of state resources, extensive alliances, and partisan institutional engineering—while operating under formally competitive rules. This electoral dominance generates incentives for co-optation and alliance-building rather than for the development of a durable and programmatic “loyal opposition” (Linz 1978).
Second, parties out-of-government have tended to either form anti-hegemonic blocks or seek the favor of the party in power. Smaller parties such as the Partido Verde Ecologista de México (PVEM), Partido del Trabajo (PT), Movimiento Ciudadano (MC), among many others, have acted as swing partners, shifting alliances according to changing electoral arithmetic. Even the three main parties (PRI, PAN, and PRD) that constituted what was seen as a highly institutionalized party system with distinct left, right, and centrist alternatives in the 2000s have more recently formed fluid coalitions whose main purpose has been to prevent the consolidation of a dominant party (nowadays, Morena) rather than to advance coherent policy programs. These opposition fronts have relied on broad procedural appeals—defending democracy, restoring checks and balances, protecting electoral autonomy—rather than clear ideological or socioeconomic platforms.
Third, these dynamics have turned parties into almost exclusively office-seeking rather than policy-seeking organizations. Changes in the electoral rules themselves—introduction of re-election for legislators, quota systems, proportional representation lists, and the distribution of appointments within the executive—determine career incentives and encourage high levels of party switching. Politicians move across parties and alliances with ease, reinforcing the perception among the citizenry that what unites or divides them is less a matter of ideology than of access to power.
The Persistence of the Regime Question and the Quality of Democratic Representation
Social revolutions are extreme conflicts over the definition of politics. As such, they tend to structure politics largely around “meta-questions” over the nature and limits of political power, pushing other cleavages over policy issues to the background. The prominence of the regime question shapes actors’ behavior, even as the post-revolutionary regime gives way to something else. Deeply rooted habits of political mobilization around the renegotiating of the rules of the game continue to dominate the political agenda.
Mexico’s revolutionary legacy thus produced a political landscape distinct from that of its Latin American counterparts. While many nations in the region experienced decades of intense ideological polarization and abrupt episodes of regime change, Mexico’s path to electoral democracy was shaped by a civilian, corporatist regime that absorbed dissent and institutionalized opposition through controlled inclusion. This unique trajectory fostered a political system where contestation centered not on competing visions for policy, but on the structure and fairness of the electoral process itself. The Revolution’s imprint—its centripetal logic, the mechanisms of co-optation of the post-revolutionary regime, and the piecemeal process of democratization—continues to shape party behavior even after 25 years of open electoral competition. The prominence of the regime question in Mexican politics has bred political parties whose primary raison d’être is access to power rather than the pursuit of clearly discernible policy objectives, encouraging repeated efforts to change the rules that govern political power, the formation of pragmatic and fluid coalitions, and high-rates of party switching. Under these conditions, the quality of democracy remains limited, as the representation of citizens’ substantive interests repeatedly takes the back seat to political elites’ struggles for power.