On Sunday, June 2, Mexico held its federal, state, and municipal elections. Sunday’s poll was historic in more than one sense. Mexico, a democracy in its mid-twenties, had never previously embarked on an election as large in scale, with more than 20,000 vacant public offices at all levels of government to be filled by an electorate of almost 100 million eligible voters. For the first time in the country’s history, a woman, Claudia Sheinbaum, was elected to spearhead the government of the world’s most populous Spanish-speaking nation. Finally, these events took place in the shadows of record-high, albeit stable, levels of drug-related violence.

In this Q&A roundtable organized by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law’s (CDDRL) Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (PovGov) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a panel of scholars discuss six main insights from Mexico’s elections and what they tell us about the state of Mexico’s democracy.*

Panelists:

• Beatriz Magaloni, Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations and Professor of Political Science in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University
• Tesalia Rizzo, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Merced, Research Affiliate at MIT Governance Lab, Research Affiliate at CDDRL’s Governance Project
• Larry Diamond, William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Stanford University
• Amrit Singh, Professor of the Practice of Law and founding Executive Director of the Rule of Law Impact Lab at Stanford Law School
• Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University
• Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar, Visiting Scholar at Stanford Law School, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

_{*Responses have been edited for clarity and length.}

1: Mexico has elected its first female president in a clean and fair election.

One of the big headlines from the elections is that Mexico elected its first female president. What explains why Mexico has accomplished this milestone, even before the United States?

Beatriz Magaloni: It is incredibly exciting, especially considering our history of machismo and a patriarchal society where women have traditionally been followers, not leaders. Mexico enacted a significant gender parity reform about two years ago, which mandates gender parity across all political parties and levels of government. This transformation to include women began then, and it is amazing that the next step is electing a woman president.

Were the elections in Mexico clean and fair by international standards?

Beatriz Magaloni: Mexico has a long history of institutional reform that created bodies like the National Electoral Institute (INE). These institutions have persisted, even though Andres Manuel López Obrador (whom everyone refers to as AMLO) tried to weaken them. Fortunately, they withstood these attacks, and we can see how essential they are for elections. I can confidently say that we had free and fair elections by international standards. Mexico has the capacity to orchestrate inspiring elections, and this should serve as a lesson to powerholders about the importance of sustaining these institutions.

What worries me about the election results is the supermajority the MORENA coalition won. Likely, Claudia has the majority necessary in both the Senate and Congress to modify the Constitution unilaterally and pass laws unilaterally. I worry that Mexico is going back to the era of hegemony we suffered from for 70 years under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

As Americans head to the polls this year, a growing number of voters are disgruntled by national politics and their elected officials. Survey after survey has found that Americans are increasingly falling out of favor with the country’s two political parties – a trend likely to continue in what Stanford political scientist Didi Kuo is describing as a “brutal” campaign season.

“Americans are already exhausted by it, even though it has barely begun,” said Kuo, a center fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).

Like other democratic institutions, political parties are reckoning with a crisis of public confidence.

“Political parties remain critical to organizing democracy but they are beleaguered,” said Kuo.

Stanford Report sat down with Kuo to learn more about the discord between political parties, candidates, and voters and what these fissures may mean for the 2024 election.

No longer gatekeepers

Kuo sees several factors that have led to political parties’ waning support among the American public, including reforms made in the early 1970s.

Until then, political parties used to have more power in selecting the party nomination for presidency.

But after Hubert Humphrey secured the Democratic Party nomination in 1968 for president of the United States without ever taking part in any of the country’s primary races, changes to the presidential nomination process were made to give voters more power in deciding who will represent the party at the general election.

“Political parties used to be gatekeepers in politics. Now, voters have a much bigger say in determining who’s going to be the presidential candidate,” said Kuo.

Those changes made it possible for Donald Trump, an insurgent candidate who had neither formal membership in the Republican Party nor any previous military or government experience to secure the nomination.

Over recent years, incumbents have faced challengers in primary elections who often tout their lack of government experience as a strength rather than a weakness.

“The party seems to have very little leverage determining who gets to run under its party label,” Kuo said.

This makes the party vulnerable to outsiders and radical candidates, and also undermines the party’s ability to choose candidates who share the party’s priorities. The party has few ways to manage factional conflict or vet candidates for office when it cannot serve as a gatekeeper in politics.

More susceptible to outside influences

Another change Kuo sees as transformative to the current political landscape was the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 – also known as the McCain-Feingold Act – that limited financial contributions people can make to political parties and campaigns.

“That had the consequence of expanding the type of financing that donors would pursue outside of the party through 501(c)(4)s or super PACs,” Kuo said.

In addition, the ruling by the Supreme Court in the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case equating corporate, political communication to that of an individual has also accelerated new ways for political power to take shape.

“What we see is a world not just of parties trying to vie for seats in the legislature or candidates, but also of these external party organizations that sometimes are connected to the party and sometimes not,” Kuo said. “These groups can run their own ads, drum up support for their own issues, and collect a lot of money, sometimes undisclosed, on behalf of specific candidates and parties.”

Kuo thinks these party-like organizations will be particularly important in 2024. “Many groups are mobilizing voters around specific issues, such as abortion rights, while others may mobilize for and against specific candidates, like the faction of ‘Never-Trumpers’ from 2020,” Kuo said.

A growing appeal of populist candidates

Another issue Kuo is paying attention to is the rise of populist, extremist candidates, a trend occurring both in the U.S. and across the globe.

Kuo, alongside her colleagues at FSI, have examined how after the financial crisis of 2008, an increasing number of voters on both the left and right have become frustrated – aggrieved, even – by their democratic and economic institutions.

“One of the things people were turning toward were populist candidates who claimed that the entire system was rigged,” Kuo said.

Kuo added: “2024 is going to be a really difficult year for Congress. It’ll be a real test of whether or not extremists can still outperform moderate Republicans.”

New ways to mobilize

The advent of digital and social media has had a transformative effect on how political parties and candidates can rally their base. In addition, data analytics afforded by these new tools has also helped candidates build targeted and effective communication strategies – all without the backing of a political party.

An example of that is Stacey Abrams, who led a galvanizing campaign to flip her home state of Georgia from Republican to Democrat in the 2020 election.

“Stacey Abrams had a massive organizational, multiyear effort in Georgia because she was convinced that you could turn the state blue, but the party was not behind those efforts,” Kuo said. “It was driven at a local level.”

Meanwhile, the same tools that have helped candidates reach people at the local level are also being used to find support beyond their precincts.

“There’s empirical evidence showing that new candidates who come into the political process to challenge an incumbent often have a lot of support from outside their district,” said Kuo. “It’s easier now for people to find candidates they support and circumvent a traditional party approach to cultivating a candidate.”

No longer reflecting what voters want or believe

When Americans are surveyed about how they feel on different policy issues, they are actually not that divided. Rather, it is the political class that has become more polarized, leading voters to feel alienated from their party.

“People feel distant from parties more and more,” Kuo said.

Increasingly, people are shunning a party label entirely and identifying as independent. Here too, political scientists see changes among how independents behave as well.

The conventional wisdom was that independent voters were people who didn’t like labels but were still solidly Democrats or Republicans, Kuo explained.

“Now, there is new evidence showing that people who call themselves ‘independent’ are turned off by the party system and see both parties as corrupt. They are very cynical about the role of special interests,” she added. “They don’t think their vote matters. When people develop this attitude, that’s more of a rejection of the party system. Many voters may feel unenthusiastic about another Biden-Trump contest and disillusioned with both parties. However, there was record turnout in 2020, and hopefully cynicism will not keep people away from the polls when the stakes of the race are so high.”

Political parties have gotten weaker

Overall, these changes have culminated in political parties becoming weaker.

“Parties have always had this tension between being run by a set of leaders who make decisions and also being democratic,” said Kuo.

Over the year to come, Kuo expects tensions to continue – not only among political parties but with other democratic institutions as well.

“I think there will continue to be a big tension between what the Supreme Court rules on things like democracy and rights and what people actually want,” Kuo said, adding how this has already been seen at the state level where voters have taken a collective stand against issues like restrictive abortion measures.

“Hopefully, there’s some way in which democracy can serve as a corrective to some policy areas where people feel as if a majority opinion is not represented.”

How did the adoption of civil service reform in the United States affect reelection rates of legislators? In a CDDRL research seminar series talk, Miriam Golden — the Peter Mair Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute and CDDRL visiting scholar — argued that a decline in patronage appointments to state bureaucracies due to civil service legislation increased reelection rates in state legislatures. 

Civil service legislation in the United States began with the federal Pendleton Act in 1883 and continued with a series of staggered reforms at the state level. These reforms mandated that political appointments be made on the basis of merit, thereby limiting the ability of party machines to make patronage appointments to the bureaucracy. By 1987, every state (except for Texas) had adopted these measures. Golden’s work investigates the spillover effects of this legislation on the careers of politicians. 

The phenomenon of the “amateur politician” was prevalent for a good part of US history, especially at the state level. Operating under a patronage system, politicians did not face a strong incentive to seek reelection. However, following the introduction of civil service legislation, parties could no longer rotate their own cadre of loyalists through appointed and elected state offices. As such, the incentive for politicians to seek reelection increased, creating a more professional class of legislators concerned with elevating their own performance in office. 

This theory is consistent with Golden’s analysis of state legislator data covering the period between 1900 and 2016. Using a series of difference in difference estimators, Golden explored the effect of staggered reforms on reelection rates across all 50 state legislatures. Her analysis shows that the said reforms are associated with higher reelection rates. While reelection rates had already begun trending upward over the course of the 20th century, civil service reform coincided with the largest single surge in reelection rates yet observed.  

Golden found that across all the states under study, the rate of legislators seeking reelection and reelection rates track together. The data also suggests that individuals who were in office before the introduction of civil service reforms were driven out at slightly higher rates than those who served after. The trend is consistent with the idea that pre-reform legislators were replaced by a more professional class of politicians.