A growing literature argues that understanding Mexico's protracted transition from one-party rule requires exploring the dynamics of political competition as they emerged at the state and local levels. Caroline Beer makes an important contribution to this approach to Mexican democratization by examining state-level electoral competition in the 1990s and its impact on institutional development, particularly of state legislatures, and on political recruitment, especially of gubernatorial candidates. She argues that democratization resulted from a “complex interplay between opposition victories in subnational elections and important democratic advances in the national political arena” (pp. 9–10).

Beer makes four important contributions in this short monograph. First, she provides valuable evidence of the role of subnational electoral competition in pushing forward Mexico's democratization. Here her work complements the recent scholarship of Todd Eisenstadt, Jonathan Hiskey, and Vikram Chand, as well as the long-standing arguments of such Mexican scholars as Alberto Aziz Nassif and Tonatiuh Guillén López, who suggested that Mexico's transition would be propelled by anticentrist forces. Beer does not argue that subnational competition has developed evenly across the nation. Indeed, she offers evidence that some states remained bastions of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), even while others became sites of intense electoral competition and, in many cases, opposition victory. She advances the literature on subnational competition, however, by demonstrating the consequences of electoral competition for development of more responsive and accountable institutions at the state and local levels: States with more competition became states with more active legislatures and states in which politicians could begin to build political bases without a reliance on Mexico City–based party leaders. States without competition remained dominated by the PRI's national leadership.

Second, Beer shows that state-level electoral competition has perceptible impact on public policy, particularly in the provision of greater volumes of public goods to citizens of states with higher levels of contestation. This result obtains regardless of whether the PRI or the opposition parties won those state-level elections for governor or the state legislature. To provide the public goods to satisfy an electorate increasingly demanding of its local and state elected officials, those authorities must develop new sources of public revenue. By finding new revenue sources, those authorities also increase their autonomy from Mexico City, which can be a democratic result if state-level politics is itself competitive.

Third, by focusing on the electoral sources of institutional development at the state level, Beer offers a new angle on the study of institutions. Throughout her work, she strives to use an analytical approach that draws heavily on the new institutionalist literature. Where she differs from many proponents of that approach, however, is in her focus on the sources of institutional change, rather than on the political and policy consequences of institutions. The emergence of electoral competition changes the incentives of politicians, thereby leading to institutional changes. In the Mexican context, “electoral competition redistributes power from executives to legislatures, from unaccountable bureaucracies to elected officials, and from party leaders to electorates, thereby creating institutionalized opportunities from the opposition to be represented and to monitor the government in order to check the power of the executive” (p. 21).

Fourth, most scholarship on democratization has centered on the sources of democratic transitions or on democratic consolidation. However, by focusing on subnational processes, Beer's account of Mexican democratization more effectively explores the consequences of the democratic transition for such key dimensions of political life as political recruitment and institutional change, especially in regard to executive–legislative relations. Combining cross-sectional analysis of the 31 Mexican states and in-depth case studies of three states—Guanajuato, Hidalgo, and San Luis Potosí—Beer demonstrates that growing electoral competition—again, regardless of which party wins election—has impact on who governs and how. With the advent of effective electoral competition, the state legislatures of Guanajuato and San Luis Potosí became more active, sitting for longer sessions, approving larger budgets for their own operations, and increasing the powers of committees. Hidalgo, lacking electoral competition, saw no such parallel developments in the 1990s. In a similar fashion, growing electoral competitiveness has forced the PRI to pay much greater attention to recruiting gubernatorial candidates with more local characteristics so as to more effectively appeal to local electorates. Whereas gubernatorial candidates were once imposed on states by the national PRI and, in particular, by the president, today the PRI uses internal primaries to select its gubernatorial candidates. Opposition candidates have usually been more linked to local communities, too. As a result, today's governors, whether from the PRI or the other parties, are much more representative of the states they govern than the proconsuls once imposed on states by national-level leaders.

The study of Mexico's transition has generated an unusually rich scholarly literature, incorporating many theoretical and methodological perspectives. As yet, no study fully integrates national-level political events and forces with the subnational changes that in many cases led the transition process. Beer has provided a conceptually lucid and carefully researched analysis of the subnational electoral competition and its implications for institutional development at the state level. Any study that seeks to offer a comprehensive view of Mexican democratization must incorporate her insights.