Understanding the consequences of electoral democratization on good governance has become a fundamental subject for political science and public policy studies. In countries like Mexico, where hegemonic parties instituted the use of clientelism, patronage, and corruption as the predominant ways to mediate the relationships between the state and society, the arrival and increase of interparty competition was considered a crucial component for improving the performance of the newly elected governments. Based on the premises of electoral accountability and the retrospective voting hypothesis, many studies that emerged during the last two decades of the twentieth century started to ask whether electoral competition would produce more efficient government outcomes, more transparent policymaking rules, and the abandonment of particularism in the provision of public services. The Mexican case was of particular interest within this line of inquiry, considering that democratization had reached many local and subnational governments almost 20 years before the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost its hegemony at the national level, and that such governments had acquired significant policy responsibilities during the decades of 1980 and 1990. Thirty years after the arrival of electoral democratization in the country, the quality of governance is, at best, mediocre. What went wrong with Mexico’s democratic optimism?

Water and Politics, a recent book by Veronica Herrera, is a refreshing effort to unravel the issue of why young democracies can bring about either modern, accountable, and effective governments or deficient, unreliable, and clientelistic ones. Herrera centers her attention on the water sector, one of the most relevant and challenging public services in Mexico, under the control of city governments. She poses the question of why some cities were able to adopt successful reforms in the provision of water, while others were not. In general, she asks why some local governments manage to provide citizens with essential public services under high-performance standards (the access to the service is effective, universal, reliable, and transparent and providers are accountable to users), while others prefer to stick to clientelism (providing services using particularistic considerations, typically driven by personal and political motivations). Her central argument is that in a context of political competition, the adoption of reforms seeking to improve the provision of public services is more likely to succeed when three conditions are present: middle-class voters, industrial firms, and new political parties attempting to attract the political preference of these groups.

In other words, Herrera argues that political competition is not a sufficient requirement for improving the performance of governments. The ability of electoral democracy to produce high-quality services requires a social and an economic context whereby citizens and private firms exert the necessary pressure on parties and local officials to make long-lasting changes to the provision systems. If those conditions are absent—for example, a city whose residents prefer to pay low public-service tariffs instead of improving their quality, and where the industrial sector does not rely on the services produced by the government—a programmatic reform to public services is less likely to emerge, regardless of what the levels of interparty competition are. Under this scenario, the author claims that the clientelistic approach to service provision will remain.

To test her theory, Herrera performs a comparative analysis of eight Mexican cities, all of which underwent a process of democratization, but whose water provision systems followed different pathways (shown in Figure 3, p. 55). In four cases, the city government successfully undertook extensive reforms aiming to improve the provision of the service (illustrated by the cases of León, Irapuato, Celaya, and Naucalpan). In the other four cases, local authorities failed to adopt far-reaching transformations to the water sector, which caused services to deteriorate (gradually in Toluca and Xalapa and severely in Netza and Veracruz).

Herrera demonstrates that insulating water policy from political pressures was a key strategy for making reforms succeed, which implied a set of institutional changes, such as providing water agencies with decision-making autonomy and extending the time horizon of their directing boards (for example in León, as the author describes on pp. 104–7). In addition to those formal changes, the consolidation of reforms also required political action. On the one hand, reformers decided to incorporate supporting elites (middle-class groups, professional association members, business leaders) into the water agencies’ boards, with the intention not only to legitimize their water policies but also to build a strong electoral base for their parties. On the other hand, reformers deliberately applied an exclusion strategy against those who opposed their policy changes, mostly comprised of the popular sectors that resisted tariff increases and used to be old political allies of the PRI. Reformers, however, agreed to negotiate and compromise with these groups in order to reduce the economic impact of the reforms on the urban poor.

In my view, this book makes two remarkable contributions to the contemporary debate on governance. First, it demonstrates that a networked service, such as water, can be subject to clientelistic practices when its system of provision is not automated; politicians then have discretionary decision-making power on such issues as collecting payments, reconnecting the service, or allowing a clandestine connection. Second, Water and Politics challenges some mainstream assumptions regarding the factors that promote governments to perform better by reinstating socioeconomic class as an essential, though overlooked, explanatory variable.

Herrera’s research casts doubt on the technocratic view of governance, according to which improved performance should come from the transformation (mostly driven by a new managerial elite controlling key government positions) of political and bureaucratic institutions based on the introduction of economic incentives, sanctions, and administrative controls. On the contrary, the author demonstrates that these changes are sustainable only when there is a strong demand from affluent and well-educated middle-class and business sectors whose living standards depend largely on the existence of modern and effective government services. She also points out that good government requires new political actors trying to attract the loyalty of those social groups to construct a long-term electoral base. In addition, her book contests simplistic interpretations of the role of citizen participation in public policymaking, particularly those that postulate that governments will always perform better as societal involvement increases. On the contrary, she presents evidence showing that, under certain circumstances, participatory strategies have the paradoxical effect of isolating policy reforms from the pressures of political detractors.

A potential shortcoming in the book is its lack of a more precise definition of the concept of middle class, a more detailed discussion of its measurement, and how large it should be to have the hypothesized effect on public service performance. In a similar vein, concepts such as “the poor” and “the popular sector” require further elaboration, mainly because Herrera’s argument has strong implications when the likelihood of public service reform in many urban contexts of the country is analyzed. In other words, readers might wonder whether the poorest cities in Mexico and Latin America are predestined to live under clientelism, patronage, and corruption. Regardless of these limitations, Water and Politics offers a novel and rigorous investigation of the political causes of successful (and failed) public service reforms in developing countries that provides a powerful explanatory framework for understanding a crucial issue, with broad implications for future research.