The defeat of the state-subsidized, “official” Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico's historic 2000 presidential election sparked new interest in the bases of long-term PRI dominance and the reasons for the party's eventual loss of national power. Kenneth F. Greene and Beatriz Magaloni make important, original contributions to this debate and to the broader analysis of political parties, elections, and democratization. Although their books differ somewhat in emphasis, both authors are concerned with how to characterize the Mexican regime under PRI rule, the factors that sustained an “official” party in power for more than seven decades, and what value the Mexican case holds for comparative studies of democratization.

Greene offers the more precisely delimited characterization of Mexico under official party rule and the appropriate set of cases for comparative analysis. He depicts Mexico as an example of a dominant-party authoritarian regime—one in which, despite multiparty electoral competition, a single party holds executive and legislative power for at least 20 years or four consecutive national elections (p. 12). Although the government may sometimes resort to electoral fraud or repression against regime opponents in order to sustain the ruling party's position, these systems are distinguished from fully closed authoritarian regimes by the fact that opposition parties do not confront government-orchestrated fraud or violence with such certainty that they have no incentive at all to compete electorally. Magaloni, in turn, characterizes Mexico more loosely as an instance of hegemonic-party autocracy “in which one political party remains in office uninterruptedly under semi-authoritarian conditions while holding regular multiparty elections” (p. 32).

Greene and Magaloni each briefly review the literature on dominant and hegemonic party systems, and both authors note that Mexico's durable authoritarian regime emerged in the wake of the country's 1910–20 social revolution. On balance, however, neither devotes much attention to the historical processes that shaped the postrevolutionary regime's distinctive institutional arrangements, the bases of political legitimacy and terms of political competition, and long-term partisan alignments at regional and national levels. Given the great diversity of the cases identified by Greene (Botswana, Gambia, Malaysia, Senegal, Singapore, Taiwan) and especially Magaloni (all the countries listed by Greene, plus Cameroon, Côte-d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon, Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique, Paraguay, Tanzania, Zimbabwe) as relevant for a comparative assessment of the Mexican experience, one might have expected them to consider in more depth the possible explanations for how dominant-party authoritarian regimes or hegemonic-party autocracies come into being and how ruling parties initially amassed their considerable incumbency advantages.

There is certainly merit in the decisions by both authors to concentrate their focus on the electoral dynamics of Mexico's authoritarian regime. Nevertheless, in devoting only limited attention to the regime's overall characteristics, they may at times actually overstate the relative importance of elections and electoral legitimacy for its long-term survival. Neither analyzes the extensive array of state controls on nonelectoral participation that underpinned “official” party rule. Although Magaloni at least allows for the possibility that Mexico's governing political elite might have bolstered its position on the basis of ideological appeals, her empirical analysis does not examine the impact of such factors. Similarly, neither Greene nor Magaloni considers whether the function of elections under official party rule might have changed appreciably over time.

The authors both emphasize the importance of government-supplied patronage in maintaining the ruling party's electoral dominance. Of the two, Greene takes the narrower approach in his argument that the party held sway principally by drawing upon the resources available to it from a large public sector (especially jobs in the federal bureaucracy and in state-owned companies, but also including illicit cash transfers to support PRI candidates and campaigns), and that the loss of this patronage base largely accounted for the PRI's eventual defeat. One difficulty with this single-factor explanation (which Greene also adopts to explain dominant parties' electoral demise in Italy, Japan, and Taiwan) is, however, that it implies that the PRI should have experienced a linear decline in electoral support after the rapid privatization of state-owned firms began in the mid-1980s. In addition, this explanation fails to consider the possibility that PRI administrations might have compensated for the declining size of the public sector by finding other ways of distributing patronage, or that the quality of different presidents' political leadership and their public approval ratings also might have influenced the ruling party's electoral fortunes. If the focus is only on the shrinking size of Mexico's public sector, it is hard to explain the PRI's notable recovery in the 1991 and 1994 federal elections—or, particularly, the party's strong showing in some of the elections held after it lost control of the federal government in the year 2000.

Moreover, in considering only the material bases of PRI dominance, Greene in effect denies to some PRI sympathizers the capacity for principled action that he attributes to “message-seekers” in opposition parties like the center-right National Action Party (PAN) and center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). This is surprising in light of his own survey data, which show (p. 156) that the proportion of “office-seekers” in the long-governing PRI was only nine percentage points higher than in the PRD.

Magaloni adopts a broader, more persuasive perspective on the resource bases of the ruling party's dominance, stressing the multiple benefits that it derived both from overall federal government expenditures and from some specific social programs. Her statistical analysis of federal budgetary data for the 1938–2000 period shows that, especially from the 1960s onward, several different categories of government spending rose significantly in the quarter prior to elections and during the election quarter. In addition, Magaloni undertakes an extremely thorough assessment of the National Solidarity Program (PRONASOL), the signature antipoverty program established by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94). She demonstrates that Salinas administration officials very effectively targeted PRONASOL expenditures to reward those voters who were most likely to defect from the PRI and to punish municipalities governed by opposition parties. In weighing the various factors that finally led voters to reject the PRI and elect PAN candidate Vicente Fox Quesada in 2000, Magaloni does not consider the possible electoral consequences of President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León's (1994–2000) decision to adopt less partisan distributional criteria in the antipoverty program that replaced PRONASOL. She does, however, underscore the highly negative impact of the 1994–95 economic crisis on the PRI's reputation for economic management and overall support for the party.

Magaloni's identification of an electoral budget cycle is central to her argument that even during the decades in which the ruling party faced no serious rivals, the federal government nonetheless devoted substantial financial resources to preserving the party's supermajorities as a means of demonstrating its invincability and thereby discouraging political challenges from within the governing coalition. This is certainly a plausible account of one of the functions that elections served in Mexico's authoritarian regime. But it is difficult to reconcile this interpretation with Magaloni's equally strong statistical finding that the most important schisms within the official party took place when government spending declined (pp. 106–8, 120, 259). If successive presidential administrations were capable of matching federal spending so closely to the electoral calendar, and if preventing elite ruptures was so crucial to regime survival, then why would any administration run the grave risks allegedly associated with a shortfall in spending during a presidential succession?

Although Magaloni suggests that economic recession might sometimes have constrained government spending, the major elite splits in 1940, 1946, and 1952 did not occur under difficult economic circumstances. Indeed, in each of these instances, Mexico had experienced positive economic growth rates during the preceding two years. Even if a miscalculation in the timing of government expenditures had contributed to Juan Andreu Almazán's breakaway presidential candidacy in 1940, why would the governing elite not have been capable of sufficient political learning to avoid repeating this error during the two subsequent presidential transitions in 1946 and 1952 (when growth rates were particularly robust)? The most serious division in the ruling party's history—the 1987–88 defection by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and his allies, which led to the formation of the nationally competitive PRD—did occur during a period of prolonged economic stagnation following the 1982 debt crisis. Yet no serious account of this episode has ever suggested that Cárdenas and his supporters were principally motivated by a short-term deficit in access to government patronage.

Both Greene and Magaloni also stress the coordination dilemmas faced by opposition parties as key reasons for the persistence of dominant-party rule. They examine, for instance, the ideological differences (especially on economic policy issues) that divided the PAN and the PRD, and they note that PRI administrations manipulated electoral rules to undercut potential opposition coalitions. Greene makes a particularly valuable contribution to the analysis of opposition forces' coordination problems by illuminating the logic of political opposition in dominant-party regimes and its consequences for the character and appeal of opposition parties. He argues that precisely because dominant parties enjoy overwhelming incumbency advantages, opposition parties are forced to develop as niche organizations. The activists who initially join them are motivated mainly by expressive goals and hold strongly anti–status quo policy preferences. As a result, opposition parties led by ideologically committed “message-seekers” may find it difficult to expand their appeal to more centrist voters, and therefore they may be slow to take advantage of new electoral opportunities provided by weakening support for the ruling party.

Greene provides an important insight into the internal dynamics of opposition parties and the challenges they confront in dominant-party systems. Nevertheless, he offers no direct evidence for his contention (pp. 169, 175) that it was principally voters' perceptions of opposition parties being too far to the left or right (and not factors such as continued government control over the organization and certification of elections) that prevented opposition forces from expanding more rapidly during the 1980s. Moreover, the shifts he documents in the evolution of opposition activists' party-building preferences (from niche-oriented to catchall strategies) are so modest as to suggest that this element only partially explains opposition parties' accelerating electoral success during the 1990s.

Finally, it is worth observing that neither Greene nor Magaloni attaches much analytical importance to political leadership—whether in successfully managing delicate presidential transitions and preserving a heterogeneous governing coalition over more than seven decades, or in building the opposition parties and allied civic movements that gradually became capable of contesting elections in which the ruling party still enjoyed significant incumbency advantages. Nonetheless, as some of their own examples attest (Salinas's ability to restore temporarily the PRI's electoral fortunes on the basis of PRONASOL spending and strong presidential leadership, Fox's innovative campaign strategy in the 2000 presidential race, or Zedillo's historic decision to accept publicly the PRI's defeat in 2000 and thereby forestall possible resistance by regime hard-liners), this is an essential explanation for both the resilience of Mexico's postrevolutionary authoritarian regime and the country's successful—albeit slow and uneven—transition to electoral democracy.