Roderic Camp has a worldwide reputation as a chronicler of the careers of Mexico's various elites. His method comes from elite theory and is based on the idea that prominent people play a key part in shaping the economy, the political system, the business environment and so on. This is a valuable approach, if a somewhat narrow one, and Camp has made it his own on the basis of a considerable number of scholarly publications.

The work under review moves the story on from authoritarian to democratic Mexico, although there is also some recapping of earlier trends and findings. The book is organised around discrete topics and mostly asks what change democratisation has made. Most of the conclusions are convincing, if in many cases not entirely surprising. For example, the book concludes that the career paths of democratic leaders have involved much more experience of elective office than in the past. This is surely what one would have expected to find given both the extent to which elections have become more contested and the enhanced political importance of local office-holding. Indeed, some conclusions appear to have surprised Camp more than seems warranted. One of them is that the degree of party membership and activism was in decline during the years of PRI domination and has increased during the onset of democratisation. However, authoritarian Mexico was run by a state elite rather than a party elite, and party politics tended to be seen as a threat to the pre-eminence of the presidency. In fact, the most celebrated conflicts in post-revolutionary Mexican history – Calles versus Cardenas, Carlos Madrazo versus the governors, Reyes Heroles versus Echeverría – precisely reflect this fault line, and party figures lost in all cases. By the 1980s the PRI had been downgraded to a kind of ‘Ministry of Elections’. This made the party apparently unequipped to deal with democratic competition when it came about, yet the PRI survived and prospered. The question that really needs to be asked is why the PRI proved able to provide effective electoral competition now that it no longer controlled either the federal government or the federal district. The increased role of PANista party militants under the Calderón administration is not really surprising either. Calderón himself was a political militant from an early age, and his appointments when president would thus reasonably reflect political partisanship.

Some of Camp's findings are more surprising and intriguing, and one of the most interesting is the diminished role of economists in government. Economists have tended to lose out to lawyers and business executives. This may perhaps reflect political alternation; the PRI is much more a party of economics graduates than the PRD or PAN, and it has been out of the presidency since 2000. Political decentralisation may, as Camp notes, have been a factor too. Another rather surprising finding is that the Distrito Federal (Federal District, DF) remains over-represented in senior government appointments. Whether this is because of a concentration of talent in the capital or because of the contingent fact that the PAN is electorally stronger in the DF than in other parts of the country is not clear. The same point in reverse may apply to the under-representation of the south – after all, the south remains mostly PRIista.

Overall, Camp has documented a complex mosaic of career patterns that reflects not just Mexico's transition to democracy but also some of the institutional changes that have accompanied the transition. A generation ago Mexico was a centralised technocracy, whereas it is now a federalised semi-partidocracy. Some things, though, do not change. The political prominence of the Altacomulco group may be one of them – this relatively small group of people from the Estado de México has played a wholly disproportionate part in controlling the PRI, and in 2012 once again produced that party's presidential candidate. Meanwhile, the DF, which shares many characteristics with the Estado de México, has been governed by the PRD since 1997. The causes of this continuance in both cases have to be understood in the context of pre-democratic Mexico.

What the book perhaps lacks is broader discussion of the relationship between institutional and personnel changes so that we get more of a sense of what is driving what. That said, Camp's material is impressively full and interesting, and there is a real store of value to be found in these pages. The book is also a good read.