The Emergence of Multiparty Competition in Mexican Politics

Mexico's presidential election in 2000 marked the end of 71 years of one-party rule, after a slow process of emergence of democratic institutions and viable second-party candidates. Yet the process of democratization has been uneven, proceeding much more rapidly in some regions than in others. This book examines whether diffusion processes have been at work or whether broader national processes of change have unfolded across an uneven socio-economic map. Using new methods of spatial econometrics, it explores how multi-party politics have emerged in a single country, testing both spatial diffusion and political development theories. Mexico makes an interesting study - with its contrasting borders, different kinds of geography, and levels of industrialisation and development, it involves a wide range of variables as well as socio-economic aspects of the population that display sharp regional differentiation. Data on vote shares from 1964 to 2000, for all three levels of political representation were examined for the three main parties and no evidence of spatial diffusion was found.
The book concludes that socio-economic factors in the main dictated that PAN appealed to urbanized, middle-class voters, PRD to those in extreme, very poor and peripheral regions and PRI to the indigenous population.