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On Measuring Mexican Presidential Ideology Through Budgets: A Reappraisal of the Wilkie Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Kenneth M. Coleman  and
John Wanat
Kenneth M. Coleman
Affiliation:
University of Kentucky
John Wanat
Affiliation:
University of Kentucky
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In recent studies by historians and political scientists there has been increasing attention paid to the question of executive impact on the budgetary process in Latin America. Wilkie's prize-winning research into the broad outlines of budgetary discretion in Revolutionary Mexico has both stimulated controversy and redoubled efforts to employ budgetary data productively in assessing the impact of who governs upon how people are governed.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 1975 , pp. 77 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 by Latin American Research Review

References

Notes

1. James W. Wilkie, The Mexican Revolution: Federal Expenditure and Social Change Since 1910, Second Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).

2. Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, “Notes on Quantitative History: Federal Expenditure and Social Change in Mexico Since 1910,” LARR, 5:1:87-91 (Spring 1970). See also Felix G. Boni and Mitchell A. Seligson, “Applying Quantitative Techniques to Quantitative History: Poverty and Federal Expenditures in Mexico,” LARR, 8: 2:105-10 (Summer 1973).

3. Among recent calls to research one might note: William P. McGreevy, “Recent Materials and Opportunities for Quantitative Research in Latin American History: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” LARR, 9:2: 73-82 (Summer 1974), and James W. Wilkie, “New Hypotheses for Statistical Research in Recent Mexican History,” LARR, 6:2:3-17 (Summer 1971). A recent example of the type of research stimulated by Wilkie is Enrique A. Baloyra, “Oil Policies and Budgets in Venezuela, 1938-1968,” LARR, 9:2: 23-72 (Summer 1974). Other recent unpublished examples are cited in Note 16 of the Baloyra article.

4. See, for example, the literature review by Carolyn and Martin Needleman, entitled “Who Rules Mexico? A Critique of Some Current Views on the Mexican Political Process,” Journal of Politics, 31: 4: 1011-34 (November 1969), for a discussion of those schools of scholarship which hold that the Mexican president is severely circumscribed by bureaucratic or political forces beyond his control. See also Note 8 below.

5. Op. cit., p. 278.

6. This exception is primarily because Wilkie places public debt repayment in the administrative category. Hence, López Mateos, who pushed to pay off prematurely a good number of national debts, found himself spending well above projected figures for debt repayment in almost evesy year of his presidency. Ibid., pp. 115-16.

7. Ibid. See Table 1-10, p. 26.

8. See Note 4. In the context of United States budgetary practice there is ample evidence of institutional and technical constraints that reduce the latitude of the chief executive in working his will with the budget. Mandated and near mandated expenditures, for example, constituted about 75% of the fiscal year 1974 budget in the U.S. See U.S. Congress, House, Joint Study Committee on Budget Control, Improving Congressional Control Over Budgetary Outlay and Receipt Totals, 93rd Congress, 1st Session, House Report No. 93-13 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), p. 22; John R. Gist, The Effect of Budget Controllability on the Theory of Incrementalism (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 26 April 1974); John Wanat, “Bases of Budgetary Incrementalism,” American Political Science Review, 68: 3: 1221-28 (September 1974); Murray Weidenbaum, “On the Effectiveness of Congressional Control of the Public Purse,” National Tax Journal, (December 1965).

9. Ibid., pp. 35-39.

10. Interview by Kenneth M. Coleman with a bureau chief in Ministry of Hacienda, 27-28 June 1973.

11. Ibid.

12. Charles W. Anderson, Politics and Economic Change in Latin America: The Governing of Restless Nations (New York: Van Nostrand, 1967), p. 162.

13. Ibid., pp. 162-96.

14. Ibid., p. 163.

15. Ibid., pp. 175-76.

16. Roger D. Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), p. 95. Similarly, Morris Singer's discussion of income distribution leads one to the conclusion that Mexico's economic development strategy of the late 1950s and 1960s was far from revolutionary, indeed not even wholly reformist. See his Growth, Equality and the Mexican Experience (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), esp. pp. 184 and 274-75.

17. Sidney Siegel, Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences, (New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1956), pp. 36-42.

18. In surveys executed by Coleman in Mexico City during 1969, 1971 and 1973, López Mateos emerged as the most favorably evaluated recent president since 1934. On a scale from 1-10, 10 being most favorable, the mean 1973 ratings of recent presidents were: Lázaro Cárdenas, 8.417; Manuel Ávila Camacho, 6.979; Miguel Aleman, 5.900; Adolfo Ruiz Coranes, 7.480; Adolfo López Mateos, 9.157; Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, 6.922; and Luis Echeverría Álvarez, 7.233.

19. Wilkie, op cit., p. 284.