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Policy Cycles in Mexican Presidential Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Dale Story
Dale Story*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Arlington
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Several aspects of presidential politics in Mexico have become well-established traditions. The president of Mexico is constitutionally limited to a single term of six years. Also, the president is always a member of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Although the details of the selection process are not well known, the PRI presidential candidate for the next election is hand-picked by the sitting president. Despite an assured victory for the PRI candidate, the nominee always mounts a barnstorming campaign covering all of Mexico, a procedure that helps to legitimize the domination of the PRI. All of these factors are the “givens” in the equation explaining presidential successions in Mexico. But at least one phenomenon—that of policy changes associated with presidential successions—has been much discussed but never critically tested. Briefly stated, various hypotheses suggest that new presidents significantly alter the policies of their predecessor, that predictable shifts from one side of the ideological spectrum to the other occur as presidents succeed one another, and that even certain patterns in policy innovation are evident within six-year presidential terms in Mexico. All of these hypotheses assume that policy decisions and outcomes are greatly affected by the politics of presidential transitions. The purpose of this article is to initiate a process of examining more rigorously the various propositions relating to policy cycles in Mexican politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , 1985 , pp. 139 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

Research for this article was supported by a fellowship from the Mellon Foundation and a Fulbright research grant. Colleagues and facilities at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas were especially helpful in formulating some of these ideas and gathering the data.

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