Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Courting Democracy in Mexico
- 1 Electoral Courts and Actor Compliance: Opposition-Authoritarian Relations and Protracted Transitions
- 2 Ties That Bind and Even Constrict: Why Authoritarians Tolerate Electoral Reforms
- 3 Mexico's National Electoral Justice Success: From Oxymoron to Legal Norm in Just over a Decade
- 4 Mexico's Local Electoral Justice Failures: Gubernatorial (S)Election Beyond the Shadows of the Law
- 5 The Gap Between Law and Practice: Institutional Failure and Opposition Success in Postelectoral Conflicts, 1989–2000
- 6 The National Action Party: Dilemmas of Rightist Oppositions Defined by Authoritarian Collusion
- 7 The Party of the Democratic Revolution: From Postelectoral Movements to Electoral Competitors
- 8 Dedazo from the Center to Finger Pointing from the Periphery: PRI Hard-Liners Challenge Mexico's Electoral Institutions
- 9 A Quarter Century of “Mexicanization”: Lessons from a Protracted Transition
- Appendix A Coding the Postelectoral Conflict Dependent Variable
- Appendix B Coding of Independent Variables
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The National Action Party: Dilemmas of Rightist Oppositions Defined by Authoritarian Collusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Courting Democracy in Mexico
- 1 Electoral Courts and Actor Compliance: Opposition-Authoritarian Relations and Protracted Transitions
- 2 Ties That Bind and Even Constrict: Why Authoritarians Tolerate Electoral Reforms
- 3 Mexico's National Electoral Justice Success: From Oxymoron to Legal Norm in Just over a Decade
- 4 Mexico's Local Electoral Justice Failures: Gubernatorial (S)Election Beyond the Shadows of the Law
- 5 The Gap Between Law and Practice: Institutional Failure and Opposition Success in Postelectoral Conflicts, 1989–2000
- 6 The National Action Party: Dilemmas of Rightist Oppositions Defined by Authoritarian Collusion
- 7 The Party of the Democratic Revolution: From Postelectoral Movements to Electoral Competitors
- 8 Dedazo from the Center to Finger Pointing from the Periphery: PRI Hard-Liners Challenge Mexico's Electoral Institutions
- 9 A Quarter Century of “Mexicanization”: Lessons from a Protracted Transition
- Appendix A Coding the Postelectoral Conflict Dependent Variable
- Appendix B Coding of Independent Variables
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
… Because all subjects cannot be armed, if those whom you arm are benefited, one can act with more security toward the others. The difference of treatment that they recognize regarding themselves makes them obligated to you….
Niccoló Machiavelli's The Prince (83)The National Action Party's (PAN) creators never really intended for their “party,” envisioned as a debating society with a ballot presence, to evolve into a potent electoral force, much less the engine of Mexico's electoral opening. Most of the party's doctrinaire founders wanted a quiet eddy of political discussion in the tumultuous sea of authoritarianism that surrounded them. However, while most of the founders wrote statutes and bylaws as narrow exercises in the citizenship they never expected to broadly practice, founder Manuel Gómez Morín accurately predicted the manipulation of “loyal opposition” parties (such as the fledgling PAN) by authoritarian incumbents. Gómez Morín wrote in 1939 that “electoral participation at this time could very well become an open escape-valve to put an end to public pressures, a means to exhaust the impulse of the citizenry, a path to dissolve – possibly through superficial concessions that would conceal the real issues – the collective impulse …” (von Sauer 1974, 101). Gómez Morín used terms remarkably similar to those of authoritarian Brazil's engineer of “the strategy of opening from above” in the 1970s, Golbery de Cuota e Silva, who, true to the PAN founder's projections, viewed political liberalization, using the same “escape valve” metaphor, as a necessary evil, the only alternative to instability (Veja 1980, 6).
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- Information
- Courting Democracy in MexicoParty Strategies and Electoral Institutions, pp. 162 - 197Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003