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Presidential Succession and Political Rationality in Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Steven E. Sanderson
Steven E. Sanderson
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Abstract

Although presidential succession in Mexico is shrouded in mystery, this article suggests an indirect method of understanding the politics surrounding that process. The fundamental framework of presidential politics has changed in the 1970s from populist redistribution to oil patronage. Such a change has involved the collapse of traditional, party-led populism at the end of the Echeverria presidency and the reorientation of the Mexican economy during President Lopez Portillo's “Alliance for Production,” made possible largely by the oil boom. The conservative tone of Lopez Portillo's administration, combined with the relative strengthening of the state via increased public spending, has shaped policy choices for the new president, Miguel de la Madrid. The conjuncture of the collapse of populism and the rise and fall of the oil-boom economy results in a state whose political flexibility is limited by the weakness of “new populist” politics, while oil patronage is reduced by fiscal constraints and external payments crises.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , April 1983 , pp. 315 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1983

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References

1 Vincent Padgett, L., The Mexican Political System (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).Google Scholar

2 Brandenburg, Frank, The Making of Modern Mexico (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964).Google Scholar

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4 Ignacio Ramírez, “El gran elector es el presidente: Roberto Casillas,” ibid., 39–42.

5 Pedro Alisedo, “El destape siempre se anticipó al partido, nunca al presidente,” ibid., 93–102.

6 Cárdenas, Lázaro, Apuntes (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1974), IV, 154–55.Google Scholar

7 The policy orientation of the state is assumed to be a function of shifting power coalitions representing politically relevant forces in society. This assumption is consistent to some extent with the bargaining model of Purcell, Susan Kaufman and Purcell, John F. H. in “State and Society in Mexico: Must a Stable Polity Be Institutionalized?” World Politics, XXXII (January 1980), 194–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar My presentation also counts on the institutionalization of certain stable economic and political relationships and a more direct understanding of the relationship between state and civil society.

8 This assumption reverses a more common Mexican political algorithm, in which the PRI is the “independent variable.”

9 Political rationality involves the logic of political development designs, the criteria for decision making, and the boundaries of possible change. If coalitions are intermediate elements between forces in society and the state itself, a number of points of political rationality suggest themselves: structural limitations of the economy, political principles of selection, criteria of state survival, and other modes of intermediation and transformation. See Wright, Erik Olin, Class, Crisis and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978)Google Scholar, and Therborn, Goran, What Does the Ruling Class Do when It Rules? (London: New Left Books, 1978)Google Scholar, for suggestive abstract treatments of some of these points at a much more general level of analysis. Here I will concentrate on the specific principles of elite selection regarding policy orientation and the goals of economic development.

10 The constitutive principles of the populist-redistributive and oil-patronage models are described in the text. The key element of these models at the political level, however, is the different composition of their elite actors. In the populist model, the PRI and “left” elements within the state apparatus itself contrived to mobilize the working class, the peasants, and “national capital” on behalf of a relatively coherent national project of development. The oil-patronage model still uses some of the language of the Mexican revolution at the ideological level, but in fact does not seriously treat national capital differently from international capital in politics. The most important peak associations of Mexican business—the Consejo Coordinador Empresarial (Entrepreneurial Coordinating Council) and the Consejo Mexicano de Hombres de Negocios (Mexican Council of Businessmen)—do not admit of Obregón's populist distinction between “honest capital” and “imperialist Wall Street.”

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14 Bailey, John J., “Presidency, Bureaucracy, and Administrative Reform in Mexico: The Secretariat of Programming and Budget,” Inter-American Economic Affairs, XXXIV (Summer 1980), 27–59Google Scholar; Wionczek, Miguel S., “Incomplete Formal Planning: Mexico,” in Hagen, Everett E., ed., Planning Economic Development (Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1963), 150–82.Google Scholar

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16 “Economy of violence,” of course, is borrowed from Wolin, Sheldon, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 220ff.Google Scholar, to describe the calculus of repression employed by the artful prince as a conscious instrument of politics. The measured application of violence has long been one of the most striking aspects of Mexican political control. It is difficult to estimate the degree to which it is “rationally” applied for the good of the state, as opposed to being used sporadically from lack of coherent organization. For more specific treatment of authoritarianism, co-optation, and control in Mexico, see Hellman, Judith Adler, Mexico in Crisis (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978)Google Scholar, and Cockcroft, James D., “Coercion and Ideology in Mexican Politics,” in Cockcroft, and others, Dependence and Underdevelopment (New York: Anchor, 1972), 245–67.Google Scholar

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19 Basañez (fn. 17), throughout; Tello, Carlos, La política económica en México, 1970–1976 (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1979)Google Scholar, chap. 2.

20 State power, of course, is a concept about which much has been written. Here the state is defined as the political embodiment of the social “pact of domination.” State power refers to the enacted capacity to influence political behavior and economic direction. The state apparatus is the ensemble of governmental, bureaucratic, and entrepreneurial organizations the public sector has available to ensure the reproduction of the social pact of domination. In Mexico, the state has historically enjoyed power due to the formative role it played in the growth of the economic miracle, its traditionally high level of public intervention in the economy, and the identification of the dominant political party with the state apparatus and important forces in civil society.

21 Legitimacy refers here not so much to consensus and participation as to the minimum conditions that permit the state and the economy to reproduce their own existence. That is, regardless of the merit or persuasive skills traditionally assigned to the Mexican polity, we are here referring to a more parsimonious concept of legitimacy, focusing on the state's ability to continue.

22 Whitehead, Laurence, “Mexico from Bust to Boom: A Political Evaluation of the 1976–1979 Stabilization Programme,” World Development, VIII (1980), 843–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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24 Tello (fn. 19), 135ff.

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27 The Sistema Alimentario Mexicano (SAM) is a multi-agency program under the new National System of Evaluation; it was established in March 1980. It has the combined goals of subsidizing farmers engaged in the production of basic grains, improving the nutritional base of the Mexican diet, integrating marginal zones into the national food system, and rationalizing the productive potential of the Mexican agricultural sector. Despite the participation of many well-known campesinistas in its direction, the SAM has not sought to mobilize campesinos at the political level in the style of the old agrarian reform agencies.

28 Real wage rates, based on the average daily minimum wage, declined from 120.70 deflated pesos after the 1976 devaluation to 94.09 pesos at the end of 1980, according to Nacional Financiera, S. A., La economía mexicana en cifras [hereafter cited as NAFINSA] (Mexico: NAFINSA, 1981).Google Scholar A generous wage settlement at the end of 1981 momentarily countered that trend, only to be nullified by the recent devaluations, inflation, and currency crisis; there is no real expectation that de la Madrid's administration will pursue an incomes policy attacking that decline in real wages. After the bank nationalization of September 1, the Confederation of Mexican Workers announced a moratorium on extraordinary wage demands until the end of 1982. London Times, September 10, 1982.

29 See Frenkel, Roberto and O'Donnell, Guillermo, “The ‘Stabilization Programs’ of the International Monetary Fund and Their Internal Impacts,” in Fagen (fn. 17), 171–216Google Scholar; Thomas Skidmore, “The Politics of Stabilization in Postwar Latin America,” in Malloy (fn. 11), 149–90; and Foxley, Alejandro and Whitehead, Laurence, “Economic Stabilization in Latin America: Political Dimensions,” World Development, VIII (1980), 823–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Whitehead (fn. 22), throughout.

31 CIDE (fn. 25), 9–22; Eatwell, John and Singh, Ajit, “Si se encuentra ‘sobrecalentada’ la economía mexicana? Un análisis de los problemas de política económica a corto y mediano plazo,” in CIDE (fn. 25), 253–78Google Scholar; Foro Internacional, XVIII (April–June 1978, special issue on petroleum); Grayson, George, The Politics of Mexican Oil (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980).Google Scholar

32 Campos, Rolando Cordera and Tello, Carlos, México: la disputa por la nación (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1981).Google Scholar The evaporation of that “nationalist” model is apparent in President de la Madrid's inaugural rejection of “Economic populism.” See “Mexico's New President Cheers U.S. Bankers,” Business Week, December 13, 1982, p. 27.

33 That does not guarantee an end to exchange-rate speculation and capital flight, of course. It merely asserts the recent attractiveness of Mexico as an investment area relative to other economies currently in recession.

34 NAFINSA (fn. 28), 305.

35 Corredor, Jaime, “El petroleo en México,” unpub., 1980.Google Scholar At the time he wrote this manuscript, Corredor was special advisor for energy to the Mexican president.

36 U.S. Department of Commerce, Foreign Economic Trends and their Implications for the United States: Mexico (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., February 1981), 4Google Scholar; Banco Nacional de México, unpub. data, 1982.

37 México, Banco Nacional de, Examen de la situación económica de México [hereafter cited as BANAMEX], ILVIII (January 1982), 11–12.Google Scholar

38 Bailey (fn. 14), 47ff.

59 In 1938, Cárdenas reformed the Partido Nacional Revolucionario and constituted the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana, based on four elements: labor, agrarian, military, and popular. The military was later dropped from the PRM under Ávila Camacho. In 1946, the PRM became the PRI.

40 Brandenburg (fn. 2), 93; Sanderson (fn. 12), 138.

41 Secretaría de Programación y Presupuesto y Banco de México, S.A., Sistema de cuentas nacionales de México, I, Resumen general (Mexico, 1981).Google Scholar

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43 Therborn (fn. 9), 54.

44 Ibid., 52–60.

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46 U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Mexico: Annual Feed and Grain Report,” U.S. Embassy in Mexico, 1981.Google Scholar

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49 Ibid., 17.

50 Cárdenas (fn. 6), i, 344.

51 Interview, Mexico City, July 29, 1981.