The Changing Party of the Institutional Revolution

Abstract

We know little about how formerly hegemonic parties react to drastic changes in the external political environment. Under non-competitive electoral conditions, the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) was characterized by centralized legislative recruitment and candidate selection that delivered a large percentage of coveted senate candidacies to national-level party politicians and bureaucrats. This centralized and nationalized recruitment gave the leader of the PRI enormous control over his wide-flung political elite. Since elections have become competitive, the PRI has decentralized its recruitment of senate candidates, searching out those most popular with state voters. This work compares the PRI candidates’ backgrounds from the non-competitive and competitive periods, and runs a logistical regression to ascertain if there is a relation between competition and types of party politicians winning nominations. The article demonstrates, using first-of-its-kind data on professional backgrounds of candidates (rather than sitting legislators), that legislative recruitment in a federal context has been decentralized in Mexico.