Conclusion

This closing chapter summarizes the central argument in this book and the evidence supporting it. Beginning with a brief look at the merendero program initiated in 2017 by the Rodríguez-Saá machine in response to an electoral setback, this chapter offers a discussion of the findings of this book and the implications of this study for the consolidation of democracy in Argentina and Mexico. This study’s findings also have implications for the many other uneven emerging democracies around the world that confront the persistence of subnational political machines. Also addressed are the ways in which attention to subnational political processes can further the understanding of a society’s political culture and the forces that shape individuals’ attitudes toward and engagement with their political world. Finally, this chapter brings the reader’s attention to several avenues for future research that this book begins to explore.

Stacking the Deck

This chapter evaluates the proposition that patterns of citizen engagement with politics in dominant-party enclaves will reflect the incentives and punishments meted out by the machine itself. The authors present an analysis of three forms of political participation—voting, protest, and local civic activism. This analysis reveals that across each of these forms of participation, the profile of individuals living in dominant-party systems who are most likely to engage in such activities is distinct from the profile of likely participants living in multiparty systems. Most important, participation in dominant-party systems appears to be, in part, a function of one’s support for the machine, while in multiparty systems, the profile of participants more closely approximates that of the active participant in established democracies. Further, the chapter finds distinct patterns of political efficacy among dominant-party and multiparty citizens.

Severed Linkages

This chapter focuses on the question of whether individuals living in political machines evaluate their incumbent government in ways that are similar to their counterparts in multiparty systems. Previous chapters established that dominant-party citizens are more likely to be exposed to corruption and vote-buying efforts and tend to be less supportive of basic democratic institutional processes. The expectation is that individuals forced to play the daily game of machine politics will not use common incumbent government performance metrics such as evaluations of the state of the economy, levels of crime and insecurity, and the quality of local health services. Through analysis of self-reported voting intentions, the chapter finds that respondents’ views on these issue areas have little impact on whether or not they will support the incumbent. This severed linkage also appears, to a lesser extent, in the evaluations of national-level politicians made by dominant-party respondents.

Tilling the Soil of an Uneven Landscape

This chapter offers an evaluation of a central proposition of the study—that citizens living in dominant-party enclaves will be more exposed to and familiar with such political machine tactics as clientelism and corruption than those citizens living in multiparty systems. The empirical analysis offers robust support for the idea that while no political system is immune to dirty politics, individuals living in dominant-party enclaves are far more likely to have direct experience with corrupt public officials and efforts to buy their votes than their counterparts in multiparty provinces. The chapter concludes with an analysis of citizens’ perceptions of corruption and government efforts to combat it. We find that those victims of corruption in dominant-party enclaves are less inclined to view corruption as a problem than their multiparty neighbors. For the former group of citizens, the dirty politics of political machines appears to be viewed as business as usual.

Conceptualizing and Measuring Dominant-Party Enclaves

Chapter 3 begins with a brief review of previous efforts to measure regimes at the national level and then introduces the study’s central concept, dominant-party enclaves, and the measurement strategy the authors employ to capture that concept. The latter focuses on the first transfer of power from incumbent to opposition as the marker for a system’s move from single-party dominance toward a multiparty electoral environment. This approach is then applied to the provinces and states of Argentina and Mexico, in which 16 cases of dominant-party enclaves are identified. These cases, home to more than 30 percent of citizens of the two countries, serve as the focus for the remainder of the study. The chapter then concludes with further exploration of the two cases that serve as prototypes for this study of dominant-party enclaves: the province of San Luis in Argentina and the state of Mexico (Edomex) in Mexico.

Dominant-Party Citizens

This chapter presents a theory of dominant-party citizens that posits a connection between one’s subnational political system and her political attitudes and behaviors. It then introduces the three governing characteristics of dominant-party enclaves that are most influential in shaping the ways citizens think about and engage with politics. These include: (1) the politicization of the rule of law, (2) the partisan use of state resources, and (3) the tilting of the electoral playing field. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how such subnational political dynamics can not only shape the ways individuals engage with politics at the local and provincial level but also influence their interactions with their national system. This work offers a new direction for political behavior research in seeking to understand the effect of local political context on citizen attitudes and participation, and it represents an effort to redirect the conversation toward the broader consequences of this local-level dynamic.

Welcome to the Machine

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the dominant-party machines of San Luis, Argentina, and the state of Mexico (Edomex), Mexico. Through this look at the political systems of two subnational units in two distinct countries separated by thousands of miles, this chapter also introduces the reader to the principal motivation guiding the subsequent analyses: How do such dominant-party enclaves affect the political attitudes and behaviors of citizens living within them? In Argentina and Mexico, like in much of the world, there are democracies that are being dragged down by subnational dominant-party enclaves. This reality has consequences for their citizens and for broader efforts to deepen democratic rule.

The View from Inside the Machine

This chapter explores the proposition that intranational differences in political culture are one consequence of an uneven political regime landscape in which subnational dominant-party enclaves exist alongside multiparty systems. The chapter offers robust support for this proposition, demonstrating that individuals living in the dominant-party machines that are the focus of this study tend to be less supportive of democracy in the abstract. They also hold more ambivalent views regarding key features of democracy in practice such as limits on executive power and other institutional checks and balances. The conclusion for this chapter examines the role that exposure to corruption and vote-buying efforts plays in shaping citizens’ views toward democracy. The finding is that, indeed, the heightened exposure to such practices in dominant-party enclaves contributes substantially to the lower support for democracy expressed by those individuals living within them.