Abstract
The laws of thermodynamics are said to predict that the bumble bee cannot fly. There are no equivalent laws governing political systems but the continued survival of the Mexican system still surprises. Every few years a scholarly analysis will declare that Mexican politics is in crisis;1 a former student of mine, apparently without irony, once wrote that ‘the most consistent feature of Mexican politics is the crisis’. Yet the Mexican system, unusually for Latin America, has produced two generations of political stability; for most Mexicans, these years have not been especially unhappy. So why is a system which is apparently capable of working quite well so regularly denounced as fundamentally unviable?
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Notes
For a short but amusing discussion of this point see M. Needier ‘The Significance of Recent Events for the Mexican Political System’, pp. 201–17. J. Gentleman, ed., Mexican Politics In Transition (Westview, 1987).
A good example is Judith Hellman, Mexico in Crisis (Holmes & Meier, 1983).
The most articulate critique of this kind is G. Newell and L. Rubio Mexico’s Dilemma: The Political Origins of the Economic Crisis (Westview, 1984).
Sol Sanders Mexico, Chaos on Our Doorstep (Madison, 1986).
H. Aguilar Camín, Despues del Milagro (Cal y Arena, 1988).
D. Cosío Villegas, El Sistema Politica Mexicana (Joaquin Mortiz, 1975) is the most effective exponent of the ‘extreme presidential-ism’ thesis; from a very different viewpoint see S.K. Purcell and J.F.H.Purcell, ‘State and Society in Mexico: must a stable polity be institutionalised?’ in World Politics, vol. 32, no. 2 (January 1980).
J.G. March and J.P. Olsen ‘The New Institutionalism’ American Political Science Review, no. 78 (1986) pp. 734–49.
This discussion is the subject of an extensive commentary in Costo Villegas, La Sucesión Presidencial ( Joaquin Mortiz, Mexico DF, 1975).
P.H. Smith, Labyrinths of Power. (Princeton, 1979).
M. Basáñez, La Lucha por la Hegemonia en México. (Siglo XXI, 1983).
For example Ian Roxborough, Unions and Politics in Mexico: The case of the automobile industry. (Cambridge University Press, 1984) and A. Alonso, El Conflicto Ferrocarrilero en Mexico (Era, 1972).
On this see Ilán Bizberg ‘La Crisis del Corporativismo Mexicano’ (Mimeo, 1989).
Gilbert Joseph ‘Caciquismo and the Revolution: Carrillo Puerto in Yucatán’, in D. Brading, ed., Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Dale Story, Industry, The State and Public Policy in Mexico (University of Texas, 1986).
See the various chapters in Silvia Maxfield and Ricardo Anzaldua Montoya, eds, Government and Private Sector in Contemporary Mexico (University of San Diego, 1987).
R.D. Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development (Johns Hopkins, 1971).
The classic statements that Mexican politics fits an authoritarian typology are found in E. Stevens, Protest and Response in Mexico (MIT Press, 1974) and S.K. Purcell, The Mexican Profit-Sharing Decision: Politics in an Authoritarian Regime (University of California, 1975).
The most notable account of this process is to be found in Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton University Press, 1982).
See also W. Pansters, ‘Paradoxes of Regional Power in Post-Revolutionary Mexico: the rise of Avila Camachismo in Puebla 1935–40’, in W. Pansters and A. Onwered, eds, Region, State and Capitalism in Mexico (CEDLA, 1989)
Jean Meyer’s The Cristero Revolt (Cambridge University Press, 1984) is an obvious exception.
H. Aguilar Camín, Despues del Milagro (Cal y Arena, 1988).
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© 1992 George Philip
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Philip, G. (1992). Introduction: The Mexican Political System. In: The Presidency in Mexican Politics. St Antony’s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12192-2_1
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