Chapter 6 Why Authoritarian Parties? The Regime Party as an ...

CHAPTER 6
and retirement policies within a dominant party regime. Due to a constitutionally mandated
one-term limit for all elected posts, a change in the administration every six and, at the
municipal level, three years implied the re-assignment or retirement for not only elected
politicians but also for thousands of government employees who held a position due their
political or clientelistic association with a politician in an elected post. Thus in the 1960s,
accordingtoBrandenburg(1964,157), everysix-year administrationwitnessed “aturnoverof
approximately 18,000elective officesand25,000appointive posts.” Thecoupling ofthefixed,
term-basedtimehorizonwiththePRI’s politicaldominance inMexico resulted inasystem of
upward and downward political mobility that was distinctively interlocked. The expectation
of such mobility is consistent with the present model’s emphasis on an appropriate balance
in the provision of incentives for political party service between the promise of promotion
and a positive rate of political retirement. In the case of Mexico, the nature of this incentive-
preserving balance is eloquently summarized by Grindle (1977, 42):
“The six-year procession often resembles a national game of musical chairs in
which the same actors may reappear in different positions; new players are freely
admitted, however, and the number of chairs may be enlarged to accommodate
some of them. Those who fail to find a chair and must leave the game do so
knowingly they have the possibility of reentering it at a later date.”
Note, however, thattheanalysis above doesnotrequire that theregime’s leadership retire
on a regular basis or even with a positive probability, as was the case in Mexico under the
PRI. This was a unique feature of the Mexican dictatorship, which I addressed in Chapter 4,
and which the present model does not account for. 17 Nonetheless, the regular re-assignment
17 In Chapter 4, I suggested that Mexican presidential term limits were a rather unique form of intertem-
24