Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Thursday, December 03, 2009

Party competition is not the same as democracy

If it looks like progress and sounds like progress toward democracy, is it progress? Maybe.

Two decades after making history as the first opposition governor in modern Mexico, Ernesto Ruffo Appel [left] yesterday lambasted the country’s political parties, saying they are failing its citizens.

The parties “are defending their own positions, their own groups, but they are not defending Mexico,” said Ruffo, a member of President Felipe Calderón’s Conservative National Action Party, or PAN...

When Ruffo won the governorship, Baja California was the only state in Mexico governed by the PAN. Today, seven states are governed by PAN party members, including Baja California’s José Guadalupe Osuna Millán. Nineteen others are governed by the PRI and six by the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution, the PRD.

While breaking the PRI’s grip, “political alternation has not necessarily represented a step toward democracy,” said Eliseo Mendoza Berrueto, a member of the PRI and former governor of the state of Coahuila. Many of Mexico’s issues, such as poverty and corruption, have not been resolved under the PAN, he said.

But other participants said the past 20 years have brought important changes, both to Baja California and to Mexico. Under Ruffo, Baja California pioneered a tamper-proof voter identification card, a concept that was adopted nationally and helped minimize electoral fraud that once was prevalent in Mexico.

Yet despite electoral reforms, “there has been no reform of society, in the sense of finding ways to express citizens’ concerns and dissatisfaction,” Ruffo said.

He added that once in power, “we began winning and we began closing ourselves off, in order to control the positions that we were acquiring” — a practice that emulated the PRI...

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Labels: democratization, Mexico, parties, political culture