There is no doubt that AMLO intends to construct a new political machine. The question is whether doing so will degrade the quality of Mexican democracy or Mexican governance. (These are correlated but not the same.) In a couple of different posts, I am going to make the case that AMLO’s machine is unlikely to make either situation much worse — because both Mexico’s democracy and its governance are already highly degraded. Things can always get worse, but AMLO is unlikely to make it so.
For this post, I want to park questions about Mexican democracy under AMLO and consider what might happen to the quality of Mexico’s governance.
Let’s ask, what does a democratic political machine do? It doesn’t blatantly steal elections: that’s a dictatorship. But democratic machine politics is different in kind from regular interest group politics. Interest group politics works by promising veterans higher benefits or auto companies a higher tariff; conversely, it works by cutting veterans benefits or increasing taxes on gasoline. Machine politics works by offering Josefina the Welder a job or Ford Motor Company a special break; conversely, it works by stopping Josefina from getting a mortgage or launching audits against Ford executives.
Successful machine politics does not require stolen elections, but it makes opposition harder to organize, increases the autonomy of machine leaders and weakens democracy’s ability to hold officials accountable or translate public desires into public policies.
The PRI under President Peña used machine politics to implement energy reform in 2013. In order to pass and implement the reform, the Peña administration needed the support of the national oil workers’ union. At the time of the reform the oil industry provided 4% of all public revenue and supported much of the economy in the states Veracruz and Tabasco. A crippling oil strike could sink the party’s position in the midterms or next presidential election.
How to get union support? First, threaten the union leader. Carlos Romero Deschamps happened to be a sitting PRI senator and “enjoyed” second-place on the Forbes list of the ten most corrupt Mexicans. On a monthly salary of US$1,864, Deschamps managed to accumulate a $1.5m “cottage” in Cancún, a son who drove a $2m Ferrari, and a daughter who liked to post Facebook images of her jet-setting her three English bulldogs around the world. In other words, a serious corruption investigation would toss him and his children into jail.
President Peña made it clear to Deschamps that he had no choice but to go along with the reform in the most obvious way: in February 2013 he took the powerful leader of the teacher’s union, Elba Esther Gordillo — number 1 on the Forbes list and head of the New Alliance Party — and had her arrested on anticorruption charges. Gordillo was fortunate enough to be over 70 years old and therefore be eligible for house arrest instead of prison — she owned a rather nice apartment in Polanco, Mexico City’s equivalent of the Upper East Side — but the message was clear. Deschamps brought the union on board with reform.
Alternative facts are not an American monopoly: in a rather startling 2014 declaration, union leader Carlos Deschamps declared that energy reform would bring no layoffs. Even more startlingly, Deschamps denied that mass firings were taking place even after they began. According to him, only oil workers employed in private companies lost their jobs.
Source: Abad and Maurer (2018).
Unfortunately, the reality was otherwise. Reform let Pemex lay off almost 30,000 employees in a three-year period. (See above.) Layoffs hit unionized and non-unionized workers alike; in fact, the share of union workers declined slightly during the mass layoffs of 2015. But the machine kept that from triggering strikes by (1) concentrating the layoffs in places that were already voting against the PRI—i.e., Tabasco and Veracruz—where workers did protest but the protests could be controlled; and (2) making sure that wages went up dramatically for those workers who kept their heads down, kept their jobs, and accepted the reforms. (See below.)
Source: Abad and Maurer (2018).
Of course, you would be right that this particular exercise of machine politics removed most of the putative fiscal gains from allowing the layoffs. The chart to the right shows payroll costs as a percent of Pemex revenue: they did not fall.
But that’s how machine politics works. Rents are generated and distributed on one end; individuals and individual group leaders are punished on the other.
Absent the subversion of democracy, it’s hard to see how AMLO could build a machine more effective than the PRI, circa 2012-18. (To reiterate, the PRI circa 1929-1997 was an institutionalized dictatorship masquerading as a political machine, not a genuine democratic political machine.) There is no obvious source of rents that the PRI did not already tap. There are places that have improved — say, competition policy — but where it would be hard for Morena to loosen the rules without pushback. Elsewhere, things are not good, as this OECD report on electricity procurement shows. In that sense, things cannot really get worse.
And a democratic machine, no matter how efficient, can’t stay in power if it really lets things go to hell. The PRI discovered that this year, losing even its heartland in the town of Atlacomulco, Mexico State. In other words, straight-up machine politics means more of the same in Mexico and is self-limiting if it delivers truly bad results — albeit less self-limiting than in democracies free of machine politics.
Morena will try to build a machine. But building a machine is hard and machines themselves do not guarantee that a bad government can remain in power.
The real worry, I think, is democratic backsliding. That is, machine politics plus institutional changes to make the vote less effective and hamstring the opposition. Without democratic backsliding, you might get a maquina Morena, but you won’t get a dark machine.
Thoughts?
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