After the 2000 presidential elections, the PRI yielded power peacefully to the PAN's candidate, Vicente Fox. The electoral defeat put an end to one of the most enduring autocracies in the twentieth century. Just twelve years before, the PRI had committed massive fraud against Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. One key difference between 1988 and 2000 was that Mexico's institutional setting had been transformed in fundamental ways. In 1988, the PRI controlled every single aspect of the organization, monitoring, and certification of the elections, and there were no independent sources of information to verify fraud. In 2000, a truly independent electoral commission, the IFE, was in charge of organizing the elections, from counting the vote to ratifying the results. The 2000 elections were also different because of the massive dissemination of polling information to the mass media. These new institutional and informational settings, I argue, proved critical in motivating the PRI to yield power peacefully in 2000.

This chapter develops a game of “electoral transitions” and employs some of the intuitions derived from it to explain, first, the political rationale, from the PRI's perspective, of granting independence to the IFE in 1994 and, second, some of the key differences between the 1988 and 2000 presidential elections that led the PRI to commit massive fraud in the former and to yield power peacefully in the latter. The model seeks to answer the following fundamental questions: When would a hegemonic party resort to electoral fraud?