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The Political Development of Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Martin C. Needler
Martin C. Needler*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

Mexico's political experience over the last fifty years—since the Revolution of 1910—is highly significant, not only for the rest of Latin America, but for much of the rest of the world. For Mexico has accomplished the exceedingly difficult feat of breaking out of the vicious circle of dictatorship, misery, and revolution, and finding a way to a regime that is at once increasingly democratic, stable, and progressive. Despite a relative lack of many of the social, economic, and cultural characteristics which are often treated as prerequisites of stable democracy, Mexico seems to have solved the problem of assuring peaceful succession to leadership positions, while at the same time permitting wide participation in policy formation and allowing full civil freedom.

This type of end-result is almost always the conscious goal of political leaders throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia. While the Mexican road is hardly likely to be followed exactly elsewhere, other countries, to reach the same goal, will have to find equivalents for the solutions that Mexico has devised, for the obstacles in their paths are much the same. A study of the difficulties which Mexico has faced and how they were overcome may therefore have a generic interest, as being suggestive of some broader hypotheses about political development.

Type
Studies in Comparative Politics
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , June 1961 , pp. 308 - 312
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1961

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References

1 See the account of this conference in Manjárrez, Froylan C., La Jornada Institutional (Mexico, D.F., 1930), p. 68 Google Scholar.

2 The Seizure of Political Power, Philosophical Library (New York, 1958), p. 51 Google Scholar.

3 Terror and Progress, USSR (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), p. 31 Google Scholar.

4 Perhaps the best account of the organization of the PRI is in Padgett's, Leon Vincent unpublished Ph.D. thesis Popular Participation in the Mexican “One-Party” System. (Northwestern University, 1955)Google Scholar; cf. his “Mexico's One-Party System: Reevaluation,” in this Review, Vol. 51 (12, 1957), pp. 995 Google Scholar. Party structure is also discussed in Scott's, Robert E. recent Mexican Government in Transition, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1959 Google Scholar.

5 The Role of the Chief Executive in Mexico, Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1947, p. 476 Google Scholar.

6 Wolfe, Bertram and Rivera, Diego, Portrait of Mexico (New York, 1937), p. 199 Google Scholar.

7 Quoted in Whetten, Nathan L., Rural Mexico (University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 544–545 Google Scholar.

8 Prewitt, Virginia discusses the techniques used in deemphasizing the military in “The Mexican Army Today,” Foreign Affairs, 04, 1941 Google Scholar.

9 See Scott's, Robert E. Mexican Government in Transition (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1959), p. 195 Google Scholar.

10 For example, Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York, 1957)Google Scholar; or Schattschneider, E. E., Party Government (New York, 1942)Google Scholar.