Political Reformism in Mexico: Salinas at the Brink

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Despite the Mexican regime's track record of adaptiveness, the 1980s seemingly altered the nature of political reform there. Secular, conjunctural, and policy trends attenuated traditional reformist mechanisms (i.e. the regime's capacity to co-opt, or corruption's “lubricating” potential), exposing a series of wrenching political dilemmas and potentially zero-sum equations. The watershed presidential election of July 1988 and the continuing challenge posed by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solórzano's PRD (Parttdo de la Revolutión Democrática) both reflected and crystallized these quandaries, magnifying the need and inherent dangers of reforming the one-party system. Yet during the ensuing years, and contrary to unwieldy predictions and scenarios, the regime neither unraveled (see Wiarda 1988/89), capitulated before a Cárdenas-led electoral or revolutionary front, nor stagnated. Instead it rebounded, raising new questions about Mexico's political future.

This publication has 13 references indexed in Scilit: