CIAO DATE: 04/06

Clientelism in Flux: Democratization and Interest Intermediation in Contemporary Mexico

Introduction

The buoyant optimism spurred by the rush to democracy throughout Latin America along with the high, even if less widespread, hopes about market reform of the last decade have given way to a different mood. The excitement associated with large scale social change has subsided and a certain disillusionment, a hangover of sorts, has begun to set in.

Emergent democracies and market economies in the region have turned out to be not particularly pretty. With very few exceptions, they stand as diminished and distorted versions of democracy and capitalism in the advanced North. A little like undergoing plastic surgery hoping to look like Demi Moore and, after all the pains and all the troubles, finding in the mirror one's ugly old self still very much there.

Faced with the new realities, scholars have begun to focus, once again, on the underlying deformities of Latin American polities and seem to be on the verge of concluding that, one more time, all has changed and yet all has remained the same. "A notable case point is that pervasive, multiheaded thing that goes by the academic name of 'clientelism'".

Some analysts, like Guillermo O'Donnell, decry the persistence of clientelism and urge us to look more closely at how its endurance is shaping the nature and operation of the new Latin American democracies. Conservatives smile and condescendingly point out that the high democratic hopes were, of course, ill founded. Latin American societies need to be governed and clientelism along with other 'dirty' political practices provide the only means to get the job done. Common to both stances is the view of clientelism as uniform and static. Shared also is the lack of systematic attention to its relationship with broader political and economic structures.

In this essay I take up the question posed by O'Donnell concerning the interplay between clientelism and democracy. In contrast to dominant views, I will here emphasize the changing nature and scope of clientelistic arrangements in democratizing contexts. The paper starts off with a discussion about the uses and means of the term clientelism whose purpose is to suggest ways through which to sharpen the concept's boundaries. The following section briefly reviews the various analytical lenses through which the relationship between clientelism and democracy has been approached and sketches an alternative. The last part of the essay explores the impact of rising electoral competition on the nature and scope of clientelism in Mexico as means to develop and illustrate the potential usefulness of the conceptual and analytical claims outlined in the initial sections.

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