Mexico has a presidential system with
strong and independent legislative, executive and judicial branches. The
doctrine of the separation of powers, which did not function in practice between
1929 and 1997, when the single official party, the Institutional Revolutionary
Party (PRI), controlled both the executive and Congress, has been resurrected
and is now the dominant feature of politics at the federal level.
The president is elected by plurality
vote. In the 1988 and 1994 elections, the winner won about half of the votes
cast, but in the 2000 election the winner, Vicente Fox, won only 42.5 per cent
of the votes. Proposals exist to amend the constitution to introduce a run-off
election between the two front-runners if no candidate wins an absolute
majority in the first round. Their success will depend primarily on the
electoral prospects of the major parties, as well as considerations of the cost
of a second round.
The president is elected for a six-year
term and can never be re-elected or reappointed. This prevents presidents from
becoming entrenched in power, but it also diminishes their accountability
because they never have to face the electorate again. Considering the
ideological and symbolic roots behind the prohibition on presidential
re-election (it was a focal point in the Mexican Revolution), it is unlikely
that this clause will be repealed soon.
The Mexican Congress is bicameral, the
Chamber of Deputies elected for three-year terms and the Senate elected for six
years (synchronized with the presidential term). Both chambers are elected
through mixed systems, using FPTP and List PR.
The Chamber of Deputies has 500 members,
300 elected by FPTP in single-member districts (SMDs) and 200 elected by List
PR in five 40-member regional districts. The 300 FPTP seats are apportioned to
the states in proportion to population, with the restriction that no state can
have fewer than two seats. The National Electoral Institute (INE)—as a
consequence of an electoral reform that took place through 2013 and 2014, it
substituted the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE)—, the independent electoral
authority, uses the pure Sainte-Laguë Method to allocate seats among the
states. INE then creates SMDs of roughly equal population within each of the
states, generally favouring municipal boundaries over achieving electoral
districts with equal populations, and also divides the country into the five
40-member districts for the purpose of elections to the List PR seats. Each
party nominates a candidate for each SMD and presents a rank-ordered list of 40
candidates for each of the five regional districts.
Parties may form total or partial
coalitions for electoral purposes, running the same candidate in some districts.
If they do they must submit agreements before INE. If parties form a coalition
to elect the president, then they must form a coalition for all the Chamber of
Deputies and Senate contests as well. In the 2000 election, two of the three
presidential candidates were backed by coalitions. In the 2003 legislative
elections, there was a partial coalition between PRI and the Greens, which ran
together in 97 single-member districts and separately in 203, and had separate
PR lists (the parties had agreed on how to divide the votes from the 97 districts
for the purposes of assigning seats to the List PR candidates, which is a
possibility no longer available after the 2013 electoral reform).
Voters cast a single ballot for deputies.
The sum of all of the votes from the district FPTP contests is then used to
calculate the number of PR seats to be allocated to each party, using the
Largest Remainder Method and the Hare Quota, and there is a 3 per cent
threshold based on the total national vote included in the law. The number of
PR seats assigned to a party is independent of the number of FPTP districts
won, with two important exceptions: no party can ever win more than 300 seats,
and no party’s share of the 500 seats can be more than 8 percentage points
higher than its share of the valid vote. A party must therefore win at least
42.2 per cent of the valid vote plus at least 167 districts to win 251 seats in
the Lower Chamber. In 1997 and 2003, the PRI’s share of the seats was limited
by the 8 per cent rule. In 2000, the 8 per cent rule did not affect either PRI
or the National Action Party (PAN).
Seats are assigned to party list deputies
in the five 40-member regional districts, also using the Hare Quota with
largest remainders. The lists are rank-ordered and closed, so that the deputies
higher on the list are elected first, and voters cannot modify the order of the
list.
The move towards pluralism and multiparty
politics in Mexico has been a slow process of evolution. Since 1979 there have
been extensive reforms to the electoral formulas used to elect the Chamber of
Deputies. The formula used in the 1979, 1982 and 1985 elections had 300 SMDs
and 100 party list seats, which were restricted to parties that did not win
more than 60 districts. The formula used in 1988 increased the number of party
list seats to 200, but guaranteed that the party that won a plurality of
districts would win a majority of seats, regardless of its share of the vote. A
ceiling was established to the number of seats a single party could win, at 350
seats. The 1991 reforms maintained the ceiling and the majority-assuring
clause, but required that the winning party win at least 30 per cent of the
vote. It also created bonus seats for the winning party, so that it would not
have to function with only a narrow majority in the Chamber. In return, the
government ceded some control over the electoral process to a partially
autonomous electoral management body (initially, IFE, the Federal Electoral
Institute, but currently the National Electoral Institute, INE) and to a
federal electoral court. The 1994 reforms eliminated the majority-assuring
clause and created a Parallel system, in which the elections to the List PR
seats were completely decoupled from the elections to the plurality seats. No
party could win more than 60 per cent of the seats (300 of 500) in most
circumstances. However, this led to the most disproportional result that Mexico
has experienced under mixed systems, with PRI winning 60 per cent of the seats
with about 50 per cent of the vote. So in 1996 the electoral law was adjusted
again to set the limit to the number of seats a party could win at 300 and the
maximum level of over-representation, as described above, at 8 percentage
points. This electoral rule has been as stable as any since multiparty
representation was established in 1964, having been since the 1997 elections.
No party has won an absolute majority of seats under this rule. The 1996 reform
also made INE fully autonomous and enhanced the powers of the federal electoral
court. Currently there are proposals to make the Chamber of Deputies either
more or less proportional, decreasing or increasing the proportion of list
deputies, and decreasing or eliminating the margin of over-representation.
However, since no two parties have similar goals, reforms are unlikely to come
about. The Senate before 1994 had 64 members, two for each of the 31 states
plus the Federal District. The senators were elected under various plurality
rules. The result was that until 1988 all senators were members of the PRI. That
monopoly in the Senate allowed the government to make concessions to
opposition, making the Chamber of Deputies more proportional.
By 1994, there were calls for the Senate
to be made more widely representative as well. It was expanded to 128 members,
with at least a quarter of the seats guaranteed to the opposition. For the 1997
election, a mixed system was established. Each state elects three senators, and
in addition 32 are elected by PR on a single national list. In each state, a
party nominates a ranked slate of two Senate candidates. Both candidates of the
party that wins the most votes are elected as senators, and the first listed
candidate of the party that is placed second wins the third Senate seat. Voters
cannot adjust the order of the candidates. Each party also nominates a closed,
ranked list of 32 candidates for the national PR list. All the votes for the
Senate in each state are totalled at the national level. The formula used is a
Largest Remainder Method using the Hare Quota and a 3 per cent threshold.
Unlike the Chamber of Deputies, there is no linkage between the plurality and
the PR seats; instead, the two systems run in parallel and the PR seats do not
compensate for any disproportionality. This electoral formula would create a
majority for the largest party if it wins around 40 per cent of the national
vote, favourably distributed, and has a margin of three or four points over its
nearest rival. Winning two-thirds of the seats in the Senate (important for
constitutional reforms, electing Supreme Court justices, and internal
procedural matters) requires two-thirds of the national vote. No party has won
an absolute majority of Senate seats.
Several proposals have been submitted in
Congress to eliminate the party list senators, with arguments that a national
list is not appropriate for a Chamber that represents the states. However,
simply eliminating the PR list would benefit the PRI, which is placed either
first or second in all but one of the states, and is thus likely to be opposed
by other parties. Alternatives would have three or four senators per state, all
elected by PR, most likely using the D’Hondt Formula.
The 2013 electoral reform has made re-election
for consecutive terms a possibility for all federal deputies and senators (and
also for state legislators, mayors, and municipal councillors). Previously, legislators
could be elected to the other chamber when their term expired, and they could
then be re-elected to the same chamber after sitting out a term. The ‘no
re-election’ reforms were implemented in 1932 to resolve problems in PRI by
increasing loyalty to the central committee and reducing the power of local
party bosses. At the time, the reform was sold as the natural conclusion of the
ideology of no re-election from the Mexican Revolution. However, it had served
to reduce the autonomy of legislators, because their career prospects after
their term of office depended on the party machinery, and for many years increased
the power of the president because of his control over his party’s machinery.
Party discipline has thus been traditionally very high, approaching 100 per
cent for the federal legislators of the PRI up to 2000. This has had profound
effects on accountability and representation. Voters could neither reward good
performance nor punish poor representation.
All the parties use relatively closed
procedures to select candidates—elite designation, closed conventions, or
closed or highly controlled primaries. In general, nominating procedures have
been opening up in recent years, but candidates are still highly dependent on
parties. Additionally, parties control most campaign expenditures, even in
district and state contests, and closed lists reduce the incentive for
candidates to campaign.
Mexico’s slow democratization has seen
frequent electoral system change as a series of concessions by the dominant
party to defuse dissent, which has resulted finally in a multiparty
presidential system with very strong parties. Further change may now be less
likely, as different parties have different interests and any change is seen as
a zero-sum game. In any case, an Overview of the 2013-2014 electoral reform can
be found as part of the information document containing the Main Aspects of the
Mexican Electoral Regime.
