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Legislative Gridlock; PRIs granted privilege or PANs control valve?
YA, this was the slogan that ended a dominance of 71 years in power by a single party
in a damaged country. The year 2000 not only brought the promise of the new millennia
to the Mexican people, but it also the hope and belief that the new system of democracy
with the Fox Administration could end with all of the problems that the previous PRI
administration disregarded and failed to act upon. We are in the year 2013 and there is a
new PRI president at the helm of the country and as one attempts to look back and
analyze the developments that took place in the last twelve years the common thread is
the inability of these PAN presidents to succeed in passing important pieces of legislation
in the new democracy that wouldve altered the country in a positive way. To
successfully compare and analyze the differences in legislative gridlock in Mexico before
and after the 2000s elections its necessary to turn and understand how the political arena
was distributed and ruled during the single-party dominance era of the PRI. Mexico
transitioned over the past 50 years from a government being completely dominated by the
PRI to a competitive one that has three main political parties. It further transitioned the
function and power of the presidency from an almost authoritarian style to fully
democratic, although almost paralyzed by Congress, one. Furthermore, the Federal
Elections Institute was implemented and with it, fair and regulated elections with no
electoral fraud were ensured. Reforms were introduced in the late 1970s that allowed
opposition parties to officially register and changed the way seats in the lower house were
chosen, from single member districts to a system based on proportionality of votes.
Finally a comparison between the responsiveness and ability of the PRI to shift between
left and right policies through legislation allowed them to appease the opposition and at
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times gather support, and the PANs lack of ability to do so marked the differences
between legislation politics during the era before and after 2000. This essay will analyze
why the Fox Administration and the Calderon Administration were not as successful in
passing legislation as the previous PRI regime was.

The PRI enjoyed 71 years of undisturbed power, where most of the reforms that were
submitted to Congress were approved and signed into law. The PRIs ability to pass
legislation during their years in power rested in their majority in Congress and the fact
that they where unchallenged until 1979 when Lopez Portillo introduced an electoral
reform that allowed opposition parties to officially register and changed the election
process where the lower chamber seats were elected based on proportionality of votes,
where the representative seats are given in proportion to the amount of votes the party
received, and not single member districts, where the district has a single representative.
The conditions for Congress to assume and deploy its legally granted powers occurred
with the introduction of fair and just electoral rules, which led to a plural and independent
Congress (Casar, 118). It was progress, but it was not enough to cause legislative
gridlock because it was not until 1997 that the PRI lost its majority in Congress, which
proved to be a powerful tool for the centrality of the presidency.

The power of the presidency changed dramatically between these two epochs. During
the PRIs hegemonic regime its important to realize [] the fact that the president was
not only head of state and government but also leader of the hegemonic party, he was
able to colonize and subordinate virtually all political institutions (Casar, 117). The
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ability of the President to impose his will on legislation and bureaucratic practices gave it
immense power that was disproportionate to its size. Congress could be taken for
granted due to both the mustering of large majorities and the presidents wide-ranging
partisan powers (Casar, 118). This excerpt gives testimony of the power wielded by the
President then and how legislative gridlock was virtually impossible, as he had no one to
challenge his authority whatsoever. Unequal access to power precluded the emergence
of divided governments and created a longstanding situation in which the president did
not have to suffer congressional support and party discipline as constraints on his will,
power, or doings (Casar, 117) In contrast, the PAN organization came into power at the
time when Mexicos Congress had [] redressed the balance of power and change the
role for the presidency in both agenda setting and public policy making (Casar, 117).
Thus the ability of the President to advance policy and introduce reforms into the country
became much more limited and controlled. As a matter of fact, Presidents that have
served under divided government have experienced that those initiatives they were most
interested in passing were defeated. [In Foxs case] fiscal, energy telecommunications,
electoral, human rights, and judicial reforms were defeated (Casar, 129). Further, it
became increasingly important to establish party alliances between parties in order to
advance reform, up to the point that without the cooperation of either the PRI or the
PRD, Calderons PAN will remain unable to make good on his proposed constitutional
reforms (Casar 125.)

Moreover, there was no realistic challenger against the PRIs dominance until the late
1980s and early 1990s with the incorporation of the IFE and finance regulating policies,
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which allowed the PRIs opposition parties, the PAN and the PRD, to grow and really
become more powerful than they had even been before. The Federal Elections Institute
(IFE) is an autonomous electoral body that was created and modified from 1990-1996.
The main provision of the IFE is to regulate political parties and their funds. Furthermore,
it regulates elections with a complex process of registration and security protocols that
ensure no electoral fraud. It also audits political parties. This was important because
before it was created there was no organism that oversaw party financing, where the
funds came from and who provided them. It came to life along with the inclusion of a
Party Fund that gave 90% of the resources to the proportion of votes a party had and
distributed the remaining 10% evenly among the registered parties. All of this accounted
for the increase [of the opposition parties] total level of electoral support in comparison
with previous elections (Middlebrook, 136). The inclusion of new political forces
marked an important stepping-stone for the opposition, its access to mass media, party
funds, and participation in official elections.

During their long tenure in office, the PRI had the advantage that their centrist party
policies were easy to shift to either left or right policies. The
fire-fighting strategy as Professor Greene called it during lecture, was used by the PRI
to dismantle the opposition. With the entire control of the government, they would use
their legislative power to shift policies to a particular sector either left or right to appease
the opposition. As mentioned, they used to their advantage the fact that they were always
the majority in the Congress, in contrast during Foxs Administration and Calderons
Administration the PAN party did not have the majority in Congress, rather a divided
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Congress that would continuously reject bills proposed by either President. All
throughout Foxs tenure, he had a divided congress that consisted of PRI holding a
majority and the PANs party holding a second minority in both the Chamber of Deputies
and the Senate and Calderon faced the first minority in both the Chamber of Deputies and
the Senate and had the PRD as a primary opposition. This proved to be a gridlock in
congress as Casar details, Fox was forced to negotiate with the PRI and its majority
because no other alliance would be sufficient to muster the two-thirds majority needed
for constitutional reform (Casar, 124). On the other hand, the PAN party suffered
continuously as the PRI and PRD allied themselves to defeat all the legislation attempts
the presidents party tried to push through congress. When the two large opposition
parties [to the PAN] were able to ally themselves against the presidents party (Casar,
125).

Although the 2000s represented a big change in the Mexican political scene, the reality
of things is that both of PANs Presidents did not have enough legislative power to fulfill
their promises and make a real change in Mexico. Division of Congress, little-to-no
alliances with opposition parties PRD and PRI and the lack of tools to change this were
some of the factors that contributed to their obstructed attempts to pass important
legislation. As it has been compared, before the 2000s elections, the PRI enjoyed
legislative freedom, as they controlled the whole government till 1997 when they lost
their majority in Congress. The lack of controlling agencies such as the IFE, the
recognition of opposition parties and elections processes, and with little fight from the
opposition it was easy for them to pass bills and reforms that would benefit them and
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those in the party. Finally, with the lack of a power that gives Presidents a true ability to
exercise an executive control over the government and the rule of law, there is little than
it can do.


Bibliography:

Middlebrook, Kevin Political Liberalization in an Authoritarian Regime: The Case of
Mexico in Guillermo ODonnel, Philippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (eds.)
Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Latin America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1986.

Casar, Maria Amparo Executive-Legislative Relations: Continuity or Change? in
Jonathan Fox Libby Haight, Helena Hofbaur and Tania Sanchez Andrade (eds.) Mexicos
Right-to-Know Reforms: Civil Society Perspectives. Mexico City; Fundar Centro de
Analisis e Investigacion AC and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars,
2007.

Shirk, David. Mexicos New Politics: The PAN and Democratic Change. Boulder: Lynne
Rienner, 2005, pp 49-61, pp 97-129.