Measuring Electoral Court Failure in Democratizing Mexico
| Date | 01 January 2002 |
| Author | Todd A. Eisenstadt |
| Published date | 01 January 2002 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512102023001003 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Measuring Electoral Court Failure in
Democratizing Mexico
TODD A. EISENSTADT
ABSTRACT. After identifying a lack of attention to electoral courts and
post-electoral contestation of elections, this article seeks to compensate
for the lack of comparative cross-national data on election dispute
resolution by constructing ideal types of electoral court success and
failure within one country, Mexico, where primary research has
produced needed data. It exposes authoritarian incumbent/opposition
bargaining over rules of Mexico’s democratic transition in the resolution
of post-electoral conflicts in Mexico’s municipalities. In identifying legal
versus extra-legal paths of post-electoral contestation, it conceives of a
“rule of law” ratio—the ratio of extra-legal post-electoral conflicts to legal
electoral court case filings—to indicate gradual increases in opposition
party compliance with electoral institutions. Upon establishing the lag
between the construction of electoral institutions and compliance with
them, the article concludes that this gap is attributable to conditions
beyond their mere institutional configurations, such as social and
political factors, and demonstrates that such compliance with institutions
may not be assumed.
Keywords: Democratization • Electoral courts • Electoral governance
Mexico • Political parties
Despite de-legitimizing electoral controversies, even within long-established
democracies like France and the United States, little systematic attention has been
given to the resolution of post-electoral conflicts. Electoral administration
generally has been understudied, prompting Pastor to observe that “[w]hen
people think of electoral systems, they do not think of the conduct of elections but
rather of constitutional questions” (Pastor, 1999a: 123–142), because developed-
country electoral institutions are overlooked, and developing-country scholars
focus on big questions like designing democratic institutions rather than on the
outwardly procedural issues of whether nations possess the capacity to implement
International Political Science Review (2002), Vol 23, No. 1, 47–68
0192-5121 (2002/01) 23:1, 47–68; 020423 © 2002 International Political Science Association
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free and fair elections (see also Mozaffar and Schedler, this issue). The few who do
comparatively analyze electoral administration, such as Elklit and Reynolds (2000)
and López-Pintor (n.d.), tend to focus on the whole array of electoral functions,
rather than homing in on contestation of elections. Heavily contested elections
abound,1but almost no attention is paid to the institutions responsible for
resolving post-electoral disputes, crucial for reinforcing the legitimacy of fledgling
and long-standing democracies alike.
Scholars of election legitimacy and contestation must in many cases look to
first-hand accounts of post-electoral conflicts, where they can readily find
examples of cluttered jurisdiction over electoral dispute adjudication between
legislative and judicial branches: such as in the controversy over hand recounts in
the 2000 US presidential election or the ambiguous role of panwas as Indonesia’s
mediating authorities at all levels (IFES, 1999); summary rejection of complaints by
“hair-splitting” electoral courts such as in Pakistan in 1994 (NDI, 1994), or the
blanket discrediting of electoral authorities by political parties in Ethiopia in 1992
(NDI and AAI, 1992); outgoing authoritarian military leaders such as in Panama in
1989 (NRI and NDI, 1989), or the international community as in Peru in 2000
(Schmidt, 2000).
The institutions charged with resolving these cantankerous conflicts may be
divided into two categories: regular constitutional courts charged with ruling in
election-related cases, as in most European countries and other established
democracies and at least some of Africa’s new democracies; and electoral courts,
usually autonomous from the three branches of government (sometimes, as in
Costa Rica, referred to as the “fourth branch”), common in democracies arising
over the last few decades, particularly in Latin America and some of the former
Soviet republics (such as Ukraine and Armenia). Little systematized theorizing has
been done on why countries would choose one of these institutional arrangements
over another, but it is apparent that perhaps an equally pertinent and prior
question is how efficiently these systems work in practice. This article addresses the
latter question.
Rather than addressing a broad range of cases and institutions, I consider
several forms of institutional efficiency—and especially of institutional failure—
within one country, 1990s’ Mexico. I argue that Mexico’s sub-national electoral
courts contain sufficient variation in their effectiveness so as to allow observers to
derive four distinct ideal types of electoral court failure, applicable in future
research to other countries with contested elections. I discuss the electoral
reforms leading to the establishment of federal electoral courts as a gambit by
authoritarian elites to legitimize their rule which was then extricated from their
control by wily opposition leaders. I then present a problem which has
confounded studies of electoral institution performance—how to measure
electoral fraud—and propose a solution. Finally, I apply this proposed remedy in
order to specify the types of electoral court failure, and contend that the method
developed here of identifying electoral court failures may have broader
applicability to the study of other specialized courts.
Measuring Electoral Fraud
In more theoretical terms, the question is what causes institutions to succeed, or,
from the actors’ perspectives, what prompts their compliance with some
institutions but not with others? Full compliance is hard to measure, as it is a static
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