The project proposes a sample survey of district-level party leaders in Mexico to test and extend theories of party strategy derived from, and usually applied to, established party democracies. Classic questions about party competition are posed: under what conditions do parties choose intensive strategies focused on increasing the yield of votes from their core constituencies, and when do they follow extensive strategies by expanding into marginal constituencies? How do strategies differ in two- and three-party competition? Answers to these questions can give insights into broader processes affecting new democracies, such as how parties define and establish positions in the electoral marketplace as competition expands, and how these positions affect the dimensionality of partisan competition. The project also sheds light on questions of specific interest to the study of Mexico: how a dominant party with hegemonic resources and opposition parties organized initially as pressure groups transform into competitive organizations with coherent policy packages.
The sample survey is directed to the leaders of Mexico's 300 electoral districts from all three major parties. The total population contains 900 members, about 314 of whom are targeted for interviews. Although the unit of observation is the district leader, the sampling unit is the district. Mexican districts are equivalent to wards in the United States, and district leaders are functionally the same as activists in Kitschelt's studies (1989, 1990) of West Europe. All three leaders from each selected district are interviewed. This methodology helps to reconstruct the conditions of local competition, and is based on the expectation that strategy is formed interactively with competitors. The study focuses on three parties, but disaggregating the organizational structure permits the use of statistical techniques which include factor analysis and regression. The questionnaire is designed to take advantage of a very small, but exciting, and emerging body of data on parties, party organizations, and party personnel in new and established democracies. Thus, the data can serve as a basis for the study of Mexican parties, and also to place Mexico in cross-national perspective with other emerging democracies.
Party strategy has never been a major area of inquiry in the literature. This omission has a theoretical basis: the dominant approaches to the study of party competition view parties as mechanical representations of sociological or political processes, not as actors in their own right. This proposal suggests two primary types of strategy. Then, hypotheses are cullled from spatial and actor-centered theories. These approaches yield strong expectations for the two-party case, but contradictory rival hypotheses for the three-party case. A simple, general model of strategy formation that combines environmental and intra-organizational variables is proposed. Testing existing approaches for the two-party case while extending their reach to three-party competition in Mexico with empirical evidence help to push the boundaries of current theory.
Mexico represents an interesting case for two reasons. First, subnational areas of two- and three-party competition permit testing multiple, and sometimes contradictory, rival hypotheses within one country. Second, party building in Mexico and in other Latin American countries is occurring in historically unique circumstances: free-market economic policies break the link between local production and local consumption, creating a constituency of winners which is too small to sustain electoral success. Although populist parties built in the 1930s were multiclass alliances that relied on a political economy of inclusion, contemporary party building must find new mobilizational strategies.
