Caballero-Sosa, Lila
(2013)
Party dynamics in the Mexican chamber of deputies: power networks and committee appointments.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
Empirically, the aim of this thesis is to understand how national party dynamics
determine legislative behaviour in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies. Through
a case study of the 60th Congress (2006-2009), I sought to identify the informal
rules that the parties have locked in for determining appointments to legislative
committees and the Directive Board. The first part of the case study overviews
the historical evolution of political parties in Mexico and shows how these have
adopted the behaviours and strategies that affect their performance in Congress.
This is complemented with an empirical description of the Chamber, its rules
and the organisation of party groups in the 60th Congress, which presents a
clear picture of how parties create informal rules and lock them in. The case
study ends with a quantitative analysis of background information of 440
members of the 60th Congress, showing that parties have a tight control over
political careers, facilitated by the existence of term limits and the political
careerism that characterises the political elite. I conclude that the Mexican
political system has been shaped by the three main parties to suit their interests,
thereby undermining the quality of democracy. Following the theoretical
precepts of historical institutionalism, this research claims that Mexican
institutions emerge and change through collective agreements of actors, who are
responsible for making institutional paths dependent. I argue that path
dependency in Mexico is conditional, in that elites have been willing to make
some institutional changes but not others, depending on the extent to which
creating new rules has a negative impact on their power. An innovative view of
path dependency, this finding is the main theoretical contribution of my work,
complemented by contributions to party and legislative organisation theories
with aims at explaining legislative parties’ behaviour in imperfect institutional
settings.
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