Conventional wisdom is easy to follow but occasionally wrong.  Political science journals and the international media commonly assert that the recent election of a new president in Mexico ended more than seventy years of national authoritarian rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).  While the statement accurately describes Mexico's authoritarian political situation prior to 1977, it does not accurately explain the decades leading up to the presidential elections of 2000.  Long before the momentous victory of Vicente Fox, Mexico’s political regime had undergone vast transformations and democratized substantially.

In the late seventies Mexico had a party-state system in which all 64 Senators and 196 out of 237 federal Deputies were PRI members.  The same party governed all 31 states and Mexico City.  In addition, the PRI held supermajorities in all state congresses and ruled 99 percent of the localities.  Twenty-three years later on the eve of the 2000 presidential elections, Mexico's political map differed dramatically.  No single party had the majority in the Chamber of Deputies, the PRI held only 60 percent of the seats in the Senate, and non-PRI governors ruled in 10 of Mexico’s 31 states and Mexico City, which together accounted for almost half of the country's GDP. Opposition parties also held over 51 percent of the seats in state congresses, and more than 50 percent of the population lived under non-PRI mayors.

The election of Vicente Fox as president of Mexico therefore did not suddenly give birth to democracy but made visible fundamental changes that had taken place under a cumulative dynamic in which local struggles interacted with national level politics to produce the Mexican democratic transition.  The social, political, and economic dynamics of this process have been well documented, and scholars have also increasingly noted the “subnational” characteristics of the mobilizations and power struggles of the period (Cornelius 2000; Snyder 2001; Weldon 1997).  However, one little noticed fact is that Mexico’s long political transition took place in the context of a federal political system.  It is a central contention of this chapter that neither the process nor the outcome of the Mexican democratic transition can be properly understood without attention to the transition’s embeddedness in a federal institutional system.   Federalism profoundly shaped Mexico’s democratization process.