Abstract

REYNOSO, Diego. Learning to Compete: Electoral Alliances and Closeness in Mexican States, 1988-2006. Polít. gob [online]. 2011, vol.18, n.1, pp.3-38. ISSN 1665-2037.

Building electoral alliances is a good opportunity for adding votes in order to support a common candidate and to increase the chance to win the election avoiding, in this way, wasting votes among different candidates or parties. The electoral alliances are not a product of the ideological distance among its members, but they are an endogenous outcome of the changes in the electoral competence conditions and, at the same time, a strong impulse of those changes. To support this hypothesis on the links between competitiveness and electoral alliances, and the pragmatism character of parties which are members of those, the article offer evidence from 96 sub-national elections of governors in 32 Mexican states from 1998 to 2006.

Keywords : electoral alliances; closeness; competitiveness; party fragmentation.

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