Abstract

CAMARGO GONZALEZ, Ignacio; PANIAGUA VAZQUEZ, Abraham  and  BORUNDA ESCOBEDO, José Eduardo. The regime of political parties: a theoretical explanation, from the perspective of independent candidates (insiders), in the context of local elections in Mexico (2016). Intersticios sociales [online]. 2020, n.20, pp.313-346.  Epub Nov 20, 2020. ISSN 2007-4964.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the functioning of the regime of political parties in Mexico in the context of the 2016 local elections. The method used was the qualitative based in the Grounded Theory; the analyzed data were constructed from 30 interviews that the candidates granted to various media. It is concluded that the political parties in Mexico are self-referential, stratified, pragmatic and non-democratic organizations, whose agents stratify into a dominant fraction (“those who really compete for public jobs”), and a broad membership of the dominated (“the who expect jobs by exchange”). These organizations are defined by their “self referentiality”; that is to say, they are oligarchic and non-democratic formations in which the power to decide on the destiny of the resources of the organization is retained by a small dominant fraction. Likewise, it will be this preponderant group that involuntarily promotes a “subversion of the electoral contest”: it is they who, through the concentration of power, maintain internal control of the entire process and who, ultimately, benefit from the additional resources obtained through the external electoral contest between parties.

Keywords : local elections in Mexico; political parties regime; grounded theory; stratified presidentialism; independent candidates.

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