Introduction

Although Mexican governors have long been accused of being corrupt, it was only until recently that they were frequently investigated and charged for it. Recent research reports that during the last sexenio before democratization —from 1994 to 2000— only four governors were investigated at the federal level (^{Ang, 2017}), whereas during the administration of the PRI president Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), over 15 local executives have been investigated and at least eight have been issued an arrest warrant. These detentions occur in a country where 48 per cent of respondents in a nationally representative survey mentioned corruption as one of the issues to be solved, just after insecurity and unemployment (^{INEGI, 2017}).

Importantly, however, not all the parties were equal contributors to the pool of prosecuted governors. Of the eight prosecuted local executives that governed during Peña Nieto, seven of them were his copartisans. This overrepresentation of priistas was noted, emphasized even, in the 2018 electoral campaigns that portrayed the PRI as an institution built to protect or enable corruption. Indeed, the presidential candidate who would ultimately win the election, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), centered his campaign around fighting corruption and criminal behavior and getting rid of the mafia del poder, political mafia, that had encroached in the federal and local administrations. During the campaigns it was also not uncommon to find newspaper editorials and pundits echoing the idea that the ruling PRI party had enabled or protected local executives that had illegally diverted millions of pesos.

Of course, these prosecutions have had important repercussions for the political figure of the governors. Once dubbed the new virreyes (^{Meza, 2009}; ^{Zuckermann, 2003}), a term that signaled their almost absolute power and impunity, governors nowadays seem to be more and more vulnerable. In an unprecedented move, former Veracruz governor Javier Duarte, stepped down from his administration when faced with accusations of corruption (only to flee from the country). Former Durango governor Jorge Herrera Caldera requested an amparo (legal protection) against his possible detention, a request that was denied because he was not being investigated in the first place (^{Lastra Guerrero, 2016}). This political weakening of the gubernatorial figure is also tangible in electoral results: governors that have been prosecuted have cost the governorship to their parties.

Despite the abundance of anecdotal evidence connecting criminal prosecution and party reputation or electoral results, research still needs to answer whether —and how— criminal corruption of a single individual affects party-level electoral results. Thus, the questions that motivate this paper are: What were the consequences of the criminal prosecutions of priista governors for the PRI party? Specifically, did the detentions of PRI governors polluted the PRI’S presidential electoral result? And if so, why?

This paper answers these questions by arguing that the criminal prosecution of local executives had two related effects. First, the public discussion that arose from the detention was less about the individuals and the crimes they had been accused of, and more about the political structure that produced the criminal behavior in question. Specifically, I present qualitative evidence to show that discourses in the media saw these detentions as evidence of a larger network of complicities that had enabled the malfeasance revealed by the prosecutions. Furthermore, I show that these networks were often embodied in the institution of the PRI, a discourse that is somewhat counterintuitive given that these prosecutions were conducted by a priista president.

Secondly, I argue that this public discourse portraying the PRI as a party that en-abled criminal behavior weakened the partisan brand, decreased the appeal of PRI candidates, and directly impacted the presidential electoral results. I demonstrate this point by presenting a difference-indifferences analysis of district-level electoral outcomes for the PRI presidential candidates in 2012 (Enrique Peña Nieto) and in 2018 (José Antonio Meade), and a cross-sectional analysis of PRI vote across districts with different access to such discourses. In this analysis, I show that although the PRI suffered considerably nation-wide, its electoral losses were even higher in states that had a criminal governor. I also find that districts with higher internet access voted less for the PRI, even after controlling for socioeconomic characteristics that might be related to internet access and PRI vote choice. Both of these groups of voters, I argue, are more likely to be exposed to public media and discourses of systemic corruption. I conclude the paper by discussing key implications of the existence of this mechanism: as corrupt behavior is made public and the electoral consequences of prosecution become more apparent for political parties, party leadership seems to be interested, and able, to discipline their members, or even publicly repudiate, for engaging in criminal behavior.

Corruption and criminal behavior

The questions addressed in this paper are relevant considering that free and fair elections are a way in which citizens can hold their government officials account- able for wrongdoings. Elections enable citizens to hire (elect) or fire (not reelect) public officials (^{Manin et al.,1999b}; ^{Adsera et al., 2003}) based on their performance and actions in government (^{Manin et al.,1999a}; ^{Grzymala-Busse, 2007}). Of course, the relationship between governmental actions and accountability might not be so straightforward. First, elections are a diffuse accountability mechanism because voters must consider a multiplicity of topics in a single election, topics that can and often are prioritized differently (^{Cheibub and Przeworski, 1999}). Second, elections are also a weak tool for accountability because they entail choosing a candidate from a fixed set of alternatives. Thus, voting is not only a matter of looking at an incumbent’s performance, but also considering what the rest of the politicians can offer and how credible that offer is (^{Maravall, 1999}).

Existing literature has examined at length the link between corruption and corruption scandals and vote choice. Research has shown that learning about malfeasance of politicians negatively affects campaigning strategies and reelection rates (^{Rennó, 2008}) and decreases vote intention for candidates accused of such malfeasance (^{Chang et al., 2010}). These effects, however, are mediated by individual factors like risk propensity (^{Morgenstern and Zechmeister, 2001}), the opinion on the state of the economy (^{Klašnja and Tucker, 2013}), or whether the voters benefitted from corruption.¹ A different literature also looks at how context shapes the effect of corruption on vote choice, highlighting the role of media and how the coverage of malfeasance and its intensity shape voters’ choice (^{Ferraz and Finan, 2005}; ^{Chang et al., 2010}).

But not all findings suggest that voters will react to the abuse of public office. Comparative empirical evidence has found that corruption scandals can reach a point of saturation in which the voters become somewhat resilient to the wrongdo- ings of politicians, and stop punishing them electorally (^{Kumlin and Esaiasson, 2012}). In addition, practices such as clientelism and patronage can prevent voters from freely exercising their right to choose, further weakening the link between information and electoral accountability. Studies of clientelism in Japan and Mexico have shown that clientelistic practices gives incumbents an excessive advantage (^{Scheiner, 2006}; ^{Magaloni, 2006}), while also deteriorating the quality of opposition,² and even rendering it incapable of positioning themselves as clear alternative in terms of differentiated policy proposals (^{Grzymala-Busse, 2007}).

The existing research, however, has been mostly interested in corruption scandals, and has used corruption detentions as a proxy measure of the former, thus addressing a somewhat different set of questions that the ones set forth at the beginning of this section. The few studies that separate the effects of corruption scandals and corruption detentions on vote choice have found that indeed the latter have effects that are distinguishable from the former,³ a finding that suggests that these two are distinct empirical phenomena with different political effects. In addition, the literature reviewed above has mostly focused in understanding the electoral effects of corruption scandals and detentions as they affect politicians involved in corruption scandals, overlooking the effects that they might have on other political actors and institutions.

This last limitation has been partially addressed by the comparative literature that has looked into how corruption and its prosecution can affect public trust (^{Chandler, 2006}). More specifically, evidence on China, Japan, and South Korea also reports that the perception that the government is efficiently fighting corruption can positively impact trust in institutions (^{Kim and Voorhees, 2011}). These findings are promising for the use of the criminal justice system when it comes to political corruption, but they still cannot address whether prosecution of corruption affects political parties and their electoral performance.

Why should parties suffer the consequences of their members’ actions, particularly when these are already being prosecuted? Put differently: what mechanism might trigger consequences for copartisans of an indicted politician? To answer this question, I borrow from the established notion that parties can serve as informational shortcuts, fulfilling the crucial function of conveying information to voters to help them cast a vote when information about specific candidates is scarce or too costly to acquire. Specifically, I borrow from this literature to argue that in the same way that party labels might be associated with ideological leanings or specific policies that are taken as information about candidates, parties can also be associated with widespread corruption. If this is the case, parties can inform (or misinform) voters whether candidates are likely to engage in, or cover up, corrupt behavior. I further develop this argument in the remainder of this section.

The idea of parties as heuristics, developed mostly in the study of American parties, originates from the assumption that voters make choices in an environment of great uncertainty and where information acquisition is costly. In these environments, parties can be seen as ‘labels’ that convey information to the voters about policy views, qualities, and other attributes of their candidates. In his classical work, Downs convincingly argues that voters must acquire information in order to cast a vote, but that the cost of acquiring such information is, in many cases, larger than the expected utility from casting a well-informed vote (^{Downs, 1957}). Thus, he concluded, voters in general will not make any additional efforts, instead relying on whatever information they can easily encounter. Empirical research in the US shows that in the absence of complete information, voters rely on ‘heuristics’ to make choices (^{Ferejohn, 1990}; ^{Iyengar, 1990}), and that partisanship is one of the most accessible ones (^{Huckfeldt and Sprague, 1990}; ^{Schaffner and Streb, 2002}). Studies conducted in the case of Mexico show that party cues are helpful for voters and that the usefulness of this heuristics increases as topics become more complex (^{Merolla et al., 2007}; ^{Guardado Rodríguez, 2009}).

The literature of party as heuristics, then, suggests that party labels help voters summarize relevant information to help them decide which candidate to vote for. I build from this logic to claim that if parties inform voters about their candidates, it is possible that the actions of candidates and incumbents also inform voters about the parties that these politicians belong to. My claim finds motivation in —and contributes to— scholarship studying why and how the behavior of party members can weaken party brands. ^{Barrow (2007)}, for example, studies how candidates that switch parties weakens the relationship between voters and their parties, offering evidence from the Mexican state of Morelos to illustrate this claim. ^{Lupu (2016)} argues that conflict between members of the same party can dilute a party brand because voters will be less certain about what the parties stand for. Put differently, exiting literature has claimed already that some actions by party members can affect party brands, and can weaken the links between parties and their voters. My proposed mechanism posits that trials involving allegedly corrupt politicians can also affect the party label of those being prosecuted by associating such party with criminal behavior. Weakening the party brand should, in turn, affect the electoral results for candidates that share parties with the alleged criminal, but that have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

Importantly, however, I do not expect my proposed mechanism to work equally across all countries, nor even in all parties within a same country. Instead, I propose that some electoral characteristics can accentuate —or mitigate— the connection between the candidate’s (criminal) behavior and partisan-level consequences. Although originally developed to classify legislative elections, I draw from Carey and Shugart’s proposition that some electoral systems cultivate strong party reputations, instead of strong individual reputations, as a way to garner votes (^{Carey and Shugart, 1995}), as well as from Samuel’s subsequent paper, who argued that parties’ strategies vary even within an electoral system (^{Samuels, 1999}). The proposed mechanism —associating poor behavior of a candidate to his or her party— will be less likely when politicians are actively trying to differentiate themselves from other party members, and more likely when candidates want to be identified with their party precisely to exploit partisan reputation to their own advantage.

Based on the characteristics identified by these authors, I argue that Mexican presidential elections are likely to incentivize party reputations, fostering the connection between candidate actions and party behavior. For example, the PRI operates with a centralized ballot, meaning that parties must support the candidate and voters cannot ‘disturb’ this, thus strengthening candidate allegiance to party structures (^{Samuels, 1999: 492-493}; ^{Carey and Shugart, 1995: 420-421}). In addition, Mexico publicly funds its parties, which means that the candidate’s access to campaign finance resources is mediated by the party, deepening the candidate’s dependence on keeping the party leadership happy. Similarly, political candidates often rely on the ample PRI structure to deliver pork, although such structure is mostly responsive to local leaders, not central ones, and has therefore been weakened during the last two decades (^{Cantú and Desposato, 2012}). Finally, although there are some opportunities for electoral alliances, which might weaken the incentives to build a party reputation, the PRI tends to build alliances with the same small parties, minimizing damage to its brand. Therefore, the PRI’S structure and dynamics when it came to determining presidential candidates —a structure that had remained quite strong until this last electoral cycle— strengthened the connection between the party itself and its candidates, making it more likely to observe the posited mechanism.

Considering this, my argument is that criminalization of individual politicians, under certain conditions like the ones discussed here, can affect not only those directly involved in the criminal process, but also those who share the same party label. As discussed in previous paragraphs, this ‘contagion’ occurs partly because criminal behavior of politicians might affect party reputation. Since voters use parties as heuristics to convey information about candidates, belonging to the same party than someone accused of wrongdoing can impact one’s electoral performance. As I will show in the next section, I find evidence that the criminal cases involving PRI governors were often related to the PRI party structures in general, thus evidencing the contagion mechanism posited here. In this way, the Mexican 2018 elections suggest that putting a single politician in jail does not simply weaken him or her, but also the institutional networks that such politician is a part of, particularly parties. Specifically, I show that José Antonio Meade, the PRI presidential candidate, suffered electorally as a consequence of the criminal processes opened against his fellow copartisans.

So far, I have discussed criminal behavior broadly, but this paper focuses empirically on criminal behavior of Mexican governors understood as either political corruption or collusion with organized crime. Before introducing evidence to support my claim, I discuss why I focus on these types of criminal behavior among this particular set of actors. To be clear, I have no theoretical reasons to argue that specific criminal behavior is more or less likely to damage a party’s reputation, nor do I argue that prosecution of specific actors will always result in consequences for his or her party. Instead, I propose that contextual characteristics of each political system can illuminate the relevance of politicians —the more relevant the actors, the more likely are they to affect the party brand— and that the type of criminal behavior they are accused of affects their parties’ reputation differently. I discuss these two characteristics in the Mexican context to further clarify the relevance of the actors and behavior studied in this paper.

Contextually, Mexican governors are powerful actors that have unfettered access to large sums of money. Since the decentralization reforms that started in the 1990s, Mexican governors receive large federal transfers and can acquire public debt with little oversight which has led to unlawful mismanagement and appropriation of funds.⁴ Furthermore, governors also face almost no constraints when in power: the presidential “winner-take-all” arrangement means that executives are often popular politicians that had to win a direct popular vote and that, institutionally, lack a counterpart to restrain their use (or misuse) of power (^{Linz, 1985}; ^{Mainwaring and Shugart, 1997}). Governor’s control of local bureaucracies and nominations of candidates for national legislators also means that parties often bow to them (^{Langston, 2010}; ^{Cantú and Desposato, 2012}). In this way, governors in Mexico are likely actors to affect party reputations because of their importance within the hierarchy, an importance exacerbated by the amount of resources they control when in office.

These characteristics of the gubernatorial office, as well as the context of organized crime, increases the opportunities of governors engaging in criminal behavior of two types: political corruption and criminal corruption,⁵ both of which I argue are likely to trigger the “contagion” effect. By political corruption I mean that governors can divert funds from the public resources they command: the proverbial cookie jar in the form of almost unsupervised federal transfers. By criminal corruption I mean that governors can collude with organized crime by, for example, receiving bribes and kickbacks for letting criminal groups operate in certain parts of their jurisdiction. Crucially, both of these types of criminal actions are abuses that could only be committed by those with access to public power: any abuse of such responsibility would breach the mandate entrusted by voters when they elected these politicians. On the contrary, criminal behavior like shoplifting or stealing a vehicle breaks the law but will not necessarily damage public trust, and as such it is less likely to trigger the mechanism set forth here. Hence, criminal behavior that breaks the trust placed in an official elected to public office is more likely to affect the party reputation than breaking the law without abusing public office.

From this discussion, I hypothesize that the PRI governors that were criminally prosecuted affected the overall party standing in the 2018 elections in two distinct but related ways. First, I propose that the PRI’S reputation suffered considerable damages as a consequence of the prosecution of its governors. This phenomenon is observable in that the public discourses surrounding the criminal processes often transcend the specific cases that motivated the discourse by referring to networks that enabled the criminal behavior, and these networks are often embodied in the PRI. Second, I propose that this reputational loss directly impacted vote choice even in races where no candidates had been criminally prosecuted or investigated. This, I argue, means that voters considered the criminal corruption cases and used this to inform their vote choice. In this way, the reputational and electoral effects of criminal prosecution are not only limited to those involved in a legal case (^{Ang, 2019}), but they can also damage political parties and their candidates in other races.

The remainder of this paper provides evidence to support this argument, and it does so in two analytically distinct, but complementary, steps. Next section shows the PRI’S reputational loss as a consequence of the arrests and criminalization of PRI governors. Specifically, I show how these arrests helped build and strengthen the narrative of the PRI as an institutional network that enabled corruption and provided impunity for candidates. Section “How arrests (and the PRI) affected its presidential candidate” develops two testable implications of the claim that these narratives had an electoral impact that affected the PRI presidential candidate, and presents quantitative evidence comparing the 2012 and 2018 elections to corroborate them. Section “Discussion and implications” concludes by discussing the immediate aftermath of the elections and the theoretical implications of the phenomena described here.

How arrests affected the PRI

As stated in the previous section, the first part of my argument is that criminalization of specific individuals can be taken as evidence that entire networks of institutions are complacent, if not complicit, with corrupt practices. I develop this argument by showing that the arrests shaped public discourse around the PRI. Specifically, I present qualitative evidence to illustrate that specific arrests were not seen only as cases of individuals abusing their public office, but as cases that evidenced how a party enabled the criminal behavior that detentions had revealed.

Nowhere was this clearer than during the detention of “the worst governor in history”, (^{Agren, 2018}) Veracruz’ Javier Duarte (2010-2016). From the very beginning of his term, Duarte was publicly accused of irregularities⁶ and the intensifica-tion of violence under his government, including murdered journalists. But in May of 2016, a month before the elections for governor, an investigation denounced that Duarte’s administration had been embezzling millions of dollars using a network of shell companies (^{Animal Político, 2016}). Faced with the accusations, Duarte stepped down just a few weeks before the end of his term, claiming that he would “face his accusations”. Two days after this resignation, he vanished, only to be arrested in Guatemala in April of 2017.

Undoubtedly, Duarte’s case impacted the figure of the PRI the most. Duarte’s figure has become a reference when talking about criminal corruption, partly because he embodied depredation to an almost deranged degree.⁷ Partly, however, the sheer size of his embezzlement operation suggests that he operated with the knowledge, if not the active participation, of dozens of public servants or politicians who turned a blind eye to his practices. Thus, it is not uncommon to find opeds and political analysis suggesting that Duarte’s detention not only evidences his personal criminal actions, but the existence of networks and institutions that en-abled it. Statements like “Duarte is proof that corruption is not the work of a single person, but of a network of links and complicities that involved both public and PRIvate people”(^{Peschard, 2017}) or “[the] courts should call the former public servants, the front men and the accomplices that enabled [Duarte’s] big theft”⁸ describe how the case of Duarte evokes institutions and actors beyond himself.

But Javier Duarte was not the only politician to be described in this way. Similar statements are made regardin other PRI governors also prosecuted for corruption. An investigation surrounding Quintana Roo’s former governor Roberto Borge (2011-2016) was dubbed “The Pirates of Borge,” a reference to the networks involving more than 50 of his collaborators accused of participating in defrauding the public (^{Ibarra and Meza, 2016}). César Duarte —former governor of Chihuahua who was arrested in Miami in July, 2020, after years of being fugitive— was also accused of operating within a network of politicians and operators that enabled his illicit enrichment (^{Torres Cofiño, 2017}).

In all of these cases, the PRI is often identified as the network that enabled corruption and impunity. This association between the party and its candidates was not haphazard: right before the 2012 election, PRI candidate Peña Nieto appeared in the TV show Tercer ^{Grado (2012)}, where he supported the “young actors of the new political generation” of the PRI, and listed Quintana Roo’s governor Beto Borge, Veracruz’ César Duarte, and Chihuahua’s César Duarte, all of whom were prosecuted years later. In doing so, the presidential candidate not only branded his party as renovated —a label that lost its persuasiveness a few years after— but also distinctly created a group of “new” or “renovated” politicians affiliated with the PRI. Therefore, claims like “the priisimo made of corruption a lifestyle and a way of exercising power” (^{Torres Cofiño, 2017}) or “[PRI] governors that in their heyday symbolized the rebirth of the PRI party [… ] five months before the [2018] presidential elections, illustrate its decay”(^{Ferri, 2018}), show that belonging to the PRI helped voters make sense of the accusations and arrests. Importantly, these association of the PRI party to its corrupt governors also extended to its presidential 2018 candidate José Antonio Meade, even when he was never accused of corruption: “[t]he Achilles heel of the PRI and its [presidential] candidate is corruption” (^{Zuckermann, 2018}). Thus, at least in public media, criminal prosecutions of governors were not taken to be cases of individual malfeasance being uncovered, and instead they were depicted as cases that showed institutional-level practices, particularly of partisan (PRI) nature.

In the terms of the argument presented here, two clarifications are in order.First, the veracity or logical soundness of the claim that corruption was indeed en-abled by partisan networks is not important for the mechanism I propose. Instead, it is crucial for the public discourse surrounding the detentions of governors reproduced the idea that such detentions were instances of practices generalized in the PRI party. Second, my proposed argument goes beyond a “retrospective voting” claim. That is, my argument is not that governors ruled poorly and that triggers the punishment of the next gubernatorial candidate. Instead, I argue that because of improper and illegal behavior of governors while in office, voters might punish candidates of the same party that are running for different offices. Both of these clarifications are relevant because, as the next section will show, the association of criminal governors to the PRI in general directly impacted the electoral results of the PRI presidential candidate.

Before developing the second part of the claim set forth in this paper, one clarification is in order. This paper has focused PRImarily in the PRI governors that have been prosecuted. This is not to say that governors of other political parties are unimpeachable, nor that they are completely trustworthy. In fact, a 2017 survey reported the trustworthiness of political parties, and the numbers were abysmal: only 17.8 per cent of citizens trust in political parties, and that percentage is even lower in states like Mexico City (around 7%) or Oaxaca (11.8%) (^{INEGI, 2017}). But as discussed above, the PRI’s particular institutional characteristics makes it a more likely case to observe the specific mechanism. Given that an overwhelming proportion of prosecuted governors are from this party (only one non-PRI governor, PAN’S Guillermo Padrés was arrested during this period versus seven PRI governors), the PRI party is more frequently associated with criminal governors, although Padrés’ case also invokes ideas of networks of corruption.⁹

How arrests (and the PRI) affected its presidential candidate

The previous section argued that recent arrests and prosecution of local executives were used in the media not only as cases or examples of corrupt individuals, but as cases where institutions and political networks, particularly the PRI party, enabled criminal behavior of public servants. I begin this section by proposing an observable implication of the existence of the mechanism set forth in this paper. If indeed the PRI had suffered a reputational loss due to its governors’ criminal prosecution, this loss would not necessarily affect all voters equally, because not all voters pay equal attention to political scandals and the discourses surrounding them. Plausibly, voters in states with a criminal governor would have been exposed to public media reproducing these discourses at a higher rate than voters in states with no criminal governors. This is so because voters are more likely to be interested, or at least exposed, to news and opeds regarding their own governor than other governors. Furthermore, it is also plausible that citizens ruled by a governor who turned out to be corrupt would have suffered the consequences of such actions directly, making the acceptance of the corruption-as-network discourse more likely (^{Ang, 2019}). Therefore, an observable implication of the mechanism proposed here is that voters in states with a criminal governor should be more prone to the depiction of the PRI as an enabler of the grand corruption schemes suffered in their states, and therefore would be the ones that would be more likely to punish the PRI for the malfeasance of its members.

Comparing electoral results across time would not quite provide convincing evidence towards the argument presented here. Showing that there was a decrease in votes cast for the PRI across the years would be insufficient as there are plenty of factors that change from one election to the next. Figure 1, which shows the presidential electoral results of all major parties for presidential candidates since 2000, illustrates the shortcoming of simply comparing across time: the figure shows a steep decrease in the percentage of votes cast for the PRI between 2012 and 2018, a decrease that is comparable to the one suffered between 2000 and 2006. Yet the corruption cases between these two sets of elections are not equal, nor are the characteristics of these elections. Thus, in order to show that the electoral results of 2018 were indeed affected by these corruption scandals, my analysis must show that the latest electoral result is a consequence of the corruption scandal and not due to other reasons, like the quality of the presidential candidate or the opposition.

Source: Own using electoral results reported by ine. Note: The figure shows the main political parties in Mexico. PRD and the PAN formed a coalition and presented a single candidate in the 2018 election. The party Morena was founded after the 2012 elections, but the candidate that competed in 2018, winner Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had already competed as candidate of the PRD in 2006 and 2012.

Figure 1 Presidential electoral results (2000-2018)  

I propose instead to present a research design that exploits both the geographical and temporal variation of corruption prosecution in explaining the presidential vote received by the PRI presidential candidates.¹⁰ I do so in two distinct, but complementary, steps. The next subsections explain each of these analysis in depth.

Discussion and implications

This paper began with the assertion that the recent wave of detained governors had political consequences beyond those suffered by the individuals involved in those cases. Because of the prevalence and importance of these cases, public media reproduced depictions of these detentions as evidence not only of the malfeasance revealed, but also of networks of impunity. These networks were embodied by the PRI, the party that contributed the most to the pool of criminal governors. As a consequence, the PRI lost its appeal as a viable party, and this was reflected in its electoral results of 2018, where its candidate suffered a resounding loss.

This argument has important theoretical and political implications. Theoretically, this paper identifies an effect that corruption prosecution has on political parties. This effect contributes to the growing literature on the relationship between corruption and trust in political systems and institutions. Furthermore, it identifies the electoral implications of this effect: by associating corrupt governors with their parties, parties suffer electorally even in non-gubernatorial races (^{Ang, 2019}).

Politically, the Mexican experience can inform us of potential ways of improving accountability of political parties beyond simply voting them out of office. After the reactions described here, where media and pundits blamed the PRI for the voraciousness of their governors, PRI militants and directives attempted to assuage the concerns raised by the corruption scandals and their ensuing prosecutions. Perhaps noting that electoral support for his campaign was dwindling, PRI presidential candidate José Antonio Meade attempted to address the corruption scandals head-on, and during a political rally in Veracruz claimed that “It hurts that Javier Duarte injured our prestige. It hurts because it does not define us, and it does not describe us. The priismo of Veracruz is not defined by corruption or impunity” (^{Gómez, 2018}). Similar statements were made by PRI national leader Enrique Ochoa Reza, who attempted to convince voters that the PRI party was free of the “sins of corruption” after calling Duarte a “national embarrassment”.¹⁹ Attempts to distance the PRI from these governors continued even after the 2018 elections. A document allegedly written by a priísta group to the PRI leadership blamed the then president Peña Nieto and the “shameful generation” of politicians for the disastrous electoral results (^{El Financiero, 2018}).

But the attempts to solve the crisis brought upon by the criminal governors went beyond vague statements. Notably, Javier Duarte and César Duarte were expelled from the PRI ranks when they escaped their arrests warrants, an extreme action considering that other governors involved in corruption scandals were never publicly rejected by PRI.²⁰ The willingness of the PRI to expel and publicly reject any association with criminally prosecuted governors marks a change from its previous treatment of corruption scandals. This suggests that the 2018 electoral PRI crisis fundamentally shaped what was considered acceptable within the PRI. This, in turn, opens up the possibility that voters, when punishing candidates for what their copartisans did, are forcing parties to improve internal discipline and a better selection of politicians and candidates.

Conclusion

This paper aimed at understanding the consequences of the recent wave of corruption scandals for the PRI party, both in terms of its reputation as well as its 2018 electoral results. I argued that the criminal prosecutions were not merely understood as cases involving individuals, but rather as instances that evidenced networks and institutions that enabled criminal practices. Specifically, the networks evidences were often embodied in the PRI, the party that most frequently contributed to the pool of criminal governors.

This paper also showed that this association of criminal behavior with a specific institution, the PRI, affected the electoral results of candidates associated with such party. I argued that, if this association were indeed affecting the appeal of the PRI as a political option, the loss of votes should be greater in places where voters were more likely, on average, to have been exposed to public media that reproduced these associations. I argued that two groups of voters that would be more exposed would be (1) those in states that had a prosecuted governor, and (2) those who had greater internet access. The evidence presented here shows that indeed districts in states with governors that were prosecuted lost more votes for the PRI from 2012 to 2018 than districts in states with no prosecuted governors. This effect, although small, is consistent with the implications of my argument. Similarly, I found that districts higher proportion of households with internet access were indeed associated with less votes for PRI, even after including Phone Access as a way to control for possible socioeconomic lurking variables.

I finalized this paper by arguing that these dynamics are somewhat promising for the possibility of strengthening partisan accountability and responsiveness to the voters. The findings presented here, I argue, are a somewhat hopeful interpretation of the electoral effects of criminalizing corruption. Particularly, it is worth noting that if politicians and entire political parties realize that they pay the consequences of what members in their group do, they might be incentivized to monitor and punish corruption within their ranks. Should this trend continue, Mexico’s prospects of developing a responsive party system that can be held accountable might not seem so elusive.