Dissertation Research: Heightened Competitiveness in a Party System Matter? Its Effect on Candidate Quality and Deputy Behavior in Democratizing Mexico

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This dissertation project determines what effects, if any, heightened competitiveness in a party system have on candidate quality and deputy behavior in Mexico. It is hypothesized that, as party systems transform from being one-party dominant to being two-party or multi-party, there is a corresponding improvement in the quality of candidates and a change in deputy behavior in the legislature vis-a-vis the executive and/or the formerly dominant party. "Competitiveness" is measured at the level of relative majority districts in terms of the number of votes received by each party's candidate from one election to the next. Candidate "quality" is measured by both the degree and nature of a candidate's political experience prior to running for a seat in the legislature. Changes in deputy behavior are operationalized as being both a change in the amount of constituency service and in the number of substantive amendments filed to major executive-sponsored legislation. How the varying degrees of competiitiveness in the party system affect both candidate quality and deputy behavior is an important question since it has direct implications for legislative autonomy vis-a-vis the executive and the formerly dominant party. In other words, does party system competitiveness matter for enabling the legislature to participate more fully in the policymaking process, and thereby affect the nature of democracy or the process of democratization? To answer these questions, party leaders and officeholders are interviewed to obtain information on the degree of importance placed on prior political experience in selecting candidates and on the importance of constituent casework. These interviews supplement and allow for better interpretation of archival research in the library of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) by determining how much money was spent on each district-level campaign, and by ascertaining the number of constituent-related amendments filed by deputies to executive-sponsored legislation in one session as compared to the previous session. Data obtained from both the interviews and the archival research are coded and compared to determine whether differences between the two elections are correlated with differences in district-level vote totals for each party.