Doctoral Dissertation Research for Poltiical Science: Shaping Democracy: Competition and Party Strategy in Mexico

该项目建议对墨西哥地区一级的政党领导人进行抽样调查，以测试和扩展政党战略理论，这些理论来自于并通常适用于已建立的政党民主。 提出了关于政党竞争的经典问题：在什么条件下，政党选择集中增加核心选区选票的密集战略，以及他们何时通过扩展到边缘选区来遵循广泛战略？ 在两方和三方竞争中，战略有何不同？ 对这些问题的回答可以让我们深入了解影响新民主国家的更广泛的进程，例如随着竞争的扩大，政党如何在选举市场中定义和建立立场，以及这些立场如何影响党派竞争的维度。 该项目还揭示了墨西哥的研究特别感兴趣的问题：一个拥有霸权资源的主导党和最初作为压力集团组织的反对党如何转变为具有连贯政策的竞争性组织。这项抽样调查是针对墨西哥300个选区所有三个主要政党的领导人进行的。 总人数为900人，其中约314人是访谈对象。 虽然观察单位是区领导，但抽样单位是区。 墨西哥地区相当于美国的选区，地区领导人的功能与Kitschelt（1989、1990）对西欧研究中的活动家相同。 每个选定地区的所有三位领导人都接受了采访。 这种方法有助于重构当地竞争的条件，并基于战略是与竞争对手互动形成的预期。 这项研究的重点是三个方面，但分解的组织结构允许使用统计技术，其中包括因素分析和回归。 调查问卷的设计是为了利用一个非常小的，但令人兴奋的，和新兴的数据机构的政党，党组织，党的人员在新的和成熟的民主国家。 因此，这些数据可以作为研究墨西哥政党的基础，也可以将墨西哥与其他新兴民主国家放在跨国家的角度。政党战略从来不是文献中的一个主要研究领域。 这一遗漏有其理论基础：研究政党竞争的主流方法将政党视为社会或政治进程的机械表现，而不是其自身的行为者。 这一提议提出了两种主要的战略类型。 然后，从空间和行动者为中心的理论中挑选假设。 这些方法产生强烈的期望，两方的情况下，但矛盾的竞争对手的假设，三方的情况下。 一个简单的，一般的战略形成模型，结合环境和组织内变量的建议。 测试现有的方法为两方案件，同时将其扩展到三方竞争在墨西哥的实证证据有助于推动当前理论的边界。墨西哥是一个有趣的例子，原因有二。 第一，两方和三方竞争的国家以下地区允许在一个国家内测试多种，有时是相互矛盾的竞争假设。 第二，墨西哥和其他拉丁美洲国家的政党建设是在历史上独特的环境中进行的：自由市场经济政策打破了当地生产和当地消费之间的联系，产生了一个太小而无法维持选举成功的获胜者群体。 尽管20世纪30年代建立的民粹主义政党是依赖包容性政治经济的多阶级联盟，但当代政党建设必须找到新的动员战略。

The project proposes a sample survey of district-level party leaders in Mexico to test and extend theories of party strategy derived from, and usually applied to, established party democracies. Classic questions about party competition are posed: under what conditions do parties choose intensive strategies focused on increasing the yield of votes from their core constituencies, and when do they follow extensive strategies by expanding into marginal constituencies? How do strategies differ in two- and three-party competition? Answers to these questions can give insights into broader processes affecting new democracies, such as how parties define and establish positions in the electoral marketplace as competition expands, and how these positions affect the dimensionality of partisan competition. The project also sheds light on questions of specific interest to the study of Mexico: how a dominant party with hegemonic resources and opposition parties organized initially as pressure groups transform into competitive organizations with coherent policy packages. The sample survey is directed to the leaders of Mexico's 300 electoral districts from all three major parties. The total population contains 900 members, about 314 of whom are targeted for interviews. Although the unit of observation is the district leader, the sampling unit is the district. Mexican districts are equivalent to wards in the United States, and district leaders are functionally the same as activists in Kitschelt's studies (1989, 1990) of West Europe. All three leaders from each selected district are interviewed. This methodology helps to reconstruct the conditions of local competition, and is based on the expectation that strategy is formed interactively with competitors. The study focuses on three parties, but disaggregating the organizational structure permits the use of statistical techniques which include factor analysis and regression. The questionnaire is designed to take advantage of a very small, but exciting, and emerging body of data on parties, party organizations, and party personnel in new and established democracies. Thus, the data can serve as a basis for the study of Mexican parties, and also to place Mexico in cross-national perspective with other emerging democracies. Party strategy has never been a major area of inquiry in the literature. This omission has a theoretical basis: the dominant approaches to the study of party competition view parties as mechanical representations of sociological or political processes, not as actors in their own right. This proposal suggests two primary types of strategy. Then, hypotheses are cullled from spatial and actor-centered theories. These approaches yield strong expectations for the two-party case, but contradictory rival hypotheses for the three-party case. A simple, general model of strategy formation that combines environmental and intra-organizational variables is proposed. Testing existing approaches for the two-party case while extending their reach to three-party competition in Mexico with empirical evidence help to push the boundaries of current theory. Mexico represents an interesting case for two reasons. First, subnational areas of two- and three-party competition permit testing multiple, and sometimes contradictory, rival hypotheses within one country. Second, party building in Mexico and in other Latin American countries is occurring in historically unique circumstances: free-market economic policies break the link between local production and local consumption, creating a constituency of winners which is too small to sustain electoral success. Although populist parties built in the 1930s were multiclass alliances that relied on a political economy of inclusion, contemporary party building must find new mobilizational strategies.