Clientelism in the party of the Democratic Revolution: Continuity and change in Mexican politics

This dissertation investigates the development of clientelistic methods of organization and representation in the Mexican Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). The main questions guiding the research are: how and why has clientelism come to be present in the PRD, how have PRD politicians used clientelism, and how do PRD patrons and their clients among the citizenry perceive these relations?

An analysis of the PRD's evolution, including the regime in which this was rooted, and interviews with politicians, patrons, and clients provides the following results. First, most of the PRD's founding members had been previously active in the Party of the Institutional Revolution, in left-wing opposition parties, or in left-wing social movements. The PRI was clientelist, and the same was true for other organizations active in Mexican politics and society, so that the founding perredistas were all quite familiar with clientelistic methods. Second, the PRD was formed by a series of groups with different roots in the left wing of the political spectrum, and had, as an organization, to accommodate all of these different currents. This was done by allowing the existence of internal factions. Inside the party, the factions eventually came to focus as much on personal power struggles as on ideological and programmatic divergences, and the factions increasingly resorted to clientelism to build their support bases and, thereby, increase their negotiating power. Third, in the Mexican political economy, the PRD's key constituency—the poor—is not adequately provided for by the state, nor is it able to fulfill its own basic resource needs. Poor individuals tend to search for political or economic patrons with whom to establish a personal relationship that will bring benefits, and the PRI has used such relationships to control the population. Members of the PRD had to compete with the PRI's system and poor people coming into contact with the opposition politicians had expectations that their needs would be fulfilled. In sum, given this context, it is not surprising that perredistas would use clientelism to cement their relationships with poor constituents.