Book: Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in Mexico (2006, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, Cambridge University Press)

This book provides a theory of the logic of survival of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), one of the most resilient autocratic regimes in the twentieth century. An autocratic regime hid behind the facade of elections that were held with clockwise precision. Although their outcome was totally predictable, elections were not hollow rituals. The PRI made millions of ordinary citizens vest their interests in the survival of the autocratic regime. Voters could not simply throw the "rascals out of office" because their choices were constrained by a series of strategic dilemmas that compelled them to support the autocrats. The book also explores the factors that led to the demise of the PRI. The theory sheds light on the logic of "electoral autocracies," among the most common type of autocracy today, and the factors that lead to the transformation of autocratic elections into democratic ones.

Winner of the Leon D. Epstein Outstanding Book Award for the best book written in the previous two years on parties and elections and the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. The dissertation upon which this book is based also won the Gabriel Almond Award for the Best Dissertation in Comparative Politics.

Available at Cambridge University Press and Amazon.