Transforming great party politics: The National Action Party and its role in Mexico's democratic transition

This dissertation investigates the problem of democratic transitions by focusing on Mexico's National Action Party (PAN), a democratic opposition party based on Catholic social doctrine. It demonstrates how democratic values can transform “great parties,” those parties dedicated to monopolizing politics. The PAN, conceived as a democratic and electoral-minded “system party” within the “great party” regime of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), engaged in a gradualist strategy of electoral participation and dialogue in order to open up the political system.; After nearly two decades of political turbulence following the revolution, Catholic intellectuals and liberal reformers founded the PAN to revive the goal of political liberty and reassert the rights of Catholic participation in the anticlerical, revolutionary regime. The PAN spent a lengthy period in the political wilderness in which it had to cope with lingering “anti-system” elements within its own ranks. Finally, under President Carlos Salinas (1988–1994), the PRI began to adopt “system party” policies with the PAN's backing. By 2000, the PAN “system party” won the presidency and ended the PRI's “gre at party” domination of Mexican politics; The problems of democratic transition theory and the developmental process of Mexico's transition to political democracy will be dealt with in Chapter One. Chapter Two contextualizes the “great party” struggle between the Catholic social forces and the revolutionary forces that led to the founding of the one-party state. The founding of the PAN as a “system party” that committed to democratic values is taken up in Chapter Three. Chapter Four describes the series of crises within both the “great party” state and the reforming opposition that led to the emergence of moderates within the PRI and the displacement of “anti-system” elements within the PAN. Chapter Five addresses the alliance between the PAN and the PRI reformers that developed the preconditions for the political transition. Chapter Six deals with the last rally and electoral defeat of the “great party” regime, and, in conclusion, Chapter Seven addresses how the lessons of the transition and how the PAN will govern Mexico as a “system” party...