The PRI under Hegemony

The third chapter offers a review of the literature on the PRI before the 1980s: how the party’s predecessor was formed, how it integrated millions of Mexicans into the party, and how its leaders were able to manipulate electoral rules to win elections at all levels of government for decades. The chapter also provides a new interpretation of the relation between federal bureaucracy and the party’s national organization by examining the relation among the successive presidents of Mexico, their Secretaries of Governance, and the president of the National Executive Committee (CEN) of the PRI. This is important because when the party lost the presidency, it also lost its third-party enforcer who had been responsible for maintaining party unity.