THE INCORPORATION OF AMERICAN-STYLE CAMPAIGN PRACTICES IN MEXICO: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE 1988, 1994 and 2000 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS

The present essay will try to answer to what extent and why have Mexican campaigns incorporated American style practices and become media-centred? For doing this I will argue that Mexican politics has progressively included American style campaigning and that these practices have been easily incorporated because of Mexico’s recent structural changes. In the first place, this will be framed in the current debate between Americanization and Modernization (Plasser and Plasser. 2002; Swanson and Mancini. 1996; Blumler and Gurevitch. 2001). This will be followed by a description of some of the most important structural changes in Mexico that have helped in the implementation of American-style techniques. Then, to determine to what extent campaigns have been modified in Mexico, this essay will focus on three of Americanization’s key characteristics and analyze them in the context of the 1988, 1994 and 2000 election campaigns. Firstly it will look at the increase in the use of political marketing in campaigns. Secondly it will examine the progression towards media-centred campaigns, specifically in relation to television. And thirdly, it will look at their professionalization. Finally, the essay will make a warning. Despite of what this ‘3 concepts and 3 elections sample’ might suggest, the increasing use of American style campaign practices is not only the consequence of internal structural changes (modernization) nor eventually leads to a full adoption of US style campaigning. It is true that internal political and economical factors were relevant and that the incorporation of these techniques has grown since 1988. However the incorporation of American style practices has also to be explained by diffusion and by hybridization, especially in the Mexican context.