Rise and fall of the one-party dominance in Mexico

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Middle- and South America, grade: 1,0, Arizona State University (School Of Politics And Global Studies), course: Mexico, language: English, abstract: The one-party dominance by the PRI lasted for over 70 years and stands for one of the most enduring autocratic regimes in 20th century. While scholars disagree on the causes for the fall of the dominant party during the "perfect dictatorship" (compare Olney 2002, Harvey and Serrano 1994 and Rivera 2008) they mainly agree on a shifting trend away from an autocratic regime structure towards a more democratic, multi-party system (for a critique see Olney 2002). Interestingly, the term "democracy" has been avoided by all scholars which my sources referring to, although they point out that the PRI was able to represent the main social cleavages within the Mexican society with the help of corporatism, clientelism, factionalism and elite consensus (see Olney 2002, Klesner 1997 and Rievera 2008). Therefore it is reasonable to question if the PRI's "perfect dictatorship" can be summarized as non-democratic. According to Lipset and Rokkan 1967, the evolution of the western political party systems has their origin along social cleavages. Thus, we can explain why a certain party emerges and how a party system becomes multi-polar or remains uni-polar. Moreover, we are able to identify a polarized party-system and therefore evaluate the democratic quality of a political system (as long as we define "democratic" along variables such as quality of political representation, free and fair elections, plurality and individual freedom). Hence we can develop the hypotheses that whether the PRI dominance led truly to an undemocratic regime and lacked democratic elements or that it led instead to a democratic regime (or at least to a certain degree) due to the fact that the party took over the social cleavages within the Mexican society.
In order to structure the above mentioned facts and hypotheses, I will try to answer the following set of questions in this paper:
How can the PRI dominance be explained with the help of social cleavages? Why has been a transformation within the party-system occurred and how did this affect the political system? How can we evaluate and rate the current Mexican party-system? Which party-system tended to be more democratic: The one-party or the multi-party system? And last but not least: Can we make any general statements about the social cleavages in Mexico and how they might affect the political future of the party-system?