Distrust Breeds Bureaucracy The Formal Regulation of Electoral Governance in Mexico Published in Public Integrity 3/2 (Spring 2001): 181–99

Over the past 25 years, the “third wave ” of global democratization has washed about 80 countries to the windy shores of electoral democracy.1 Responding to this unprecedented move towards democratic rule, political science has developed a whole new subfield – democratization studies. In this new subdiscipline, scholars have explored various explanations of either successful, failed, or flawed transitions to democracy. They have studied the influence of a wide range of variables, such as economic well-being, political culture, international pressure, pre-democratic institutions, political leadership, choice and contingency. Yet they have failed to recognize one “crucial variable for explaining the success or the failure of democratic transitions ” (Pastor 1999b), namely, electoral governance.2 In general, political science has paid scarce attention to the institutional foundations of democratic elections. In established OECD democracies, scholars can afford to ignore them because “people take for granted the administrative dimension of elections ” (Pastor 1999a: 76). As it seems, in the early transitions from authoritarian rule in Southern Europe and South America something similar happened. Those transitions took place in the context of “usable