Why do Mexicans Vote? An Analysis of the 2018 Elections

Mexico’s 2018 elections marked the arrival to power of a new political party and a president with rarely seen popular support. Despite this event’s relevance in the country’s political life, evidence-based explanations are still missing about the reasons behind Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) triumph and Enrique Peña Nieto’s incumbent PRI party’s defeat.

According to the most widespread narrative, the primary determinant of the Mexican vote in 2018 was citizens’ weariness with political corruption. Is that true? Which policy issues were relevant to Mexican voters’ preferences? What led to the triumph of a presidential candidate running for the third time? Two political scientists answer these questions with the most comprehensive electoral autopsy of the 2018 elections so far.

In “Política y Gobierno” (a journal published by the Center for Economic Research and Teaching), Professors Melina Altamirano and Sandra Ley published the article “Economy, Security, and Corruption in the 2018 Presidential Election. Campaign issues and electoral preferences in Mexico.” In this work, they measure the influence on voter preferences of the three main issues that set the agenda for the 2018 election: the economy, security, and corruption. Altamirano and Ley’s studies these three themes simultaneously and comparatively. This was possible thanks to the National Electoral Study of Mexico (CIDE-CSES) 2018, a survey conducted at three different moments: two surveys before Election Day and one after the elections.

The most surprising finding of Altamirano and Ley’s work is that, despite being one of the main campaign issues, citizens’ assessment of corruption did not play a direct role in explaining the vote for AMLO. While 83% of the population interviewed for the CIDE-CSES survey believed that corruption was pervasive in Mexico in 2018, only 9% thought this was the country’s most pressing problem. During Peña Nieto’s presidential term, many corruption scandals touched both the president’s family and close associates. López Obrador’s campaign highlighted those scandals, so why did corruption not play a relevant role in his electoral support? According to Altamirano and Ley, one possible explanation is that corruption is a challenging factor for citizens to use when defining their electoral preferences. The perception of widespread corruption and the accusations’ lack of credibility makes it difficult to identify which politicians are not corrupt. Hence, voters tend to discount the issue and give priority to other needs.

The analysis indicates that economic issues, instead, were the main determinants of the vote in the 2018 elections. The so-called Structural Reforms (in areas such as energy, labor, and telecommunications) were the Peña Nieto administration’s flagship project. They also were one of its most controversial policies. Despite Peña Nieto’s claims that these constitutional reforms would bolster growth, Mexico’s economy was relatively weak during his six-year term. Consequently, voters believed the government failed to live up to the high expectations they set. The authors suggest that this favored AMLO’s candidacy in 2018.

To a lesser extent, voters’ negative assessment of the security situation also played a relevant role in explaining the vote for AMLO in 2018. Since 2007, Mexico has been going through a severe crisis of violence. During the last year of Peña Nieto’s six-year term, the country reached a record number of 94 murders per day on average. However, an interesting finding is that the victims of violence (the group most affected by this issue) did not show clear support for a particular candidate. In 2018, the AMLO campaign proposed establishing an “amnesty” as a tool to pacify Mexico. Through this law, specific individuals such as minors, farmers and women used to transport drugs by cartels could be pardoned by the government. However, the authors point out that AMLO’s amnesty proposal may have had counterproductive results, possibly alienating victims. On the contrary, measures of punitive populism (such as the proposal to “cut off the hands” of the criminals made by independent candidate Jaime Rodríguez) seem to have been better received by crime victims.

The electoral autopsy performed by Altamirano and Ley sheds light on a political episode in Mexican history that, although widely discussed, has generated more opinions than rigorous, evidence-based work. The research portrays an election in which the economic vote coexists with a security vote and where corruption scandals are not a strong determinant of electoral behavior.

In the context of a pandemic with midterm elections approaching in Mexico, it is worth asking whether these trends will remain or whether voters will turn their attention to other issues.