Subnational governance in Mexico: the unending persistence of dependency

Juan Cruz Olmeda

Chapter 9 in Handbook on Subnational Governments and Governance, 2024, pp 122-136 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: As a federal country, Mexico grants autonomy to its states, allowing them to select their own authorities, manage tax collection, and formulate and implement public policies. However, for the majority of the20th century, the country remained under the authoritarian rule of a single party, which resulted in subnational governments being politically reliant on the central government and unable to exercise their autonomy effectively. Although the situation began to change during the 1980s and 1990s with the advent of democratization and decentralization, and governors emerged as significant political figures, Mexican states still find themselves in a position of dependency today. In this chapter, I argue that this outcome can be attributed to a dual dynamic. Firstly, state governments displayed a reluctance to assume additional fiscal responsibilities, seeking to avoid the costs associated with increased tax collection. Secondly, the federal government actively pursued recentralization measures to exert greater control over various policy domains.

Keywords: Law - Academic; Politics and Public Policy Urban and Regional Studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781803925370.00016 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21670_9

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().