The Federal Electoral Act of 1946 and its Influence on the Electoral Administration in Mexico: a look back

Abstract

As a result of the various political and electoral reforms that since 1977 there have been almost continuously until today, electoral institutions in charge of organizing elections have been equipped with new tools to deal with the organization of the elections; this task was a critical point of ripeness with autonomy and citizen participation the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE, for its acronym in Spanish) at the dawn of the second half of the nineties of the last century. From that moment, the electoral institution is designed not only as a bulwark of the election administration, but as a body builder and promoter of civic values. In this sense, the mass media (especially television, who has made accessible to all the democratic idea of citizen participation) have assisted in this task however this situations has created tensions between the old social sector workers, unions and peasants who were loyal —consciously or unconsciously— to the PRI authoritarian regime and they had to adapt their electoral practices to the new rules of the game, in a dynamic that survives to this day.

However, studies addressing the issue of the transition to democracy in Mexico, begin their analysis since the electoral reform of 1977, without assessing the real dimension the electoral reforms that created those institutions, leaving plow the way through which, first, the structure of PRI domination remained in power until 2000, and second, how the same structure created in an authoritarian context was exploited in the process of transition to democracy. This apparent contradiction is clear from analyzing the Federal Electoral Act of 1946 as an instrument through which a federal model of electoral administration that influenced all subsequent electoral systems at least until the 1996 reform was established.