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I would like to share some reflections concerning the results of several investigations in the field of training of values, citizenship, basic education (primary and secondary school), at national and international contexts. First, I shall present the context in which those researches took place, then I will go to some of the results and in my conclusion I will show the proposals for the construction of global citizenship. [For the complete Volume 12 proceedings, see ED597979.]

The "ISSS Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. The following papers are included in the 2013 proceedings: (1) Teaching About Asia in a Social Science Education Program (Cyndi Mottola Poole and Joshua L. Kenna); (2) Teaching Students about Contemporary Germany (Janie Hubbard and Karen Larsen Maloley); (3) Evaluating Pedagogical Techniques in Education Courses: Does Assignment Resubmission for Higher Grades Increase Student Achievement? (Joseph Asklar and Russell Owens); (4) Incorporating Global Citizenship into Social Studies Classroom (Anatoli Rapoport); (5) Internal Culture: The Heart of Global Education (Cyndi Mottola Poole); (6) The Treatment of Monotheistic Religions in World History Textbooks (Jason Allen); (7) College Readiness: Preparing Rural Youth for the Future (Jason Hedrick, Mark Light, and Jeff Dick); (8) The University Core Curriculum Program: Factors of Success and Opportunities for Potential Improvement (Mohamed Elgeddawy); (9) Communication processes of Online Education: The Need for a Sociological Reflection (Beatriz Fainholc); (10) Cinema and History of Brazil: A Debate in the Classroom (Paulo Roberto de Azevedo Maia); (11) Practitioner Inquiry in the K-12 Social Studies Classroom (Heather Leaman); (12) Role-Playing Parent-Teacher Conferences Defending a Social Justice Curriculum (Christopher Andrew Brkich and April Cribbs Newkirk); (13) "Steve Obamney": Political Scumbaggery, the Internet, and the Collective Memetic American Consciousness (Christopher Andrew Brkich and Tim Barko); (14) Democratic Twittering: Using Social Media in the Social Studies (Daniel G. Krutka); (15) An Electorate Equality: Are we Seeing a New Age or Era in American History? (Sean M. Lennon); (16) Instances of Reification in Contemporary Society: Work, Consumption, Cyberculture, and Body (Julio Cesar Lemes de Castro); (17) The Ent's Will Rise Again: The Representation of Nature in the Film "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (Iclal Alev Degim); (18) "We need to conserve the beautiful places of the world, and protect them from being destroyed:" Using Papers about Place in an Environmental History Class (Russell Olwell); (19) Lesson Study in Elementary Social Studies Methods (Lara Willox); (20) Visualization of Teacher's Thinking Process While Observing Students: An Educational Neuroscientific Approach (Naoko Okamoto and Yasufumi Kuroda); (21) Perceptions of Teacher Candidates on Quality Standards of Education Faculty (Aysun Dogutas); (22) Laptops and iPads and Smartphones, Oh My! (Brian D. Furgione, Jason Dumont, Alexandra Razgha, and Joe Sanchez); (23) Academic Transition from High School to College (Barbara Houser and Cheryl Avila); (24) QR Codes: Let's Get Them in (and out of) Your Classroom! (Brian D. Furgione, Jason Dumont, Alexandra Razgha, and Joe Sanchez); (25) Creating a New Space: Partners in Global Education (Denise Dallmer); (26) Letting Go of the Textbook: Applying Multimodal Intertextuality in the Secondary Social Studies Classroom (Terrell Brown); (27) Preservice Elementary Teachers' Economic Literacy: Are They Ready to Teach Economics Concepts? (Kenneth V. Anthony, Nicole Miller, and Becky Smith); (28) The Effect of Family Disintegration on Children and Its Negative Impact on Society (Nourah Mohammad Altwaijri); (29) Historical Examination of the Segregated School Experience (Anthony Pellegrino, Linda Mann, and William B. Russell, III); (30) The Effects of Transnational Prejudice on Incorporation and Identity Formation of Oaxacans in the U.S. (Monica Valencia); (31) Neo-Liberalism and the Deconstruction of the Humanistic Pedagogic Tradition (Chris Sparks); (32) The Great Depression as a Generational Lens on Contemporary Social Studies Reform Movements (Doug Feldmann); (33) Digital Collaboration to Promote Learning in the Social Studies Classroom (Raymond W. Francis and Mary Jo Davis); (34) Disrupting Patriarchy: Challenging Gender Violence In Post-Apartheid South Africa and Post-Conflict Northern Ireland (Erin Tunney); (35) The Relationship between Teachers' Conceptions of Democracy and The Practice of Teaching Social Studies: A Collective Case Study of Three Beginning Teachers (Andrew L. Hostetler); (36) Facilitating the Reduction of Recidivism: A Political Philosophical Approach to Community Justice (Philip Waggoner); (37) Teaching Social Studies Through Photography: World Travels of a Pre-Service Teacher (Rebecca Stump); (38) Young Children's Descriptions about the History of Their Given Names (Lois M. Christensen, Szymanski Sunal, Melissa G. Whetstone, Amanda Daniel Pendergrass, and Ebtesam Q. Rababah); (39) Apoyo: How Does This Culturally Learned Practice from México Characterize Hispanic Households in America? (Gilbert Duenas); and (40) Implications of Common Core State Standards on Social Studies Education (Joshua L. Kenna). (Individual papers contain references.) [For the 2012 proceedings, see ED531864.]

Electoral institutions in democratic states produce incentives for politicians to manipulate economic policy for electoral gain. A growing literature on political institutions in non-democratic states has begun to focus on the effects of these institutions on political and economic systems. Recently, Gandhi and Przeworski (2001) have argued that democratic institutions function by giving support to the autocratic regimes in which they are embedded. If non-democratic institutions are functional, the natural question is whether or not they are consequential. Do democratic institutions have political and economic consequences in non-democratic states that are analogous to those of democratic institutions in democratic states? I argue that the answer to this question is yes, and build on the literature on political business cycles (PBCs) to explain how. Elections in non-democratic regimes bestow legitimacy on the ruling government by purportedly demonstrating its widespread popular support. Ruling parties in non-democratic regimes are interested in maximizing their perceived legitimacy among the population, as such legitimacy gives them free reign to pursue their policy objectives with a minimal amount of domestic opposition. Whereas some authoritarian regimes with a tight control over the press and the exchange of information can create the illusion of a wide popular mandate, other non-democratic regimes must resort to more subtle political means to garner high levels of popular support. I focus on the latter group, which Levitsky and Way (2002:53) refer to as “competitive authoritarian regimes,” where conditions are ideal for the manipulation of economic policy for electoral gain. With the significant informational asymmetry regarding macroeconomic policy in the government’s favor, I predict that non-democratic regimes manipulate fiscal policy to create popular support for the incumbent regime. I demonstrate the applicability of this reasoning with a study of fiscal decision-making accompanying the 1982 presidential elections in Mexico. Turning to a longitudinal study, I develop a more rigorous test of the hypothesis through a time-series analyses of the political and economic correlates of national account balances in Malaysia. Employing an autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model and adjusting for seasonal effects, I find a robust association between elections and lower quarterly budgetary surpluses from the years 1967 to 1997. At least in Malaysia, non-democratic regimes are characterized not simply by an unresponsive government, but rather by a dynamic political process. This paper contributes to comparative politics in two ways. By focusing on some of the more observable implications of economic policy manipulation in a well-defined population of states, this model lends itself to empirical verification, often difficult in the study of non-democratic states. My study also demonstrates ways in which researchers might conceive of the relationship between authoritarian regimes and the populations that they govern, illuminating directions in which the study of non-democratic governance might proceed in the future. References Gandhi, Jennifer, and Adam Przeworski. 2001. “Dictatorial Institutions and the Survival of Dictators.” Paper presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco. Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan A. Way. 2002. “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism.” Journal of Democracy 13(2). pp. 51-65. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of neoliberal reforms on the political activity of the poor in Mexico by paying attention to how low-income actors experience these reforms and how they adapt their political behavior in response to these changes. While many analysts maintain that free-market and democratic reforms reinforce each other, this paper argues that neoliberal reforms and the new linkages they establish between the state and citizens stifle the voice of the poor and create new foundations for their powerlessness. They do this not through the threat of force or sanctions, but by making mobilization and demand making more difficult, or by channeling discontent into arenas such as local governments or neighborhood councils that have little decision making power. As a result, lower-class citizens channel their activities less and less into state-directed activities such as petitions and protests and more into informal and self-help modes that do not put pressure on state-actors. The net effect is to insulate policy makers from pressures from below, with significant negative consequences for representation, accountability and voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1980s and 1990s, Mexico, was able to institute a stabilization and adjustment program in the form of a series of tripartite agreement known as the Pactos. The pacts managed to set the context for the reform of the Mexican economy. The central objectives of this paper are to understand, first, how tripartite agreements between 1987 and 1997 came about and helped reform the economy, and second, put forward some of the factors that are impeding mechanisms of social partnership in the context of democratic politics in 2000. This paper argues that the Pactos were the result of a free trade governing coalition interests for economic reform, and a set of institutional factors (State capacities (ideas, knowledge and expertise), corporatism, and the Pacto institutions) that helped create a policy mechanism that minimized uncertainty and free-riding through an system of rules that monitored, coordinated, and sanctioned political actors. This study suggests that social partnership mechanisms can help reduce uncertainty and foster cooperation in the context of economic reform and increasing competition, yet, that the institutional arrangements of Mexican presidential regime can be an obstacle for the development of tripartite accords in todays Mexican democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Threats to the integrity of electoral democracy are manifold. The democratic quality of electoral contests can suffer damage from self-serving manipulation by central or subnational governments, foul play by contending parties and candidates, or the administrative incapacity or incompetence of election authorities. This paper focuses on a distinct form of threat that has received scant attention in the comparative literature: the societal subversion of democratic elections by criminal violence. Conceptually, the paper presents criminal violence as a form of horizontal threat against the integrity of liberal democratic elections. Empirically, it analyzes the ongoing civil war in Mexico (the so-called drug war) to illustrate the chilling effects criminal violence has on electoral d democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a lot of interest in how party primaries affect the characteristics of candidates, most work has focused on U.S. presidential candidates, limiting scholars’ ability to compare the effects of primaries across large numbers of candidates. The gap is understandable, as it is rare for parties to use different selection methods simultaneously across districts. In new democracies, more experimentation takes place. One such case is Mexico, where the two largest parties used a variety of selection procedures to choose their 2006 candidates for plurality district seats, from open primaries to designation by the national leadership. Since re-election is prohibited, there were no unopposed incumbents. This paper looks at how selection methods affect the candidates chosen, drawing on two surveys, of congressional candidates prior to the 2006 election and of congressional deputies in March 2008. Since the decision to hold a primary is separate from who wins the primary election, I use a Heckman two-stage model to control for selection sample bias. The paper analyzes whether candidates selected in primaries are systematically more moderate or more extreme than the median candidate for each party. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about political participation in Mexico is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including the transformation of Mexico from a one-party authoritarian regime to a multiparty competitive democracy, and the influence of political opportunities and constraints on political participation.

This paper develops a theoretical argument that explains the patterns of change in bothsocial insurance and social assistance in Mexico over the last two decades and explains some ofthe apparent contradictions in the existing literature on globalization, democratic institutions, andwelfare in Latin America. By comparing multiple social insurance and social assistance policyoutcomes during the Salinas (1988-1994), Zedillo (1994-2000), and Fox (2000-2006)administrations, the paper demonstrates that though globalization may constrain welfare policyoptions, its impact is often indirect, through its effect on the relative political capacity ofdomestic actors. Furthermore, political liberalization changes the incentives for politicians tosupply welfare. In addition, existing welfare institutions create powerful policy legacies thatinfluence the interests of some domestic political actors. The overall pattern that emerges inMexico is one of partial retrenchment of social insurance and the expansion of targeted socialassistance, a pattern that can be explained in light of economic liberalization, democratization,and policy legacies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a discussion of three questions central to the practice of indigenous autonomy in southern Mexico. Why did the federal government grant it? Is it consistent with liberal democratic principles? Does it benefit indigenous Mexicans? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper relaxes the informational assumptions of Weingast's (1997) model of democratic stability by applying the solution concept of quantal response equilibrium (QRE). Case studies of The American Colonies, Mexico, and China illustrate the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses evidence from Mexico to test two competing visions about how democracy produces responsive government. Electoral theories of democracy, such as accountability theory, posit that democracies are responsive to the public interest because citizens can use elections as a means of controlling politicians. Participatory theories explain levels of responsiveness as a function of a citizenry?s ability to articulate demands and influence politicians through a wider range of political action. I test hypotheses derived from these two theories, using an original dataset that combines electoral, socioeconomic, public-financial, and demographic indicators for virtually all of Mexico?s 2400 municipalities, from 1980 to 2000. Although most recent research on Mexico has emphasized the importance of elections as instruments of democracy, my data show that electoral competition has little effect on municipal government performance. Non-electoral forms of participation, on the other hand, are closely and strongly correlated with government performance. Most surprisingly, the data show no evidence of an interactive effect: a competitive electoral environment does not appear to be a necessary condition for participation to be influential. I argue that Mexico?s institutional context is responsible for the failure of elections to influence government responsiveness in Mexican municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The democratic transition and consolidation literatures recognize the key role that civil society plays in the consolidation and deepening of electoral democracy. As a corollary, societies with a weak civil society will have a difficult time consolidating an already vulnerable democracy. This then begs the question, how can civil society be encouraged to grow? Civil society can be encouraged to develop indirectly through a variety of mechanisms including funding for civil society organizations and tax deduction laws that create legal incentives. However, in some Mexican states controlled by the PAN, state governments have tried to create civil society directly by establishing neighborhood committees to mediate between government and society. The neighborhood committees are intended to build consensus about desired infrastructure projects, petition the government accordingly, and mobilize resources to pay for projects. This paper seeks to determine whether these committees are a successful government led creation of civil society or merely a different form of the same government control that has plagued organization life in Mexico’s past? This study proposes a survey of, and selected interviews with, the presidents of Tijuana’s neighborhood communities. Controlling for income and service levels, the study examines democratic practices within the committees, links to other civil society organizations, and their relationships with the PAN lead government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses evidence from Mexico to test two competing visions about how democracy produces responsive government. Electoral theories of democracy, such as accountability theory, posit that democracies are responsive to the public interest because citizens are able to use elections as a means of controlling politicians. Participatory theories explain levels of responsiveness as a function of a citizenry?s ability to articulate demands and influence government through a wider range of political action. I test hypotheses derived from these two theories, using an original dataset that combines electoral, socioeconomic, public-financial, and demographic indicators for virtually all of Mexico?s 2400 municipalities, from 1980 to 2000. Although most recent research on Mexico has emphasized the importance of elections as instruments of democracy, my data show that electoral competition has little effect on municipal government performance. Non-electoral forms of participation, on the other hand, are closely and strongly correlated with government performance. Most surprisingly, the data show no evidence of an interactive effect: a competitive electoral environment does not appear to be a necessary condition for participation to be influential. I argue that Mexico?s institutional context is responsible for the failure of elections to influence government responsiveness in Mexican municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent wave of political transitions has often led to competitive elections, but not always to the minimal institutional guarantees of civil and political rights or the responsive policy outcomes that are generally associated with democratic regimes. Scholars have offered a range of explanations for the differences in the quality of these new democracies. Aspects of socioeconomic structure, institutional configurations, and the strategic choices of elite actors have each been proposed, but these hypotheses are rarely systematically tested against each other. In this paper, I draw on the experiences of Mexico’s thirty-one recently empowered state governments in the years since that country’s pivotal 1988 presidential election to provide just such a test. My statistical analyses indicate that legislative pluralism, the strength of radical opposition parties, and economic inequality each have an important effect on the quality of new democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the broader theoretical claim that civil society can be thickened (in democratic ways) with international support and collaboration. Case studies of domestic election monitoring organizations in Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru suggest that internationally supported civic organizations can play an important role in mobilizing political participation. There is less evidence to show that they can consistently fulfill other democratizing functions, such as modeling democratic practices and improving communication between government and citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the institutional legacies of the one-party regime in Mexico and Russia respectively as they make the transition to democracy and market economies. Despite their differing histories, the countries are responding to similar globalization pressures, in roughly similar ways. However the Soviet legacy of strict limits on institutional pluralism and lack of a mechanism for ensuring leadership rotation left Russia ill-prepared for the democratic transition in comparison with Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper is a study of the deliberative development of the Mexican media, both broadcast and print, through the analysis of their current legal framework, culture, ownership scheme and common practices. It is grounded on archive research, interviews and literature review. Its analytical framework is based on particular concepts of the theory of deliberative democracy developed by contemporary philosophers such as Habermas, Bohman, Mansbridge and Cohen. Through this framework it argues that the major obstacles to democracy in Mexico, such as social and economic inequalities, patronage and a weak rule of law, constitute also obstacles to this deliberative development of the Mexican media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to operationalize democracy at the national level have occupied a central place in the discipline since the 1960s, and have resulted in a cumulative body of literature and in a variety of datasets of increasing rigor and geographic and temporal coverage. Attempts to measure democracy at the subnational level are much more recent and inchoate, cover only a few countries and periods, and, critically, are not comparable across nations. After reviewing the state of the subject at the national level and the existing (objective) national subnational indices, this paper proposes six versions of an objective Subnational Democracy Index that can be calculated on the basis of (typically available) electoral and institutional data. Because of their modest data demands, the proposed indices can easily be applied to very different national and temporal contexts, thus permitting comparisons of subnational regimes across countries. The measures are pilot-tested on the first-level subnational units of five federations (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and the United States) and of one unitary country (Uruguay). The ultimate goal of this line of research is to produce cross-sectional--time-series datasets of subnational democracy with broad geographic and temporal coverage similar to those existing for national regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rising literature on voting behavior emphasizes a “two step” model (originally argued by Dominguez and McCann in Democratizing Mexico), where a voter first examines their attitudes toward the dominant party and then towards their personal economic or personal interests. However, there are divergent findings from tests of this model, and there are methodological differences that limit our ability to make consistent conclusions. In this paper, we reexamine the validity of the “two-step” argument using data from the 2000 Mexico and 2006 Paraguay elections and employ methods we argue are more appropriate for these tests: 1) a mixed logistic estimation and 2) statistical backwards induction. From the mixed logistic regression, we conclude that voters in nations with hegemonic parties confer greater importance to the image of the dominant party, confirming the “two step” model. From the statistical backwards induction analysis, we confirm that the existence of the two steps respond to strategic considerations of voters. These findings have relevant implications for transitions to a multi-party democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organization of fair elections requires impartial and independent electoral management bodies. This paper analyses the impact of electoral competition on the independence of state level electoral institutions in Mexico, an emerging democracy. We posit a simple model where increased political competition in local elections leads to more independent electoral management bodies through various mechanisms at different stages of a democratization processâ??noting that competition in local, state assembly or gubernatorial elections do not produce the same incentives for electoral reform among all political parties. We develop an original index of the independence of electoral institutions for the Mexican states during the 1990 to 2004 period, and analyze a number of measures of political competition to assess some of the hypotheses derived from our model. Results indicate that increased competitiveness in governor and legislative races leads to more independent electoral institutions, whereas competition in municipal races does not. Increased competition from some political parties elicits larger increases in independence than others. We also find that, as the number of effective political parties increase, the pressure for further electoral reform eventually settles down. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many countries, networks of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have supported fledgling democracies by building solidarity, facilitating communication, and mobilizing political action. These networks have been particularly effective in pressuring governments to increase political transparency and to reduce corruption. For almost two decades, networks of Mexican NGOs have contributed to a political transition toward democracy. Evidence suggests that this transition has occurred sporadically, leaving Mexico a democracy with authoritarian enclaves. Thus, the presence of this political diversity offers a unique context in which to examine NGO-state relations.Using data from 173 non-profit NGOs in Oaxaca, Mexico, this paper explores interactions among NGOs and the Mexican government. Analyses of the NGO network suggest heavy involvement by government authorities in civil society operations. In fact, the majority of ties reported by NGOs were to various levels of the Mexican government. There are dual implications of this research: first, parameters of civil societies and states may not be as rigid as they are usually assumed to be. Second, while the results suggest that this overlap may present an obstacle to democratization, the presence of NGO-state networks may also offer a unique opportunity for those seeking to support democratization in historically authoritarian settings. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why has Mexico's approach to achieving economic liberalization and political democracy shown consistent success over time? Mexico has managed a sustained evolution of its institutions towards economic liberalization and democracy, and the preferences of each of Mexico's presidents since Miguel de la Madrid have determined the pathway taken. Each of the last four presidents set policy agendas based on improving social capital, adopting policies of economic liberalization, eventual commitment to democracy, transparency, and a firm determination to reform and uphold the rule of law. This paper focuses on measuring the changes in Mexico's formal institutions: electoral success by opposition parties, the interaction of mixed party participation in the legislature with the size of the executive's winning coalition, and changes in economic policies that led to greater economic participation. Leadership preferences, which initially chose economic liberalization, produced political liberalization as an outcome of the policies dictated by those preferences. The long-run result is that Mexico's slow and steady approach led it down a path of sustained economic and political liberalization, leading to a sustainable democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cuban and Mexican regimes both used their respective Revolutions as their benchmark for legitimacy until the late 1980s. By 1989, neither regime could afford itself and the myth that a state-led revolutionary economy could provide effectively for a population indefinitely was shattered. Mexico gradually shifted its benchmark of legitimacy from Revolution to Liberal Democracy starting with the Salinas sexenio and culminating with the administration of Vicente Fox, the first opposition president to break the PRI's monopoly on power at the national level. Cuba transformed its economy but maintained its benchmark of legitimacy act by preventing the emergence of an independent sector of small businessmen, the same sector that brought the opposition to power in Mexico. Cuba's post Cold War realignment has given birth to an apparent alternative to liberal democracy- Revolutionary Democracy, a system based on selective access to free market pockets, a permanent state of siege mentality, and the maintenance of quality social programs. The key variables affecting the survivability of revolutionary ideology are security and transparency. The higher the level of security provided to the population and the lower the levels of transparency, the greater the support for a revolutionary regime. This paper is based on oral histories and interviews conducted in Mexico between 1995 and 2002 and Cuba in the summer of 2004. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mexico's 2000 transition to democracy seemed to signal the final demise of seven decades of single-party rule and the advent of truly competitive politics. At the same time, it appeared that the deep restructuring toward a market economy under the auspices of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was finally beginning to pay off in terms of growth, investment, and a slight upturn in distributional gains. However, the country's 2003 mid-term elections told a rather different story: the incumbent PAN party suffered a net loss in its congressional standings that was unprecedented for a Mexican party that controlled the executive office, while the former ruling PRI party not only gained in legislative presence but continues to play a prominent role in domestic politics. The tenacious political presence of the former architects of semi-authoritarian rule, as well as the country's weak legacy around democratic institution building, confirms that a decidedly gradual democratic transition will be even more protracted. This paper analyzes Mexico's transition from a political economy standpoint, with a focus on the need to reconcile the emergence of competitive politics with the development strategy now in place. We trace four main themes that have underpinned this transition over the past two decades, and then analyze the ways in which these themes have crystallized into the political economic challenges that faced the administration of President Vicente Fox. In essence, we argue that the current juncture constitutes a "new" political phase for carrying out the next wave of reforms, even if politicians and policymakers have been slow to grasp this reality and act accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to shed light on the relationship between democratic accountability and local public good provision in Mexico. I assess the way in which the system of intergovernmental finances has allowed municipal governments to remain rather unaccountable to citizens in the provision of public goods and services at the local level. By looking at the determinants of the reelection rates of the parties that control the municipal government, I explore the extent to which the process of decentralization and the way in which local governments use decentralized fiscal transfers is linked to the retention of municipal governments in the hands of the same party. Though this does not provide a direct test of the accountability of politicians to citizens, it suggests that the punishment of incumbents who fail to deliver in certain aspects of public policy is a critical tool that may allow Mexicans to align their interests with those of their representative governments. The findings, however, suggest a rather strong entrenchment of incumbents from all parties, based on the construction of clientelism and patronage networks, rather than the provision of public goods. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]