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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 ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]