Legislative Candidate Selection and Incumbent Renomination in Mexico

LEGISLATIVE CANDIDATE SELECTION AND RENOMINATION Legislative Candidate Selection and Incumbent Renomination in Mexico Ahead of Print ISSN: 0718-090X Revista de Ciencia Política cienciapolitica.uc.cl Selección de candidatos legislativos y renominación de incumbentes en México JOY K. LANGSTON Colegio de México ABSTRACT Despite the abundant literature on consecutive reelection, few works examine how party leaders’ preferences over incumbent traits can affect the future positions of sitting legislators. This paper examines how consecutive reelection and strong party leader control over candidate selection combine to promote certain types of politicians for renominations for reelection, while others are consigned to candidacies for lower posts or left out of the selection process. We use Mexico’s first experience with consecutive reelection since 1932 to better understand how incumbents’ interests and the demands of party leaders shape candidacy outcomes by examining whether the incumbents from the 2018-2021 term were able to win a renomination bid or were sent to a higher or lower post. Keywords: Mexico, reelection, legislators, preferences, party leaders RESUMEN A pesar de la gran cantidad de trabajo que existe sobre la reelección consecutiva, pocos han estudiado cómo las preferencias de los dirigentes partidistas por ciertas características de sus legisladores pueden afectar la probabilidad de ganar o no la nominación la reelección o un puesto más alto. La mayoría de los diputados federales quieren mantener sus puestos en la Cámara Baja; sin embargo, este resultado depende de las preferencias de los líderes de los partidos, porque ellos deciden si los diputados de su bancada merecen la oportunidad de competir para ganar otra vez un curul (la re-nominación para competir). Usamos los 500 diputados federales en México que entraron en 2018 y salieron en 2021 y estuvieron posibilitados para competir para el puesto otra vez para entender interacción entre las preferencias de los líderes partidistas y los políticos ambiciosos. Palabras clave: México, reelección, legisladores, preferencias, líderes partidistas All the contents of this electronic edition are distributed under the Creative Commons license of “AttributionCo-sharing 4.0 International” (CC-BY-SA). Any total or partial reproduction of the material must cite its origin. JOY K. LANGSTON I. INTRODUCTION This paper examines which congressional incumbents win a nomination for consecutive reelection in a consolidating democracy – Mexico’s – in the federal legislature’s first opportunity to reelect sitting deputies in 90 years (2021). Reselection, and legislative turnover more generally, are important questions, because, as Krupnikov and Shipan (2018) argue, too many new members of congress limit the body’s policy expertise, and too few new legislators suggest voters cannot easily punish unresponsive legislators. Because Mexico’s constitutional prohibition of consecutive reelection at the federal level lasted through 2018, this is a first examination of how sitting deputies and party leaders will behave now that reelection has been reinstated. One of the central tenants in the United States literature on legislative politics is that most representatives wish to run for reelection, because it is unlikely that they would risk their posts to compete for another, especially due to incumbency advantage and the risks of running for higher posts (Eckles, Kam, Maestas, and Schaffner 2014; Jacobson 2015). Because candidates are chosen in primaries in the US, candidate selection controlled by party leadership is not an important factor in reselection. In many Western European democracies, on the other hand, closed (or partially closed) list electoral systems and electoral volatility are believed to be the main drivers behind legislative turnover (which is normally not measured at the level of individual choice, but at the legislative aggregate). Ballot structure makes an important difference in rates of reselection (and reelection): plurality or single-member-district (SMD) deputies enjoy an advantage because they are better known to voters than their colleagues who run on the closed proportional representation (PR) lists, and thus, they are more valuable to party leaders who wish to retain or improve their seat counts. In many of these cross-national works, however, the individual legislator’s decision to stay or go is of little interest, although later articles recognize that party selection is an important matter to consider (Gouglas and Maddens 2019). What is less studied are the traits of individual incumbents that make them more (or less) attractive to party leaders after having served a term in the national congress. Instead of examining aggregate legislative periods, or assuming decentralized candidate selection, this work studies how party selectors use the individual traits of sitting deputies to determine whether to nominate them for another congressional run. Furthermore, instead of simply defining the choice as renomination or not, we disaggregate future posts into five different outcomes: retirement or death, not winning a future post, a nomination to a lower post, reselection, or a higher position. This separation is much closer to reality, and it allows us to better measure what incumbent traits matter most for reselection, while distinguishing between more desirable political positions from less important posts. By delving into the interaction between the interests of party selectors (in this case, party leaders) and the individual characteristics of incumbents, such as 2 LEGISLATIVE CANDIDATE SELECTION AND RENOMINATION background experience and leadership posts, we help explain why, even in single-member-districts (SMDs), where we should see the highest rates of consecutive reelection because of the importance of the personal image in voters’ choices at the ballot box, many Mexican incumbents are sent by their party leaders to compete for other political positions instead of being allowed to run again for their congressional seat (Preece 2014; Marino and Martocchia Diodati 2017; Gouglas and Maddens 2019). Because we control for potential confounders, such as candidate selection methods and ballot structure in Mexico’s two-tier electoral system, we are better able to pinpoint the individual characteristics of incumbents and how they interact with the interests of party leaders’ who control their future career paths. We posit that most federal deputies want to remain in office, as it is a good political post (with excellent salaries and possibilities for networking and national media exposure) and for most incumbents, staying put is less risky than running for a higher post (Black 1972) and is a better career decision than moving to a lower post.1 However, as has been shown for other federal democracies in Latin America, such as Brazil and Argentina (Samuels 2000; Jones 2002; Micozzi and Lucardi 2021), (...truncated)