Publisher's Synopsis
Mexico's 2000 presidential election marks the end of 71 years of one-party rule, after a slow process of emergence of democratic institutions and viable second-party candidates. Yet the process of democratization has been uneven, proceeding much more rapidly in some regions than in others. This book examines whether diffusion processes have been at work or whether broader national processes of change have unfolded across an uneven socio-economic map; it explores how multi-party politics have emerged in a single country - testing both spatial diffusion and political development theories - using new methods of spatial econometrics and data on vote shares from 1964 to 2000, for all three levels of political representation. It involves a wide range of variables as well as socio-economic aspects of the population that display sharp regional differentiation.
