Year: 2006

Less than five minutes after head of the Electoral Institute and the President announced that results would not be available until the full vote on Wednesday and urged Mexicans to be patient, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is on TV (at 11:20 local time) telling the country that he has won. He believes his camp has won by at least 500,000 votes.

He’s headed for the Zocalo to tell the people that this result will not be reversed.

{My stomach still hurts.}

Luis Ugalde is right now announcing that the rapid count is too close to call.

He’s saying that we’ll have to wait for the official count, due Wednesday. And, only the IFE can certify the vote, and he urges everyone to wait for the full vote.

The country has “una enorme responsibildad” and the parties should wait for and respect the full vote, according to Ugalde.

{And he looks like he’s sweating a LOT.}

And, all manifestaciones should wait….that is, no one should take to the streets.

{Shit….uh oh.}

Now, Fox is making an announcement. I’d sure hate to be him. {Geez, he sure has aged in just six years….} He’s saying Mexico has already made its decision at the polls, and the country must wait for the “impartial, transparent electoral institutions” to do their job.

{My stomach hurts….}

Fox News. And this other source.

Whew! I finished that conference paper (a full 3 weeks before the conference) and set a new personal record (3 days). I don’t think it’s horrible either. Since its directly related to a sliver of my book manuscript, it was not entirely a detour from the book, just a brief pit stop.

From the paper’s introduction:

This paper answers two rather modest questions relevant for these latter diffusion explanations: How do IOs influence domestic social policy? And, is there anything new about the ways IOs participate in the diffusion of policy? These are important questions, since a handful of recent studies suggest that IOs have not had a significant impact on social policy outcomes since the 1980s (Hunter and Brown 2000; Brooks 2005). These studies fail to find a statistical relationship between international aid or World Bank lending and social spending or pension privatization. In this paper, I contend that IOs do influence social policy, though not in ways likely to be measured by cross national comparisons of program lending and policy outcomes. International financial institutions may have used the blunt instrument of loan conditionality and one-size-fits-all structural adjustment recommendations during the debt crisis of the 1980s, but few would characterize the social policy approach of IOs during the 1990s as such. Seldom is IO influence on social policy a matter of a gross display of influence through loan conditionality or the imposition of simple policy models. Instead, the influence of IOs on social policy has been important but more nuanced than many characterizations would admit. Further, recent studies fail to address the second question posed above; they fail to ask what is new, if anything, about the ways IOs influence policy. I show that recent participation of IOs in policy formation shares both commonalities and differences with participation of IOs in the first half of the twentieth century. To illustrate the ways IOs influence social policy, both recently and historically, I compare social insurance policy formation in Mexico during the 1940s and 1990s. In neither case did IO participation decisively cause the policy outcomes, but in both cases IOs provided both important technical advice and established important international norms regarding policy that influenced the types of policies that were ultimately adopted.

And from the conclusion:

This paper demonstrates the ways in which IOs have sought to influence domestic social insurance policy in Mexico, though with mixed results, in two important periods of policy reform. Several general observations should be made regarding the Mexican experience. Efforts of IOs to influence domestic social policy are not a new feature of recent globalization; IOs have always sought to influence policy in Mexico. This is consistent with findings of comparative and historical studies (Deacon 1999; Orenstein 2003). Though the regularity of IO participation and the means of influence (technical assistance or loans) observed in Mexico are likely to be similar to experiences of other developing nations, this IO influence stands in marked contrast to the experience of most advanced industrialized democracies, where it is safer to assume that all welfare politics are domestic. This suggests that studies of welfare in the developing world should be careful to consider the influence of IOs when explaining policy outcomes, even if IO participation is not decisive in determining policy. If Mexico provides any finding worth generalizing, it is probably that the politics of social insurance are still predominantly domestic, despite efforts by IOs to influence policy outcomes. IOs may provide policy inputs, but whether those inputs are incorporated into policy will ultimately be constrained by the domestic political context.

Now, to decide what to do with the rest of the day (until election results start coming in) as a reward. This, perhaps? [No, Brian voted for this.]

Update: The movie was good, but be sure to see it somewhere with digital sound. The sound drug really bad in the new theatre where we saw it, which made the score sound off key during intense parts of the movie.

And come hell or high water, the IFE will announce the results of the preliminary count at 11pm.

The World Cup is still a close second for top news story, however.

Number of typewritten pages: 10.5

Notes for reamining 3 pages of paper: check

Number of futbol games watched: 2

Number of pages in the latest Archie/Nero adventure read: 80+

Number of espressos: I’m not tellin.

It was a long day.

From the Federal Electoral Institute in English. And in Spanish.

It includes a calendar and overview of rules regarding campaigns.

Guau.

Matthew Shugart provides a better round-up than I’m prepared to offer. He makes some interesting points regarding the dynamics of the Congressional elections, too. Go read it.

Yesterday: 1 typed page (because I had to spend time making up for the fact that I never took the IR security core in graduate school)

Today: 7 typed pages. Goal: another 10 to produce a 20-25 page conference paper

Update today: Two more typed pages and notes for rest of paper.

Well, there’s not much since campaigning officially ends tonight. The vote is Sunday. Did you know that alcohol is not sold on election day in Mexico? Interesting, huh?

Now that Mexico’s out of the world cup, my Google “Mexico” newsfeed has regular news again, though I can’t say I’m happy about it.

Early in the day, Reuters and Bloomberg were pointing out that Mexican stocks opened low, but by tonight, both were commenting on the overall rise in stocks today.

La Jornada dedicated three stories to a claim by a Mexican journalist that the PAN has used voter registration information target their campaign:

El martes pasado, la periodista Carmen Aristegui denunció que el PAN realizó -con base en el padrón- su propio mapa de georreferencia para identificar a ciudadanos por nombre, apellido, dirección y hasta preferencia electoral, con el fin de utilizarlo en su campaña. Tal operación se pudo descubrir al ingresar a la página de Internet de las Redes por México, de Calderón, con el usuario hildebrando 117 y la contraseña ”captura”. De acuerdo con la legislación electoral, los partidos sólo pueden utilizar el padrón para revisarlo. Cualquier otro uso constituye un delito.

The PAN’s response was to claim that it was a trick by the PRD to make the PAN look bad:

”No caeremos en las provocaciones del Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD). Con mentiras no ganarán la Presidencia de la República”, aseguró la dirigencia nacional que preside Manuel Espino, cuando se le solicitó una entrevista sobre el eventual uso ilegal del padrón. Inclusive anunció que el tema no formará parte de la agenda político-electoral y de paso advirtió a los periodistas que “no esperen ningún comentario sobre las empresas de Diego Zavala”. [both quotes from the first article above]

The IFE has said it would investigate and that only 192 people have legal access to the voter rolls.

The leftist Mexico City daily is continuing to fan the flames of claims that social spending funds are being used for electoral purposes. This time, they claim to have thier own evidence pointing to PAN mischief. La Jornada is also continuing to criticize perceived inaction by Ugalde (the head of the electoral institute) to stop the CCE spots.

And, last but not least, just when we thought the teachers’ strike in Oaxaca was cooling off, things turn for the worse. (see also)

Of course, if you read the other Mexican dailies, you’re likely to get rosier, or at least less biased, news about the national Mexican futbol team or the closing rallies of the campaigns.

So far, 8 typed pages. And still going.

I know. Academic Coach recommends stopping while I’m hot, but I’ve got service work to do tomorrow…so I feel I should keep going while I can.

[And, besides, with my box set of Antonio Aguilar loaded on my iPod (thanks to my good friend Liz back in the D.F), I’m super inspired.]

Update, 11:15pm: Have reviewed Chapter 2 and made list of issues to review/resolve before I can write more. Time to review my notes on class power and institutional change.

About five pages newly written. More revising/parsing/sorting of information.

The use of social welfare for political gain is nothing new. In fact, if governments don’t provide social benefits to earn votes, they would they provide social benefits at all? Since the late 1980s, however, Mexican governments have been a bit more direct in their use of anti-poverty programs for electoral purposes. The most blatant effort was Salinas’s use of Pronasol. Zedillo apparently cleaned up some of the most overt political manipulation when he converted Pronasol into Progresa, though some studies have found that Progresa was also a political tool. (I have a published paper on Pronasol; Tina Green has a good paper on Progresa.)

Recently, two studies have suggested that Oportunidades (the program that replaced Progresa) has also been politically manipulated, primarily by local politicians rather than the national government. This was the topic of the editorial I linked to last week.

Today’s WaPo has an article discussing the findings of the two recent studies of Oportunidades. You can read the press release from one of the studies at the Alianza Civica website.

Just when you start to think that maybe democracy will improve the efficiency of anti-poverty programs or at least prevent the programs from being used as a tool of intimidation, the realities of rural Mexican politics surface.

3-4 pages typed/revised, to finish Intro. 1-2 pages of Chapter 2 written; other parts reviewed/outlined (80% finished).

Lopez Obrador called Calderon’s camp “traffickers in influence,” and Calderon accused Lopez Obrador of supporting “los malosos” in the northern state of Tamaulipas.

The final stop on AMLO’s campaign.

Madrazo was just trying to minimize the defections from his campaign, following the announcement by the CROC last week that it would urge its workers to vote for Lopez Obrador. The CROC has been one of a handful of faithful PRI-affiliated unions since the 1930s. Its leader defended the decision to support the PRD by claiming it was trying to stop the right and saying it had nothing against Madrazo personally. In response, the CTM, the largest of the PRI-affiliated confederations (but still withered compared to its heyday in the 50s-70s) threw Madrazo a final campaign event.

Tomorrow, two of the three largest members of the largest independent labor confederation are expected to reiterate their support for AMLO. They are the social security workers’ union and the union of the national university in Mexico City.

From a story in today’s Milenio covering another meeting between Lopez Obrador and the business elite, this time from Jalisco.

Also, several papers are responding to the suggestion in a WaPo editorial that immigration to the U.S. would increase were AMLO elected:

The country’s pro-market president, Vicente Fox, leaves office this year. His successor will be chosen in an election July 2. The leftist Andr?s Manuel L?pez Obrador is a strong contender.

If Mr. L?pez Obrador wins and pursues the populist economic policies he’s been associated with in the past, the flow of Mexican arrivals in the United States could accelerate.

What kind of unsubstantiated drivel is that? Why would immigration increase exactly? If AMLO’s such a populist, I’d expect more immigration of the elite than the poor.

Really, now. How uninspired.

Flights, train from Philly, hotel in midtown (with 2 free nights!!), and Yankees tickets all booked. Now just to fill in the rest of the weekend with things to do.

What else could a girl ask for?

[Imagining Brian in background….”A completed book manuscript?”…..]

Ok. Back to work.