Overcoming Uncertainty: Retrospective Vote in the Mexican Presidential Election

Abstract

When conditions are bad, citizens vote against the ruling party. This assumption, however,faces a strong challenge in the Mexican political system, where only one party hasheld the presidency for more than 70 years. In this context, a rational voter would be unableto evaluate the consequences of the policies implemented by an opposition party basedon its past performance. In the 1997 national election the incumbent party, the PRI,lost for the first time the majority of the popular vote, in what seemed to be a clear rejectionto the performance of the party in the 1994 crisis. Nevertheless, the PRI also lost thepresidency in July 2000, even though after 1997 most economic indicators showed signs ofimprovement and by December 1999 the PRI topped the polls with more than 50 percentof the voting preferences. Based on two national polls, raised in February and June, 2000,and using the retrospective vote model, this article shows the importance of the retrospectiveevaluations of the situation of the country and the prospective perceptions of the candidatespossible performance on the probability of individuals to vote for the PRI. It alsohiglights the role played by the different levels of certainty about the performance of theopposition on the probability to vote for Vicente Fox.