Political Culture and Constitutionalism: A Comparative Approach: A Comparative Approach by Daniel P. Franklin & Michael J. Baun

Author:Daniel P. Franklin & Michael J. Baun [Franklin, Daniel P. & Baun, Michael J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781315483238
Google: ub0YDQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 32207005
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1994-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Institutions versus Culture

The above discussion serves to indicate that it is both institutions and culture that have helped provide for the legitimacy and stability of Mexico, along with social and economic development. All these factors are not only in delicate balance among themselves but also in a dynamic relationship that has changed over time. There is a learning process under way in Mexico, a culturizing and a socializing process at work. At the same time, socioeconomic change is fundamentally altering the society of Mexico and calling forth the requirement of political modernization as well. Let us explain further.

At the time the Mexican Constitution was adapted in 1917, at the height of the Revolution, Mexico was still essentially a rural and an agrarian society. Industrialization had just barely begun under Porfirio Díaz. The country was perhaps 90 percent illiterate and 80 percent Indian. Most of the indigenous population did not speak the national language, was outside the money or market economy, and was often unaware of being part of another entity that is usually thought of as a modern phenomenon: the nation-state called Mexico.

Not only was Mexico socioeconomically underdeveloped and with most of its population unintegrated into the national life, but politically it was woefully underinstitutionalized as well. Díaz had ruled as a dictator for thirty-four years, but he did help centralize the country, establish order in the violent and fractious countryside, and enforce social peace. Along with the Díaz regime, all these other features also came crashing down in the 1910 Revolution. A central government for a time all but ceased to exist. Díaz’s feared rural police (the rurales) were abolished, and the national army collapsed, replaced in the Revolution by at least four major armed bands and scores of lesser ones. So the first order of business for those presidents coming to power in the early years after the Revolution was to restore order, reestablish national institutions, create a national army that could eliminate the power of the regional chiefdoms, provide for stability, and begin to put the country back together again. Those purposes help account for the strong executive power in the Constitution of 1917, the sometimes brutal suppression by the regime of recalcitrant warlords, and the creation of a single-party system that could incorporate all the major post-Revolutionary groups (the traditional church, army, and landed oligarchy were largely eliminated in the Revolution) while also monopolizing all political positions and providing for continuity. For while the most violent and destructive phase of the Mexican Revolution lasted from 1910 to 1920, rebellion, bloodshed, and civil war continued through the 1920s, and it was only in the 1930s that the country settled down and the process of reinstitutionalization began.

Mexico in the 1930s was still a backward, overwhelmingly rural, and underdeveloped country; but in the 1940s, with the demand for Mexican products stimulated by World War II and continuing in the postwar period, large-scale and widespread industrialization began. Mexico began to be transformed from the “sleepy,” traditional, “comic-opera” country that was

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