Electoral Competition and Institutional Change in Mexico. By Caroline C. Beer. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. 208p. $45.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

A growing literature argues that understanding Mexico's protracted transition from one-party rule requires exploring the dynamics of political competition as they emerged at the state and local levels. Caroline Beer makes an important contribution to this approach to Mexican democratization by examining state-level electoral competition in the 1990s and its impact on institutional development, particularly of state legislatures, and on political recruitment, especially of gubernatorial candidates. She argues that democratization resulted from a “complex interplay between opposition victories in subnational elections and important democratic advances in the national political arena” (pp. 9–10).