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David A. Shirk, Mexico's New Politics: The PAN and Democratic Change. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005. Tables, figures, bibliography, index, 279 pp.; cloth $58.50; paperback $23.50.
David Shirk has produced a first-rate monograph on Mexico's National Action Party (PAN). He gives the reader a rich description of the party's founding, its slow and arduous development over half a century, and Vicente Fox's historic victory over the incumbent PRI in 2000. He also shows how the PAN's development affects its particular style in government. As the title promises, this is a broad treatment of the PAN as an organization, in the electorate, and in government. But it also delivers more than promised: as Shirk describes the party's history and struggles, he presents a surprisingly complete and extremely clear description of the old system under the PRI and Mexico's democratization process.
This book is well researched, and it benefits from substantial data on intraparty affairs. Obtaining this type of data in Mexico-and probably in much of the developing world-can be difficult, because party personnel often have chores more pressing than recordkeeping, and information may be tightly controlled. Shirk clearly got "inside" the PAN and opened what scholars have sometimes called the "black box" of intraparty affairs. The text glimmers with juicy detail as a result. His success also owes a lot to the PAN's commitment to transparency, its investment in party organization, and its recognition of the value of analysis. Consequently, the PAN is quickly becoming the best-analyzed party in contemporary Mexico (see Arriola 1994; Loaeza 1999; Chand 2001; Middlebrook 2002; Reveles Vásquez 2002; Mizrahi 2003; Martinez Valle 2003) while works on the PRI and PRD are fewer and farther between.
Shirk makes extensive use of firsthand interviews and party documents. In the historical chapter, he carefully untangles myths about the PAN's ideology perpetrated by earlier studies and, unsurprisingly, by the PRI itself that sought to cast the PAN as more out of step with the public than in Shirk's depiction. The PAN was not "the kind of reactionary, antirevolutionary movement portrayed by its critics," nor was it like the "nefariously illiberal" right-wing parties found in other Latin American countries (p. 57). Instead, it was a much more centrist party of "progressive reformers" (p. x) and "compassionate conservatism"...