Coordination of Military Elites and State Formation: Mexico, 1821-1876

• In Event: Elites, Social Class, and State Building

Abstract

After almost half a century of political turmoil in Mexico, Porfirio Díaz managed, in 1876, to secure political order and remain as president for thirty years. When do political-military contenders stop fighting? Prior to Díaz, no politico-military coalition managed to remain in power for long. We study the insurrectionary practice of the pronunciamiento and its role in building coalitions and coordinating military officials and civilians around a national project. The cycles of pronunciamientos, in which one pronunciamiento proposal was followed by other pronunciamientos de adhesion, functioned as a decentralized way of aggregating information. Indeed, during most of the pronunciamiento era the practice aimed more at compromise than at confrontation. Our spatial and temporal analysis of pronunciamientos coincides with patterns of centralization and decentralization of the Mexican State. Using evidence for Mexico, we describe the process through which beliefs began to center around Díaz and argue that as the cost of mis-coordination increases the “power” to coordinate of a leader also increases. We contrast this argument of state formation through coordination with existing theories that posit force as the foundation of state building.

Authors

• Luz Marina Arias, CIDE

• Mariano Sanchez-Talanquer, El Colegio de México