What explains mass party formation? Prevailing approaches explain party formation as a process of reflection of preexisting social constituencies, or as the consequence of the rise of the bureaucratic state and in particular the advent of universal suffrage. These approaches fail to explain why Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) emerged as a mass party in some regions but not others despite attempts to do so and similarity in conditions that have been posited as central to party formation. I put forth a novel approach that posits that parties emerge as mass organization through a process of constitution of the very social base they claim to represent, but their constitutive powers are conditioned by fundamental economic structures. Relying on agrarian censuses and archival data, I show that the PRI emerged as a mass party in areas where land privatization had been more intensive. In these areas the party during its process of formation was able to build new, and absorb existing, peasant unions and organizations and carry out strong electoral mobilization. These findings suggest that mass party formation is dependent on the destruction of “pre”-capitalist agrarian structures.

中文翻译：

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群众党的形成：革命后墨西哥的土地、公民社会和政党

什么解释了群众政党的形成？流行的方法将政党的形成解释为反映预先存在的社会选民的过程，或者是官僚国家兴起，特别是普选权出现的结果。这些方法无法解释为什么墨西哥的 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) 在一些地区成为一个群众政党，但在其他地区却没有，尽管他们试图这样做，并且在被认为是政党形成核心的条件下存在相似之处。我提出了一种新颖的方法，假设政党通过他们声称代表的社会基础的构成过程而成为群众组织，但它们的构成权力受基本经济结构的制约。依靠农业普查和档案数据，我表明，在土地私有化更加密集的地区，PRI 是作为一个群众政党出现的。在这些地区，党在其组建过程中能够建立新的和吸收现有的农民工会和组织，并进行强有力的选举动员。这些发现表明，群众政党的形成取决于对“前”资本主义农业结构的破坏。