Overcoming uncertainty:: Retrospective vote in the 2000 presidential election in Mexico

When conditions are bad, citizens vote against the ruling party. This assumption, however, faces a strong challenge in the Mexican Political system, where only one party has held the presidency for more than 70 years. In this context, a rational voter would be unable to evaluate the consequences of the policies implemented by an opposition party based on its past performance. In the 1997 national election the incumbent party, the Plu, lost for the first time the majority of the popular vote, in what seemed to be a clear rejection to the performance of the party in the 1994 crisis. Nevertheless, the Piu also lost the presidency in July 2000, even though after 1997 most economic indicators showed signs of improvement and by December 1999 the PRI topped the polls with more than 50 percent of the voting preferences. Based on two national polls, raised in February and June, 2000, and using the retrospective vote model, this article shows the importance of the retrospective evaluations of the situation of the country and the prospective perceptions of the candidates' possible performance on the probability of individuals to vote for the PRI. It also higlights the role played by the different levels of certainty about the performance of the opposition on the probability to vote for Vicente FOX.