"This book is perhaps the most comprehensive explanation to date of Mexico's gradual transition to democracy, written from a novel perspective that pits opposition activists' postelectoral conflicts against their usage of regime-constructed electoral courts at the center of the democratization process.

It addresses the puzzle of why, during key moments of Mexico's twenty-seven-year democratic transition, opposition parties failed to use autonomous electoral courts established to mitigate the country's often violent postelectoral disputes, despite formal guarantees of court independence from the Party of the Institutional Revolution, Mexico's ruling party for seventy-one years preceding the watershed 2000 presidential elections.

Drawing on hundreds of author interviews throughout Mexico over a five-year period and extensive original archival research, the author explores choices by the rightist National Action Party and the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution between postelectoral conflict resolution through electoral courts and traditional routes - mobilization and bargaining with the Party of the Institutional Revolution authoritarians.

He argues that these mobilizations divided the ruling party and facilitated the National Action Party's watershed presidential victory in 2000"--Jacket.