This dissertation examines how parties respond and adapt their behavior to political violence. Building a theoretical argument about strategic party behavior and party capture, I address the following questions: How do parties select and recruit their candidates in regions with high levels of violence and the pervasive presence of VNAs? Do parties respond to violence by selecting certain types of candidates who are more capable of fighting these organizations? Do parties react differently at different levels of government? And finally, how do VNSAs capture political selection across at different levels of government? I argue that in regions where there is high "uncertainty," candidate selection becomes highly important for both party leaders and DTOs. Second, I argue that as violence increases and the number of DTOs also, criminal organizations, as risk-averse actors, will capture candidate selection. I posit that as violence increases, there is a greater likelihood that candidates will have criminal connections. To test my theory, I use the case of Mexico. Violence in Mexico and the presence of criminal organizations across the country has experienced a great deal of variation since the 1990s. In Chapter 2, I find that violence affects the gubernatorial candidate selection of the PRI, PAN and PRD. In high violence states, parties select gubernatorial candidates with long experience in subnational politics compared to other types of experiences. In chapter 3, however, I find that at the municipal level not all the parties respond equally to violence. As a municipality becomes more violent, the PRI and PAN party leaders are more likely to select mayoral candidates who were either state or federal deputies or candidates who were both. In contrast, the PRD is likely to recruit state deputies as a function of violence, but not national deputies or candidates who were deputies at both the state and federal level. Interestingly, I find that as the municipality becomes more violent, party leaders are less likely to recruit inexperienced candidates. This result suggests that parties do indeed respond to levels of violence. Finally, in Chapter 5, I show that criminal organizations capture candidate selection to reduce uncertainty. As utility-maximizing actors, DTOs seek to influence the selection of candidates as a function of violence. At the state level, criminal organizations are more likely to capture candidate selection in states with the presence of multiple DTOs. Party capture is more likely to happen in states where more than one DTO are fighting to control the turf. I show that criminal organizations at the state level equally capture all parties. This finding reveals that DTOs are diversifying their political connections. While under the dominant party regime, they colluded with PRI officials, under the new political Mexican democratic configuration, DTOs are establishing other political relationships with different political parties.

Unique to nineteenth-century Spain and Central America, the pronunciamiento can be interpreted as an act of insubordination against ruling authorities, which included a written document with a list of complaints or demands. The practice was almost always carried out by members of the army, but usually involved heavy participation by political and civilian sectors of society as well. The pronunciamiento more often than not contained a threat of military violence if the grievances of the pronunciados were not listened to; as a result, it carried with it the implicit consequence of armed revolt. The pronunciamiento was responsible for major political changes in early nineteenth-century Mexico and Yucatán, and was also one of the most powerful forces of political and societal destabilisation during this period. Indeed, the pronunciamiento was responsible for the establishment of federalist and centralist systems, changes of constitutions, and constant overthrows of presidents. This was also true on a smaller scale in Yucatán, as the pronunciamiento was not only used to depose governors and administrations, but was the key negotiatory mechanism between the Yucatecan and Mexican administrations; yucatecos resorted to the pronunciamiento to realise their secessions from and reunifications to Mexico throughout the early nineteenth century. The aim of this thesis is to expose the dynamic of the Yucatecan pronunciamiento. It will challenge the present depiction of the pronunciamiento as military exercise of destabilization, and will instead concentrate on exposing it as a highly intricate process of political representation and negotiation, at both local and national levels. This will not only contribute toward a greater understanding of pronunciamiento culture on a local and more general scale, but will also reveal a more comprehensive analysis of the socio-political and economic circumstances of nineteenth-century Yucatán. This in turn will aid in re-defining early nineteenth-century Mexico, questioning its traditional depiction as an age of “chaos”, and instead exposing it as one dominated by political and ideological forces and factions, who used the pronunciamiento to express their beliefs and to negotiate for change.

The Hispanic phenomenon of the pronunciamiento, particularly prominent in nineteenth-century Mexico, is just one example of an insurrectionary political act that has contributed to the traditional portrait of chaos and disorder that has tainted much of our interpretation of the country‟s socio-political history. Once considered to be a violent, non-ideological, praetorian military act, recent studies reveal that the pronunciamiento was primarily a written petition that sought to further political proposals or address particular grievances through negotiation (albeit often backed by the threat of force). Although the military were largely the most visible leaders of the pronunciamiento, a plethora of political and civilian actors and interest groups partook in the practice with the intention of having their grievances/demands attended to by the national government. As well as being viewed as one of the causes of chronic instability, the pronunciamiento was also the primary mechanism employed to bring about tangible political changes throughout the country. At the local level of San Luis Potosí, the pronunciamiento seed also germinated and was used by all political groups and factions in their negotiations with local and national authorities alike. Local interests were often at the heart of these negotiations and so dictated the nature of the pronunciamiento in San Luis Potosí. This dissertation will explore and analyse the pronunciamiento practice, its origins, dynamics and nature, from the regional perspective of San Luis Potosí. Bearing in mind that the pronunciamiento was borne out of, and operated in a specific socio-political-economic context of constitutional disarray and transition, its analysis will also further our understanding of the broader socio-political culture not only of San Luis Potosí, but of Mexico in general. This in turn will contribute to the acknowledged need for reinterpretation and revaluation of the tumultuous period of early nineteenth-century Mexico. It will expose the period as an age of democratic revolutions; of intense political debate between emergent political groups and factions, who increasingly used the pronunciamiento to further an ideological stance, represent a spectrum of interests and force some kind of political change both at a national and regional level when all other constitutional options had been exhausted.