doi.org/10.15178/va.2020.152.101-115
INVESTIGACIÓN

FINANCING OF 2018 POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS IN MEXICO: GENDER INEQUALITY
FINANCIAMIENTO DE LAS CAMPAÑAS POLÍTICAS DE 2018 EN MÉXICO: DESIGUALDAD DE GÉNERO
FINANCIAMENTO DAS CAMPANHAS POLÍTICAS DE 2018 NO MÉXICO: DESIGUALDADE DE GÊNERO

Angélica Mendieta Ramírez^1
1Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla México.

ABSTRACT
In Mexico, there is gender inequality between men and woman that can even take the political sphere: during the electoral campaigns to elect the 128 seats in the senate and the 500 federal deputies in the 2018 elections, the parties invested 30 percent of the funding for female candidates while the male candidates received 70 percent. Using a quantitative research methodology, we analyzed the funding financial reports of the National Electoral Institute and demonstrated the existing gender inequality in political campaigns. It is proposed to create compensatory laws and policies with a gender perspective to ensure joint candidacies for the political campaigns of the 2021 elections.

KEY WORDS: financing, political campaigns, gender inequality.

RESUMEN
En México existe una desigualdad de género entre hombres y mujeres que puede llevarse incluso al ámbito político: durante las campañas electorales para elegir a los 128  curules del senado y 500 diputados federales de las elecciones de 2018, los partidos invirtieron un 30 por ciento a las candidatas mujeres; mientras que los candidatos hombres recibieron un 70 por ciento del financiamiento. Mediante una metodología de investigación cuantitativa, se analizaron los reportes de financiamiento del Instituto Nacional Electoral y se demuestra la inequidad de género en las campañas políticas. Se propone realizar leyes y políticas compensatorias con perspectiva de género para garantizar candidaturas paritarias para las campañas políticas de las elecciones de 2021.

PALABRAS CLAVE: financiamiento, campañas políticas, desigualdad de género.

RESUMO
No México existe uma desigualdade de gênero entre homens e mulheres que pode ser levado inclusive até o âmbito político: durante as campanhas eleitorais para escolher aos 128 lugares do senado e 500 deputados federais nas  eleições de 2018, os partidos investiram 30 por cento nas candidatas mulheres; enquanto que os candidatos homens receberam 70 por cento do financiamento. Através de uma metodologia de pesquisa quantitativa, foram analisados os reportes de financiamento do Instituto Nacional Eleitoral e se demonstra a iniquidade de gênero nas campanhas políticas. Se pretende realizar leis e políticas compensatórias com perspectiva de género para garantir candidaturas igualitárias para as campanhas políticas das eleições de 2021.

PALAVRAS CHAVE: financiamento, campanhas políticas, desigualdade de gênero.

Como citar el artículo:
Mendieta Ramírez, A. (2020). Financing of 2018 political campaigns in Mexico: gender inequality. [Financiamiento de las campañas políticas de 2018 en México: desigualdad de género]. Vivat Academia. Revista de Comunicación, 152, 101-115. doi: http://doi.org/10.15178/va.2020.152.101-115 Recuperado de: http://www.vivatacademia.net/index.php/vivat/article/view/1271

Correspondence:
Angélica Mendieta Ramírez: Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla México. angelica.mendietaram@correo.buap.mx

Recibido: 28/03/2019.
Aceptado: 28/06/2019.
Publicado: 15/09/2020.

1. INTRODUCTION

The purpose of electoral campaigns is to make citizens know the campaign proposals and the promises that candidates will fulfill when they come into power. In Mexico, there has been favorable progress in the recognition of political rights for both genders; however, examples of political violence against women, discrimination and investment inequality at the hands of political parties towards female candidates still prevail.
Before the Political Electoral Reform of 2014, political parties were not legally bound entities within the transparency and access to government public information regime. The information that could be obtained about electoral campaigns and the exercise of their finances was only known through the electoral institutes of the entities of the Republic; it was very difficult to make an analysis of the money used in the electoral campaigns.
Little by little, we have advanced towards democratization and transparency. The elections of 2018 were a historical landmark because the third electoral alternation in the government of the Republic was achieved, after two initial decades and after 4 presidential elections. In 2000, after 70 years of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) hegemony, the first alternation occurred; Vicente Fox Quesada of the National Action Party (PAN) won. Later, the PRI won again in 2012 with Enrique Peña Nieto, and in 2018, the electorate decided on a left-wing government with the president Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA).
During the election day of 2018, the political parties and independent candidates reported having received 5 billion 334 million pesos altogether, additionally, by the end of the election, the National Electoral Institute (INE) detected 184.1 million pesos of unreported expenses, which represented 3.5 percent of the money used that did get reported by the political parties. In these 2018 elections, the President of the Republic, 500 federal deputies and 128 senators, 8 governors, the head of the government of Mexico City, 27 local congresses, and 1,601 mayors were elected (Murayama, 2019 p.15).
This has produced a broad democratic demonstration in the claiming of the political rights of minorities and has sought equality for men and women in their access to power. But the political parties are still adopting a macho and androcentric perspective by nominating more men with the possibility of winning the elections and bet less on women.
The public sphere has been an area in which men have historically had preeminence. They have been the leaders, the candidates and the majority elected. In the report: Unseeing eyes: Media coverage and Gender in Latin American Elections carried out by The UN WOMEN in 2011, the problem of media inequality was made visible, however, it had little repercussion in the legislations of Latin America, and the political parties have not taken a stance about it. The little financial distribution towards women’s campaigns still continues in our country, as well as in the distribution for advertising.
This situation is not exclusive to Mexico. In The United States, before the midterm elections of 2018, there were only 23 women among the 100 senators and 84 among the 435 congress members of the most powerful country in the world. Therefore, the problem of media inequality is not characteristic of our country alone. A study carried out by the Swiss Federal Office of Communication (OFCOM), the Federal Office of the Commission for Women’s Affairs and Swiss public broadcaster (SRG SSR), published in 2015, concluded that even if women represented 34.5 percent of the candidates for the Swiss National Council (the lower house of the Federal Assembly), in contrast, they only appeared in 24 percent of the audio and video stories of televised campaigns, 23.5 percent of the stories and information published in print and online media; as well as 25 percent of the photos published in magazines and newspapers. Which is concerning if we compare the numbers of 2003 with the ones of 2015 in Switzerland, because there has been practically no progress in media coverage beyond 25 percent (CE, 2017, p. 10).
This inequality can be verified in the studies conducted by Vargas and Palazuelos (2019), Elizondo (2017) and; Font and Matías (2019). The unbalanced relation between men and women also permeates the field of politics, since the stereotypes, roles, prejudices and all kinds of discriminations and unequal treatment are replicated here; as the result of culture and idiosyncrasy (Estrada et. al., 2016). There are multiple factors that constrain and limit the participation of women.
In spite of this, there is progress. The Political Reform, promulgated in 2014 by the former president Enrique Peña Nieto, allowed achieving substantive equality between men and women. It was decreed that political parties were obliged to nominate men and women equally. As of that year, 50 percent of the candidacies are for men and 50 percent for women.
The gender agenda in electoral matters began in the 1950s, after allowing women in Mexico to go out and vote in the elections of July 3, 1955. Women were also counted as political representatives in several countries. Chile has had women in power since 1946, as political representatives; Cuba in 1960; Mexico, Bolivia, Costa Rica, The Dominican Republic and Peru, in the 1970s, started fighting to participate in politics through organizations and pressure groups (Zaremberg, 2008, p. 29).
The advancement of women’s political participation in Mexico has been gradual. In 1993, in section 3 of article 175, the Federal Code of Electoral Institutions and Procedures (COFIPE) only recommended that the parties promoted more participation of women through the nomination of the posts for election, meaning that there was not a democratic commitment from the State to promote the inclusion of women into politics. It was called pro-quotas because it was unrelated to a genuine interest in women being able to access power (Caminotti and Freidenberg, 2016, p. 124). Subsequently, in the following 1996 COFIPE reform, the recommendation that candidates of the same gender should not exceed 70 percent of nominations was included, in both the proportional representation and the relative majority.
It was not until 2002 that a quota system was established in the COFIPE, in the article 175, subsection A, in which the nominations of male candidates for deputies and senators could not be greater than 70 percent. Therefore, women gained 30 percent of political representation in the legislature. In 2006, the federal legislature comprised of 500 seats was distributed as follows: 212 were female legislators (42.4 percent), while 288 were male (57.6 percent). By 2016, the same thing happened in the Senate, out of the 128 seats, 81 were held by men and 47 by women, that is, the representation was 64.6 and 35.4 percent, respectively. Later in 2008, the reform in article 219 of the COFIPE established that the percentage of proprietary candidacies should be of at least 40 percent, in addition to including 2 percent of the money granted to political parties to promote courses and workshops of political leadership. There were several affirmative actions to include women into politics, not only in this area, but also from a greater educational inclusion and access to the labor market.
Only until the Political Reform of 2014, it was when the concept of gender parity was established in the candidacies of the political parties that were obliged to include women in the nominations for posts decided upon popular vote. There are multiple studies of the political participation of women, Guadarrama (2015), Archenti (2011), and others. Globally, 78 percent of candidacies correspond to men; there is male over-representation around the world, and governments are working to bridge this gender gap (IDEA, 2016).
Multiple experiences in our country have also been documented around political violence against women: Granados (2014), Moscoso (2012), Durán, et.al, (2014) with inequality in political campaigns being considered as gender-based violence.
Basing on the International IDEA and The UN WOMEN manual: “Mirando con lentes de género la cobertura electoral: Manual de monitoreo de medios” [EN: Election Coverage from a Gender Perspective: A Media Monitoring Manual] (Llanos and Nina, 2011), we found that the discretionary use of public resources in electoral campaigns requires control mechanisms, for both political parties in national leadership roles and in the finances and transparency of public resources. For this reason, control agencies linked to universities and civil organizations have emerged.
For example, in Italy, since 2012, the Italian media have been obliged by law (“par condicio di genere”) to provide a balanced representation of women and men in the coverage of their electoral and political campaigns, which are also carried out on their television and radio programs. The Italian regulatory authority (AGCOM) was asked to publish data about the presence of female politicians on political radio and television programs, but no report exists to date. One of the reasons why they put some women on the front line is that this report would represent a challenge, bearing in mind that candidates are mainly men (CE, 207). However, in Europe women are also subject to discrimination and there is a greater visibility of male candidates in the news and programs.
In Latin America, the legislation is still very incipient because political parties have grown without much control on them. Rial (2015) argues that it is more and more difficult to audit and control their funding because, in the face of the new ways of promoting the candidacies on WhatsApp or on social networks, there are serious limitations to ensure equity during these contests.
Only 41 countries have more than 30 percent women among their parliamentarians —approximately a fifth of all the countries— and only 12 percent globally have 40 percent or more women in their parliaments. That is, there is still an unequal distribution in political representation (IDEA, 2016).
Derived from the arguments above, from the field of political communication, the funding political parties receive for campaigning partially determines their electoral success. We base on the hypothesis that funding is an element that promotes the purchase of communicative products, and therefore, allows greater possibility of victory for the candidates in electoral contests; in the case of female candidates, having less budget has an impact on their probability of electoral success; which is why a gender equality agenda must be promoted so that male and female candidates can bridge the existing gap in financial inequality to ensure greater democratic quality.

2. OBJECTIVES

The purpose of this investigation is to analyze the public resources that political parties received during the elections of 2018, basing on the financial reports of the National Electoral Institute in order to verify the distribution in electoral campaigns.

3. METHODOLOGY

For this research, we implemented a quantitative analysis to visualize, basing on gender variables, the male and female candidates that were going to hold a post among the 500 federal deputies and 128 senators. These two types of political representatives were chosen because during the 2018 elections they were the most important ones in addition to the presidency of the Republic, which only had male candidates:  José Antonio Meade Kuribeña for the “Todos por México” Coalition, led by the PRI; Ricardo Anaya Cortés for the “Por México al Frente” Coalition, led by the PAN; and the independent candidate Jaime Rodríguez Calderón. Since there were no female candidates for the presidency, it was impossible to make a national comparison of the resources disbursed by the political parties for the Presidency of the Mexican Republic.
To obtain the information, we made a transparency request to the National Electoral Institute, as a legally bound entity to answer the requests for information. In an accountability exercise, the 2018 report He for She, Reporte del Ingreso y Gasto en las Campañas Electorales [EN: Electoral Campaigns Income and Expenditure Report], was requested per political party (MOCESP, 2018).
Having information and data about the funding of political parties is something recent, just until the Law of Transparency and Access to Government Public Information [ES: Ley de Transparencia y Acceso a la Información Pública] was approved in April 2016; which allows political parties to be legally bound entities.
As for transparency, the first change in the party system occurred in 1976 when granting political parties public funding from the State was approved; although very little was constructed in terms of control regarding this public money. In 1977, the Federal Law of Political Organizations and Electoral Procedures (LOPPE) was promulgated, which led to the creation of the National Electoral Institute in 1990. Before, in the year of 1977 with the reform to the sixth article of the Mexican Constitution in which the right of access to government public information was recognized; but it was crystallized in 1993 with the Federal Code of Electoral Institutions and Procedures (COFIPE), in the fifth article.
In 1996 the rules for accessing the funding of parties were modified, conditioning private funding to political institutes, as a way of ensuring equality during the electoral contests. Similarly, in that same year, after the 1994 elections when Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, coming from the PRI, won as president of the Republic, the auditing powers of the Federal Electoral Institute, created in 1990, were extended.
Later in 2014, the Electoral Political Reform was promoted, which constituted a redesign in the electoral regime. Initially, the Federal Electoral Institute was modified, which then became the National Electoral Institute (INE), and it also made the changes in COFIPE possible to give rise to the General Law of Electoral Institutions and Procedures (LEGIPE), promulgated on May 23, 2014, and modified on January 27, 2017; where the broader obligations for political parties are specified. Concurrently, another institution pillar of democracy was modified; the Federal Institute of Access to Government Public Information (IFAI), its name was changed to National Institute of Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI), as part of the modifications to the General Law of Transparency and Access to Public Government Information, promulgated by the President Enrique Peña Nieto in 2015; with this transformation, powers to monitor political parties and syndicates were given to the INAI.

4. RESULTS

Derived from the aforementioned laws, as well as the democratization of the political parties that had to open the information regarding the funding they receive, hereunder we present the analysis of the income that political campaigns received during the elections of 2018 for the 128 male and female candidates to the Senate and a space of representation in the Chamber of Deputies comprised of 500 seats.
Chacón (2011) claims that even if it is true that the campaigns have had wide vulnerability in the transparency and use of illicit resources derived from donations, as well as the use of public resources; the legislation in our country is solid and seeks to distance politicians from sources of funding that do not correspond to a democratic country.

Table 1. Distribution of campaigns income.

Source: national Electoral Institute, 2020.

As seen in Table 1, in regards to the distribution of income of the electoral campaigns for the candidates for federal deputies and senators, it reached a total amount of 1 billion, 833 million 413 thousand 760 pesos; out of which a total of 690 million, 487 thousand 515.43 pesos were allocated for the campaigns of female candidates; while for the campaigns of male candidates a total of 1 billion, 142 million, 926 thousand 244 pesos were allocated. This means that women received 37.66 percent of the funding, while men received 62.34 percent.
Casar and Ugalde (2018) state that there are certain areas vulnerable to the use of resources of dubious origin, with the influence of other actors who seek to influence on local politics. It is easier for these types of cases to happen at a municipal level; given the fact that regulations lack schemes aiming at the close monitoring or at the influence that caciques and local actors, who use private funding and the embezzlement of public resources on a smaller scale, have. But currently, through the use of new technologies, there is greater monitoring of the activities of political parties because there are photos and videos that abound on the network about electoral campaigns and electoral monitoring exercises.
The Federal Code of Electoral Institutions and Procedures, promulgated in 1990, did not considered as an obligation allowing the implementation of audits of the political institutes conducted by the electoral authority; it was not until 1996 that the law to demand accountability was amended. The most important antecedent of the mechanisms to make political parties transparent occurred in 1993 with the COFIPE, which established in article 5 the possibility of promoting the monitoring during an electoral process and of political parties; as well as the legal establishment to oblige political parties to submit reports about their income and expenditure to the electoral authority.
In the distribution of resources, the political parties do show differences in the investment for male and female candidates, as shown in Table 2. While the National Action Party registered an income of 24.72 percent for the candidacies of female candidates, MORENA achieved 49.49 percent. Very close to 50 percent.

Table 2. Income distribution per political party

Source: National Electoral Institute, 2020.

The issue of the economic resources allocated to campaigns influences the results due to the possibility the candidates have of influencing public opinion through their exposure in communicative products; but there are also limitations for women in terms of time and their possibility of participating in politics. IDEA (2016) found that women are at a significant disadvantage when being candidates because their contact networks and supporters are fewer than men’s.
Women must work to gain sympathizers because they get less media exposure; but also their contact networks and supporters tend to be more limited.

Table 3: Distribution of expenditure.

Source: National Electoral Institute, 2020.

In Table 3, it can be seen that, for example, in the propaganda and production of messages, the female candidates received less than 40 percent of the resources, while the male candidates received from 60 to 70 percent. A very important item during the 2018 elections was advertising on web pages; for which women running for positions of popular election only received 27.83 percent, while men received an amount of 72.17 percent.
Tables 1, 2, and 3 show that there is an unbalanced distribution of the investment for the electoral campaigns of the political parties destined to male and female candidates.

5. CONCLUSIONS

As seen in the results obtained, electoral campaigns in Mexico bear a strong cultural bias, in which stereotypes are replicated in the communicative products that are disseminated to attract voters. In this sense, women are structurally and institutionally disadvantaged when carrying out a campaign under equal conditions. This represents a limitation in democratic terms, which alters the electoral integrity for the next elections in 2021, by which 500 federal and local deputies from 30 entities of the country, as well as 15 governorates, will be voted again.
But we also found that among the political parties there are differences in their gender advocacy. During the elections of 2018, the party that registered almost 50 percent of income for women’s candidacies was MORENA, while the most inequitable one was the PAN. In this sense, Gottlieb (2016) found in Mali, within the African continent, that citizens are willing to participate when there is more information about the actions of representatives or legislators. Also, civic training is essential to ensure more supporters within political parties and so their members as well as sympathizers can have more information about the goals and objectives.
Norris and Nai (2017) affirm that elections require firm monitoring in terms of transparency of the electoral procedure, but also regarding the finances of political parties. On June 25, 2019, the INE sanctioned the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) party, for having breached their transparency obligations. The amount of the sanction comprises three fines of 80 thousand 600 pesos, that combined amount to 241 thousand 800 pesos, which were deducted from the total of their prerogatives for the month of June 2019, which was $115,584,056.00 (one hundred fifteen million five hundred eighty-four thousand fifty-six pesos 00/100 MXN.).
It is important to mention that MORENA has been sanctioned 12 times during 2019 for omissions that occurred in 2018, related to obligations stipulated in the transparency law applicable to political parties. The other sanctions derived from the fact that the salaries the employees of the political institute receive have not been published. The representation and travel expenses have not been published either, as they ought to be. Another deficiency is that the contracts for goods and services are not being reported, or the selection mechanisms and processes for candidates are not being published (Hernández, 2019). In the balance of the elections of 2018, it was announced that the sanctions applied to the political parties derived from audits that amounted to 870 million pesos.
Although it is true that the law must control political parties in terms of the funds they receive, it is also necessary to establish compensatory mechanisms to ensure gender equality regarding such funds. This can be achieved basing on the transparency and accountability of the political parties through civil organizations. The social control that occurs with the impact of organizations that monitor the fulfillment of social and political rights can have positive results. In addition to the financial issue, the inequality gap is evident in the low impact of women in public life, in the creation of initiatives, and also in the marginality for women who belong to minorities: indigenous and belonging to different ethnic groups where they have barely achieved the right to vote (Dahlerup, 2010).
Given these circumstances, it is necessary to build a greater political culture in the partisan representatives, legislators and members of political parties in order to influence decision-making and bridge the existing budget gap in the funds allocated to candidates. If gender parity in candidacies was recently achieved in 2014, now it is also necessary to ensure financial parity of the candidates to have a better quality in the democracy of our country.
IDEA (2016) states that political parties can benefit from gender equality policies, not only in the distribution of candidacies between men and women, but also in financial equity. Actions for gender recognition produce greater electoral participation, legitimacy in elections, and of course, an inclusive democratic culture.
Basing on this analysis and study, there are more possibilities so that other countries can also reflect on this anti-democratic phenomenon that persists and that can have an impact on the next elections, for Mexico in 2021, but also for other Latin American countries.

AUTHORS:
Angélica Mendieta Ramírez
She has a Ph.D. in Sociology, Postdoctoral Studies in Education, a Master’s Degree in Political Sciences, a Degree in Law, and a Degree in Communication Sciences. She has done three research residences: at the University of Harvard (2004), at The City University of New York (2014), and at the Complutense University of Madrid (2014). She is a member of the National System of Researchers, level 1. She is head of the Consolidated Academic Group: “Comunicación Política”. She is author of the concepts: Electopartidismo and Bucle de la Comunicación Política. She is the author and co-author of more than 35 books and more than 25 articles in peer-reviewed and indexed journals, among which the following stand out: “Diseños de la investigación. El coaching metodológico como estrategia”, “La democracia en tiempos de incertidumbre”, “Cultura política de las mujeres en el estado de Puebla”. She is founder and General Director of the Asociación Mundial de Investigadores, A.C [EN: World Association of Researchers]. She is Currently Head of the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the BUAP (2017-2021). angelicamendietaramirez@gmail.com
Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9344-8653

See: Llanos Beatriz (2011), Ojos que no ven: cobertura mediática y género en las elecciones latinoamericanas, UN WOMEN, IDEA, accessed 12 May 2019, available online:
https://www.idea.int/publications/catalogue/ojos-que-no-ven-cobertura-medi%C3%A1tica-y-g%C3%A9nero-en-las-eleccciones

See: Amanda Mars and Pablo Guimón (2018), Elecciones en EE UU: mujeres al poder, El País, October 28, 2019, accessed 29 May 2019. Available Online:
https://elpais.com/internacional/2018/10/26/actualidad/1540574302_751574.html

However, there was no clear regulation about sanctions in case of non-compliance with these quotas. See: Freidenberg, (2017), where he describes the historical context of this process.

See: Jiménez Horacio and Alberto Morales (2016), “Limitan poder de mujeres en congreso”, Newspaper El Universal, accessed 23 February 2018, available online: http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/nacion/politica/2016/03/8/limitan-poder-de-mujeres-en-congreso

Among the affirmative actions the use of gender-inclusive language stands out, as well as all those corrective measures aiming at increasing the participation of women in the electoral field, such as electoral training and the possibility of being included in the spaces for decision-making.

On February 10, 2014, the Constitutional Reform to the Article 41 was approved, establishing that political parties must ensure gender parity in the candidacies for Federal Legislatures and Local Legislatures.

See: File: UT/SCG/Q/INAI/CG/302/2018, corresponding to the council minute of June 25, 2019.

See: Maritza Pérez, Rolando Ramos and Elizabeth Albarrán (2019), INE multa a partidos con más de 500 mdp, El Economista, November 6, 2019. Available online: https://www.eleconomista.com.mx/politica/INE-multa-a-partidos-con-mas-de-500-mdp-20191106-0107.html