The controlling political party in Mexico is the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), and it had been the governing political party since 1929. The PRI is divided up into three sectors: labor, agrarian, and popular. This party claims to be the true heir of Mexico's revolutionary tradition, and has worked extremely hard to keep an appearance as a left-wing party. Although the PRI certainly has right-wing and left-wing factions, it is probably more accurate to describe it as a "centrist conservative party dedicated to

The PAP and the PRI are two extremely powerful parties within their countries. It is obvious that a major similarity is their emergence, the PAP and the PRI both started as revolutionary parties, the PAP wanted to break away from the United Kingdom, and the PRI formed to represent the revolutionary sector of its population. The political systems were structured in a "winner take all" design that allowed the leaders to develop into long term leaders. The leaders that started the parties envisioned that their parties would be in power for long periods of time, and thus structured the political systems in accordance with those views. The PAP and the PRI also set policies that would not allow for their opposition parties to grow. There was no room for dialogues between the PRI and its oppositions (and the PAP and its opposition), and thus both parties have been described as authoritarian, but however they continue to view themselves as active participants of the democratic process.

Another similarity between the dominant one-party systems of Mexico and Singapore is that the PRI uses a system in which representatives of different functional groups are brought together under the auspices of the state, called corporatism. The essence of the corporatist relationship is political reciprocity. "In return for official recognition and official association with the government or government-controlled organizations, these groups can expect some consideration of their interests on the part of the state." (Camp 1996, p12) Corporatism facilitates the state's ability to manipulate various groups in the state's own interests. The example given in the paragraph above of Singapore's electoral mind-set, it shows how groups feel that their interests would be considered if they voted for the PAP.

Mexico's PRI is different from Singapore's PAP as they have used electoral fraud in order to maintain power, and have ignored wins by opposition parties. "PRI government agents stuffed ballot boxes, intimidated opposition candidates, disqualified opposition poll watchers, relocated voting places at the last minute, manipulated voter registration lists, issued multiple voting credentials to PRI supporters, manipulated voting tallies and even nullified adverse electoral outcomes." (Dominguez 1999b, p3)

The PRI operates through an informal system of camarillos or political cliques. (Johnson 1984b, p136) Throughout the development of the contemporary Mexican political system, the creation of pressure groups of one sort or another has been crucial to the exercise of power. The camarillos are a tightly knit core of loyal and influential people, the cliques are usually founded around the power of a given individual who has the ability to control behavior and allocate rewards, this makes the person the catalyst who gives the group a singularity of purpose and an informal loyalty web.

One of the PAP's first goals was to end colonial rule, and to stay with Malaysia. The PAP was committed to a democratic and socialist society. (B

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Approximate Word count = 2049
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)