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Abstract

As organizations designed to canalize and centralize the administration of political and economic resources, political parties have remained powerful actors in contemporary democratic systems. In Mexico, this enormous power held by parties has led to decades of reforms and institutional changes in order to regulate their faculties and limitations. After public financing of political parties was elevated to constitutional rank in 1996, the auditing and transparency of resources has been one of the main trends in the study of the functioning of the electoral system in the country. Although since its creation as an essential autonomous entity the current National Electoral Institute (INE) has represented a great advance in terms of electoral management and institutional autonomy, this organization does not have sufficient powers and capacities to effectively monitor and audit the financing that flows towards and from political parties.

By reviewing the current legal structure of the Mexican electoral system, both the organizations that compose it and their faculties, this article finds necessary the creation of an autonomous institution with authority to regulate the general control of the parties' finances, for that reason, the creation of the figure of an Electoral Comptroller is proposed by this investigation in order to replace the current Technical Auditing Unit under the General Council of the National Electoral Institute. The relevance of this research lies in an unconventional approach to the socialization and institutionalization of the management of the economic activity of public and private funds of political parties.

It is concluded that, although it is essential to guarantee greater efficiency in the fiscal regulation of parties, the implementation and strengthening of new legal figures in the process of institutionalization and transparency is subject to the understanding and support of all social sectors and institutions at the national and local levels. This generalized support must be accompanied by the adoption of a perspective that promotes the autonomy of the institutions and their imperative task of accountability to the citizenry.