Paper short abstract:

Cardenas's mass politics was not an aim in itself. It was a strategy for achieving socio-economic empowerment and political sovereignty. For realizing that Cardenas worked out an "institutionalized" populist and clientele program, which throws new light on the study of both populism and clientelism.

Paper long abstract:

Cardenas's mass politics was not an aim in itself. It was a political strategy for achieving other goals: social empowerment, economic modernization and political sovereignty; all under strict conditions of social peace, rule of law and democracy. The last thing President Cardenas wanted was to use force. This is the reason why he insisted on organizing the masses rigidly, even contrary to the syndicalist instincts of the workers and other sectors bound up in his new founded PRM (Partido de la Revolución Mexicana).

Despite the array of unmediated "clientele-like" relations Cardenas established with statesmen, politicians, military officers, intellectuals, writers, academics, lawyers, local leaders, priests and Christian rebels, explained by him as a necessity in a country of so many conflicting interests, Cardenas was a staunch advocate of political institutionalization. For him this was a sine qua non condition for acquiring legitimacy for his radical agrarianism, and his policies of oil industry nationalization, indigenism, advanced socialist education, and labor and party political corporatism.

In this sense, we suggest redefining or extending the concepts of populism and clientelism as "institutionalized populism" and "institutionalized clientelism", which accurately describe the Mexican case during Cardenas's era and after. This type of populism could be taken as a starting point for a study of other political styles of power accumulations on behalf of peaceful radical reform projects in both Latin America countries and other developing countries.