Islands of power. Democratic legitimacy, autonomous organisms, and their conflict in Mexico

Abstract

In connection with the democratic transition in Mexico, several autonomous organisms were created by constitutional amendment, in significant public policy areas. However, these same organisms came under increasing criticism over the past years, as technocratic and illegitimate, in the country’s national media. Institutional confrontation followed. We discuss this conflict employing our own theoretical proposal on sources of bureaucratic legitimacy. Furthermore, based on key informant interviews, we examine the understanding of senior officials who serve at autonomous organisms about their role in Mexican democracy, and how this understanding informs and orients their work toward strengthening the legitimacy of their own institutions.

Keywords:

• Autonomous organisms
• bureaucracy
• democratic legitimacy
• Mexico

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We translate with “autonomous organisms” the designation employed in Mexico, organismos autónomos (constitucionales). Independent “authority,” “agency,” or “commission” are standard terms employed in the literature for this kind of bureaucratic organizations, which have been “freed in principle from party control” (Carpenter, 2001, p. 9). In Mexico, it has been underlined similarly that autonomous organisms are “not subordinated to the political priorities of the government of the day” (Dussauge-Laguna, 2015, p. 226). We use “autonomous” and “independent” as synonyms for the purposes of the present research.

2 The first independent commissions were created during the Progressive Era in the United States (Carpenter, 2001). Rosanvallon (2011) provides a comparative perspective, including France and other European countries. Legal guarantees of bureaucratic independence seek to protect senior leadership from dismissal for political reasons. However, as both Carpenter and Rosanvallon point out, the autonomy of bureaucratic organizations is not assured by mere legal declaration, but rather by their democratic legitimacy—more on this below.

3 Zacka (2022) describes the work of Rosanvallon as one of the main contributions leading political theory to rediscover public administration.

4 Regarding the influence of Duguit in Latin America, including on the Mexican constitution of 1917, see Ankersen and Ruppert (2006, p. 96); see also Babie and Viven-Wilksch (2019).

5 Public institutions use multiple non-standard designations for their component administrative units. We standardize designations as follows and translate, accordingly, Spanish terms: divisions are the main administrative units; institutions can have one or more divisions. Areas are secondary units inside divisions; divisions can have one or more subordinate areas. In most cases, key informants interviewed for this article were either directors or deputy directors of autonomous organisms, divisions, or areas. Units outside the hierarchical structure—frequent at independent bureaucratic authorities—we designate as “offices,” and the persons in charge as “office managers.”

6 Aberbach (1990) thoroughly explored contact patterns between representatives of diverse organizations as an indicator for the strength of institutional connections; we use a simplified four-point scale based on Aberbach: we define “frequent” as one contact weekly at least, “regular” as one or two contacts monthly, “occasional” as two or three contacts yearly, and “never or almost never” as one contact yearly or less.

7 Contacts with civil society representatives can be controversial for civil servants in Mexico, as we will discuss below, because this activity is perceived as “political.” Around controversial issues, it is a well-known resource for interview questions to refer to behavior by “indeterminate colleagues” of respondents (Sandhu et al., 2011, p. 219).

8 Among relevant national cases in the region, see, for the case of Chile, Vergara Blanco, 2018; for Brazil, see Correa et al., 2019; for Perú, see Orihuela et al., 2021.

Additional information

Funding

Present research was supported by CIDE – Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (México). The grant had no specific number.

Notes on contributors

Agustin E. Ferraro

Agustin E. Ferraro is a Professor for Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he studied for his PhD at the University of Frankfurt as a fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). He was a Humboldt Scholar from 2001 to 2003 at the University of Hamburg, and at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). In 2009, he won a prestigious national award (INAP) in Spain for his research on Latin American state institutions. He was Visiting Research Professor at Princeton University during the Spring Term 2011. He has published books, journal articles and book chapters in Spanish, English, German and Portuguese.

Gustavo Fondevila

Gustavo Fondevila is a Professor at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Mexico City. He holds a PhD in Law from the University of Buenos Aires and a Magister Artium in Political Science from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Ger-many). He is the author of the books Political Models of Social Integration (Munich: Utz, 2002), Institutions, Legality and the Rule of Law (México: Fontamara, 2005), and several articles in Mexican and international scholarly journals.