Jodi Finkel’s article that we are reading for class explained the important transitions in the Mexican Supreme Court caused by the 1994 Judicial Reform. The reform package increased the independence and judicial powers of the judicial branch, with additional powers granted with the 1996 electoral reform. As Finkel explains in her article, the Law of Judicial Power was delivered to Congress by then-president Ernesto Zedillo of the PRI. One might wonder at the reasons why Zedillo chose to do this—why would the president and his party want to establish a judiciary with the potential to constrain the PRI’s political power??
Finkel actually discusses this issue in another article, called Judicial Reform as Insurance Policy: Mexico in the 1990s. She suggests that although the intentional creation of a judiciary capable of checking the power of the president and the ruling PRI appears to not follow political logic, it does make sense as a political “insurance policy” to protect the ruling party from its rivals—and especially a weakening ruling party operating in an increasingly insecure political arena (true for the PRI at this time).
She argues that PRI politicians, no longer able to control political outcomes at state and local levels and becoming unsure if they would continue to dominate the national government in the future, chose to empower the Mexican Supreme Court as a “hedge” against the loss of office. In her language, “Judicial reform thereby becomes a trade-off in which ruling parties are willing to accept short-term costs in exchange for long-term security.”
As we saw in the reading assigned for class, there were several limits to the power of the Supreme Court even after the reform. In theory, Zedillo could have granted the Mexican Supreme Court even more extensive judicial review powers but did not. Finkel argues in this article that he did not do this because a more powerful judiciary was not the ultimate goal. The court’s two new constitutional control powers were instead designed to lessen the increasing political power of PRI’s rivals. (See the article for details on how the “Constitutional Controversies” and “Unconstitutional Laws” clauses, also mentioned in the article assigned for our class, served to reduce the risks associated with the potential loss of the PRI’s dominant political position.)
Finkel thus theorizes that democracy-building institutional reform and the likelihood of retaining office have an inverse relationship; as the probability of retaining control over political office decreases, motivation for carrying out institutional reform to place constraints on political power increases. So for Mexico, this meant the increased power of the judiciary as the PRI steadily decreased in power. Who knew???
Ah, the power of incentives!!!
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/latin_american_politics_and_society/v047/47.1finkel.pdf (more…)
