Bureaucratic Insiders: Subverting Meritocratic Reform in the Mexican Judiciary

• In Event: Judiciaries in Democracy and Autocracy

Abstract

We argue that under authoritarianism, a perverse type of bureaucratic autonomy can develop by which specialized bureaucracies trade subordination to the executive for internal administrative discretion. This exchange engenders a cadre of institutional insiders with strong corporate identities and a vested interest in retaining control over appointments. With the introduction of meritocratic reforms, insider elites leverage their networks and strategic organizational positions to co-opt implementation and maintain influence within the new formal framework. We support this argument using original qualitative evidence and a new database covering the career of all judges in Mexico’s federal judiciary over the last century. We show that, despite the introduction of meritocratic examinations for recruitment and promotion during democratization, personal connections to Supreme Court Justices remain strong determinants of judicial careers and organizational insiders enjoy advantages in appointments. Our findings have implications for judicial autonomy and the effectiveness of meritocratic reforms.

In many developing democracies, there is a sense that transitions from authoritarian rule have failed to produce meaningful improvements in the functioning of core state institutions. Chief among these concerns is the persistence of patronage in the public sector, which studies have linked to poor economic performance, ineffective provision of public goods and services, and citizen mistrust in state institutions. The predominance of connections and discretion over impersonal procedures in the recruitment, promotion, assignment, and removal of public servants also reproduces inequities in access and treatment that, normatively, are incompatible with the principle of universality that underlies the rule of law.

Conventional wisdom holds that democratization often focused narrowly on free and fair elections, neglecting reform of institutions like courts, police forces, the military, and government agencies ridden by corruption and patronage. However, in several cases the persistence of personalistic practices in those institutions has more to do with failed or partial reform than with its absence. Reforms have often been poorly enforced or unable to resist counterpressure, falling short of their intended goals.

This paper investigates why bureaucratization reforms, in the Weberian sense, fail to materialize as intended by reformers. Specifically, we examine how particularistic practices persist in Mexico’s federal judiciary despite the adoption, during the country’s transition to democracy, of a state-of-the-art meritocratic system for recruiting and promoting judges. Although most studies on bureaucratic politics and civil service reform focus on the executive branch, some of the most ambitious professionalization reforms have targeted judiciaries as keystone institutions for the rule of law. We build upon the literature on bureaucratic politics to study reforms to judicial organizations.
In the Mexican case, the system created by reformers on the verge of democratization was explicitly designed to secure judicial independence from the executive and professionalize the judicial career through merit-based recruitment and promotion. Although executive dominance was undone, our analysis demonstrates that influential elites within the judiciary adeptly harnessed the examination system, effectively maintaining informal yet substantial particularistic influence over hiring, placements, and promotions. We argue that this pattern of incomplete reform results from the strategic behavior of bureaucratic insider elites who have a vested interest in preserving the importance of personal connections and possess the means to bend the new selection system to their advantage. During the implementation stage, these insiders take advantage of their strategic positions and their role as knowledgeable intermediaries, without whom the entire organization could become dysfunctional, to coordinate counteraction.

Our analysis draws on various types of evidence. First, we conducted interviews with judicial personnel, Supreme Court justices, and policymakers and reform promoters in the executive branch at the time of the creation of the examination system. Second, using previously untapped primary sources, we built and quantitatively analyzed a new database containing information on the universe of personnel employed in the judiciary under Mexico’s authoritarian regime, during the adoption of meritocratic reform in the late 1990s, and in its aftermath. These rich data on individual career trajectories at different historical time periods allow us to examine the mechanics of reform implementation and the adaptation of bureaucratic insiders at the micro level, while taking a long-term view at political development and the mechanisms of institutional persistence and change.

Authors

• Julio Rios-Figueroa, ITAM

• Mariano Sanchez-Talanquer, El Colegio de México