When the Regulatory State Meets Populism: Regulatory Agencies in Mexico

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on two questions: what kind of strategies of de‐institutionalization of the regulatory state have been chosen, and to what extent can they be linked to an explicit ‘populist’ agenda guided by a ‘will of the people’‐ based justification that cuts across different regulatory domains? Applied to the case of Mexico, this article looks at how a populist President (Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO), within one single period in office (from 2018 to 2024), sought to de‐institutionalize regulatory agencies that were said to have been institutionally embedded. Mexico offers an important case for the study of populist leadership. López Obrador has been portrayed as a populist leader because of his repeated claims to be speaking ‘in the name of the people’. However, this particular Presidency has not been associated with the typical ‘right‐wing’ authoritarianism (e.g., Brazil's Bolsonaro). Nevertheless, during his presidential term, regulatory agencies were exposed to a range of pressures, ranging from ‘de‐delegation’, ‘de‐legitimization’, and ‘termination’. This article focuses on eight domains (representing the total universe of domains in which regulatory agencies were prominent). The analysis is based on a variety of sources including documentary analysis of government announcements, media coverage, and statutory changes as well as semi‐structured interviews. Our comparative approach is aimed at exploring general populist policymaking patterns in a national case, while seeking to better understand specific variation across policy sectors, as well as institutional agency designs. This piece adds to the literature on regulatory institutions in an era of populist times by setting ‘de‐delegation’ strategies in the wider theoretical context of institutional de‐legitimization. In particular, it highlights the limited institutional ‘hard‐wiring’ of regulatory arrangements.