Mexico’s Judicial Elections: Reform or Government Takeover?

A panel of scholars examines Mexico’s judicial reforms, exploring how direct elections, political control, and institutional design are reshaping the judiciary, its independence, and public trust in the courts.

The 2024–25 judicial reform in Mexico represents one of the most sweeping overhauls of a national judiciary in recent history. The reform replaced nearly all federal and state judges through direct popular elections, restructured the country’s highest court, and created new administrative and disciplinary bodies that expanded political influence over judicial decision-making.

Here, in a conversation with Judicature International, Amanda Driscoll, the Dr. J. Elizabeth Garraway Professor of Political Science at Florida State University, Michael J. Nelson, professor and head of the Department of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University, and Julio Ríos-Figueroa, professor of law at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in Mexico City, bring their expertise on comparative judicial politics and the Mexican legal system.²⁵ They analyze the design, implementation, and consequences of these reforms, assessing what they reveal about judicial independence, democratic legitimacy, and the potential risks of politicizing the judiciary.

JUDICATURE INTERNATIONAL (JI): Thank you for joining us. To start, could each of you highlight what you consider the most significant aspect or consequence of the Mexican judicial reform?

AMANDA DRISCOLL: The proposal called for direct popular elections for every federal judge and justice, the elimination of the Federal Judicial Council (CJF), and the creation of new disciplinary and administrative bodies that would give political actors far more power to sanction or even remove judges who were seen as going against the “popular will.” It also aimed to shrink the size and authority of Mexico’s Supreme Court, including by limiting its ability to suspend laws while reviewing them.²⁶

Of the various components of the reform, judicial elections have garnered the most attention, as they represent a wholesale replacement of virtually all judges and magistrates across the entire judicial system. Half of the national and subnational jurists were replaced by direct election in June of 2025, with the second half being scheduled for replacement in the summer of 2027.

MICHAEL J. NELSON: Although the elections are the highest profile aspect of the judicial reforms, the new disciplinary administrative body that Amanda mentioned is the newly created Judicial Discipline Tribunal (El Tribunal de Disciplina Judicial). This tribunal is empowered to oversee judicial authorities, and its decisions are equally, if not more, impactful on judicial behavior than the elections. This will allow members of the tribunal (who are themselves elected) to review the decisions of judicial magistrates, judges, and other judicial officials, reverse them if deemed necessary, and remove or sanction judges or officials if their decisions do not align with the disciplinary tribunal’s priorities or principles. We have seen that the government can easily organize the candidate selection process and the election so that pro-government magistrates are appointed to the disciplinary tribunal. This institutionalizes for the government an additional layer of ex-post control over all judicial decision-making.

JULIO RÍOS-FIGUEROA: This judicial reform is unprecedented both in depth and width. As both Amanda and Michael have said, the reform involves firing every single judge in Mexico, about 5,800 (approximately 4,000 state and 1,800 federal judges), and replacing them with popularly elected judges. Half of them were elected on June 1, 2025, and perhaps the most salient feature when comparing the newly elected judges with old career judges is the significant drop in legal experience and academic background among the former. Thus, if I must pick one implication of the reform, I would say it is the hollowing out of the Mexican judicial system’s capacity and professionalism.²⁷

JI: What political or institutional factors made such a sweeping judicial reform possible in Mexico? Were there early warning signs that this kind of transformation was coming?

DRISCOLL: The current judicial reform in Mexico has its roots in the rise of Morena and its founder, former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). Throughout his six-year term, AMLO regularly clashed with independent institutions — from electoral authorities and transparency bodies to research organizations and the press — accusing them of being out of touch, elitist, or corrupt.²⁸ When many of his broader reform efforts ran into roadblocks in the courts, the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary quickly became the main focus of his push to remake Mexico’s institutional landscape.

AMLO’s successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum, won the June 2024 election with nearly 60% of the vote.²⁹ When the new Congress was seated in September, the judicial overhaul became a top legislative priority, facilitated by the near-supermajority held by the government party, a supermajority with coalition partners. The constitutional amendments were passed with supermajority support in both chambers and in most state legislatures and were published in the Federal Gazette on September 15, 2024. A second constitutional amendment was passed in early November 2024, effectively shutting down any legal challenges to the judicial reforms by stripping the federal judiciary of the power to review them.

The conditions that allowed this to occur are not unlike those that led to the adoption of national judicial elections in Bolivia. Since the constitutional reform in 2009, Bolivia has selected jurists to the Constitutional Court, Supreme Court, the Judicial Council, and the Agricultural Court via direct popular elections. These national elections were held in 2011, 2017, and 2024. The Mexican reforms are much more comprehensive.

RÍOS-FIGUEROA: I agree with Amanda and Michael. I would add, echoing Michael, that by the time López Obrador and Morena won in 2018, the levels of distrust and perception of corruption in the judicial system were relatively high. According to the Latinobarometer, in the 1994–2018 period, 40% was the highest percentage of people with “some or much trust in the judiciary,” with an average of 26% — other surveys report somewhat higher percentages, but this does not alter the central fact that popular support for the judiciary was relatively low.³⁰ On the other hand, according to surveys by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (INEGI), by 2017, a whopping 71% of respondents considered corruption in the judiciary to be “very frequent.”³¹

A crucial caveat is in order. In their responses to those surveys, the citizens did not distinguish between state or federal judges, prosecutors, or even police officers.³² . . . López Obrador exploited this confusion; he constantly trash-talked the federal judges, promoting a spillover of the distrust and bad perception that many people have of the other actors.³³ Yet the reform affected only the judges; it did not touch the prosecutorial organs at either the state or federal levels, even though one of the rhetorical motivations was to fight corruption within the justice system.

To be clear, the federal judiciary, and even more so the state judiciaries, faced many challenges and strong criticism. But the reform, instead of proceeding surgically, took advantage of the generalized distrust of the justice system and went after the more professional and more independent parts of it.³⁴

JI: The elections were framed as a democratizing reform, giving citizens a direct say in choosing judges. In your view, did the structure of the reform live up to that promise?

DRISCOLL: The direct election of judges does carry with it the sheen of representative democracy, insofar as it involves the popular participation in selecting judicial representatives; ideally, candidates might seek voters’ support who are then chosen by an informed electorate. Yet procedurally speaking, there are a number of aspects of the candidate selection and electoral environment in Mexico such that the 2025 judicial elections did not conform to this democratic ideal.

First, the constitutional reform designates that the three branches of government — the executive, legislative, and judicial branches — are all responsible for assembling a committee to review the judicial aspirants’ candidacies. The government party controlled the committees in both the executive and legislative branches, owing to its control of those two branches of government. A majority of the members of the judicial committee resigned midway in the candidate vetting process, so the work of that body was transferred to the Senate, which again is controlled by the government party. All of this implies the government party, Morena, was able to nominate candidates without the involvement of opposition parties. Selection committees approved numerous candidates with longstanding ties to Morena. The institutions responsible for vetting the applicants reviewed tens of thousands of them in a matter of weeks, suggesting that their review of the candidates was cursory at best; in the end, the control of candidate selection was dominated by the government party, which then ostensibly chose candidates to populate the ballot by a random draw.

Voters were then asked to sort through dozens of judicial candidates across as many as six ballots, all with very limited information about the candidates themselves, and without the usual cues of partisanship or similar heuristics.

Consequently, the candidate selection process fell short of meritocratic evaluation and was neither competitive nor open to deliberation about candidate qualities. The public, by all available metrics, was not well informed about the process or the candidates.³⁵

Interestingly, this is a similar dynamic to what we observed in Bolivia since the first direct election of national judges and magistrates in that system in 2011. The supermajority control of the government party implied that the ruling party could unilaterally nominate judges to the electoral slate. Consequently, all the judges elected under that system had the de facto stamp of government approval. In that country, the strongest predictor of candidates’ vote share was their position on the ballot, which was randomly assigned.³⁶ In those elections, voter information was also very low.³⁷

JI: Candidate selection and campaigning were tightly controlled, and voters faced complex ballots with thousands of names. How did those design choices shape the quality and fairness of the elections?

NELSON: In an effort to ensure that the judicial elections were “apolitical,” candidates were prohibited from reporting partisan affiliation or from campaigning openly. There was no public funding available to candidates, who were also prohibited from accepting donations from private entities, much less parties. This meant candidates, for the most part, self-funded their campaigns, and much of their campaigning took place online and via social media. In place of traditional campaigns, the National Electoral Institute (or INE, its Spanish acronym) launched a centralized online portal that provided candidate biographies, contact information, social media links, candidate numbers, sample ballots, and a ballot simulation tool.³⁸ Voters reported that the sheer number of candidates made it difficult to navigate and accurately identify candidates they most preferred.

DRISCOLL: In practice, there were large disparities in promotional resources available to candidates, and uneven enforcement resulted in some government-backed candidates reportedly accessing external resources for self-promotion.³⁹ There were interest groups and political parties distributing voter guides (“acordeones”) that endorsed specific lists of candidates, sometimes accompanied by explicit endorsements by key elites and opinion leaders.⁴⁰ Preliminary research by Michael, Rachel Canino, Matheus Zanetti, and me suggests that these “cheat sheets” had an outsized influence on voter choice on election day and largely benefited government-affiliated candidates.⁴¹

JI: How would you characterize the role of political parties and the executive in the process? To what extent was the judiciary’s independence preserved or compromised in the design of these elections?

NELSON: Despite the formal prohibition on partisan involvement, the government party had an upper hand in almost every aspect of the reform implementation. The near supermajority control of the bicameral legislature along with the executive meant that they controlled both the legislative and executive candidate selection committees, as well as that of the judiciary when that committee resigned. So, essentially, total control of the candidate selection process.

DRISCOLL: Another facet of partisan or executive control relates to a feature of the ballot design: Alongside each candidate’s name and number, there was an indicator of which of the three candidate selection committees had approved the candidate. So, “PE” if the candidate was cleared by the executive (“poder ejecutivo”), “PL” if the legislative branch assessed them, and so on. This was a clear indicator to supporters of the president — if you knew nothing else about the candidates on the ballot, you could vote for someone with a “PE” by their name and be assured you were picking someone who the president approved. This, along with the candidates’ voter numbers, was the sort of information communicated in the “how to vote” guides that were circulated in advance of the election.

RÍOS-FIGUEROA: The reform sets the institutional incentives for independent behavior at a historical low. The design of the judicial election promotes the view that judges’ preferences will be very close to those of the governing coalition. First, to appear on the ballot, a candidate must pass a politically charged filter: a green light from at least one of the three selection committees in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. At least two of them were dominated by members of the official party. In contrast, the members of the judiciary committee ended up resigning, and their job was absorbed by the legislative committee. Second, as was already said, to win the electoral race, the successful were those who made alliances with political actors capable of mobilizing votes. Finally, once elected, the judges face yet another ex-post check on their behavior by the Tribunal of Judicial Discipline, also popularly elected and with judges with close ties to the government, a quite disturbing feature of the reform as highlighted by Amanda and Michael.

JI: Turnout was strikingly low despite the historic nature of the event. What do you think explains the limited public engagement?

RÍOS-FIGUEROA: There was an open campaign by the opposition and citizens who do not support Morena to promote abstention from voting as a form of civil disobedience against what they portray as a reform to subordinate the judiciary politically. However, the low turnout was also due to genuine perplexity and a lack of enthusiasm among many voters, stemming from the complexity of a poorly planned election.

DRISCOLL: I agree with Julio here. Civic engagement and public involvement in vote counting and oversight have been the norm in Mexican elections since the transition to democracy, both of which were absent in this electoral process. The National Electoral Institute (INE) has long been professionalized and very institutionally capable, but in this process was tasked with administrating a new and very complicated electoral process, on a very tight timeline, and with severe budgetary restrictions.

We have conducted surveys in the field over this period, asking people about their participation and the reasons for not participating. Among those who self-reported abstention, a large plurality (about 45%) expressed skepticism about the trustworthiness of the process overall, with another 30% suggesting they lacked adequate information to know how to participate or which candidates to choose.⁴²

JI: What do we know so far about how these elections are affecting the judiciary’s composition — for example, the experience levels or backgrounds of newly elected judges?

RÍOS-FIGUEROA: The erosion of professionalism and judicial capacity is, I think, perhaps the worst of the consequences of this judicial reform, one that Mexico will suffer for a considerable time.

For starters, the formal requisites to register as a candidate in the judicial election are minimal: three to five years of “experience” (depending on the position sought), a GPA of at least 8 out of 10 (9 in the subjects that are specific to the tribunal that you are running for, e.g., criminal law if you aim at joining a specialized criminal district court), and five letters of recommendation by family or friends.⁴³ That’s it.

Moreover, as we have said before, the reform entails the dismissal of all career judges. To gauge the magnitude of the reform, consider that in the period from 1994 (when another big judicial reform was enacted, this one attempting to promote independence and capacity in the federal judiciary), it took an average of 19 years and merit examinations to arrive at an appeals court after entering the lower echelons of the judicial career.⁴⁴ The current judicial reform entails firing all those career judges on whom Mexico invested significant resources and replacing them with much younger lawyers, many of whom have never set foot in a courtroom.

In joint work with colleagues at the Georgetown Americas Institute, the University of Notre Dame, and the World Justice Project, we found that, on average, the elected judges have 15 years of “experience” less than the career judges (we captured experience by counting the years from when someone earned their law degree to 2025).⁴⁵ We also found that 9% of elected judges have a PhD (compared to 16% of career judges), and 48% have a master’s degree (compared to 60% of career judges).⁴⁶ Of all the federal judges elected last June 2025, 48% had never set foot in the federal judiciary, either as judges or as lower-level judicial officials of any kind.⁴⁷ In other words, the capacity and professionalism of the new judges are set at historic lows.

JI: Given the populist framing behind these reforms, do you see this as an isolated event or part of a broader global trend toward politicizing the judiciary?

RÍOS-FIGUEROA: Mexico, after the legitimate and sweeping electoral victory of López Obrador and Morena in 2018, initiated a process of democratic erosion: a process of executive aggrandizement and concentration of power in a party and its leader through relatively small but significant and seemingly democratic reforms that, in the aggregate, have made it much harder for the governing coalition to lose future elections.⁴⁸ Viewed through this lens, the judicial reform in Mexico is similar to other efforts to capture, or at least neutralize, the judiciary in countries such as Hungary under Viktor Orbán, Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, Poland under Jarosław Kaczyński, Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, or El Salvador under Nayib Bukele. Mexico’s reform is deeper and broader than any previous attempts. Plus, resistance to the reform was organized and relevant but ultimately insufficient to stop it. So, Mexico crossed a line that other countries have not yet crossed.

DRISCOLL: I am very concerned that would-be autocrats or populists will look to Mexico as a playbook of how to effectively and efficiently capture the judiciary for their own benefit, under the auspices of democratic transformation. As Julio has already mentioned, the scope of these reforms implies that it is perhaps the most efficient government takeover of an otherwise independent judiciary in the history of the world.

JI: Looking ahead to the next phase of elections in 2027, what will you be watching most closely?

RÍOS-FIGUEROA: I am not optimistic regarding judicial independence in Mexico. Not only is the political context of unified government favorable to judicial deference toward the main political party and its coalition, but also the new institutional incentives set in the constitution by the reform promote proximity of preferences between judges and the government. For judicial independence to improve in Mexico, a more balanced electoral competition and, thus, a more plural representation in the elected branches would be necessary. This is not only difficult to foresee in the near future, but it would also not be sufficient to foster independent judicial behavior as it would need to be accompanied by an additional constitutional reform that changes the selection and sanctioning mechanisms of judges. In other words, new institutional incentives promote distance between the preferences of elected politicians and judges.

But the judicial reform also deeply eroded judicial capacity, and this is a feature that, together with low independence, is generating a lot of uncertainty among different political, economic, and social actors not only in Mexico but also in the United States, Canada, and other of Mexico’s economic partners. Therefore, I would be watching closely potential micro-reforms regarding qualifications to become a judicial candidate in 2027, the reform of the selection committees so that they can do a much better job screening the candidates based on merit and capacity, or the deferral of the election to perhaps 2028 so that it does not coincide with the midterms.

NELSON: It is likely that some actors within the legal system, especially those with the capacity to do so, will simply move to alternative venues for dispute resolution. For example, bilateral agreements will be rewritten to resolve contracts in arbitration, or at least outside the Mexican judicial hierarchy. I also worry that the elections will change who wants to become a judge. If you feel like you need to have connections with the government party to become a judge, people who would otherwise be excellent jurists might choose other career paths. In this way, there could be important downstream consequences for judicial quality in Mexico.

DRISCOLL: To echo Julio’s and Michael’s concerns, I anticipate a loss of independence, as well as a loss of capacity. Mexican judges will now be incentivized to attend to public opinion and to rule with an eye to the preferences of the disciplinary tribunal or their eventual election, otherwise risking their careers. The move from the professionalized federal judicial career track to the direct election of judges represents a tremendous loss of professional capacity and legal expertise, the effects of which will take years to fully realize. If the next round of elections coincides with the midterms as Julio suggested, we will likely see broader public participation but a more polarized and partisan electoral process. I believe the bad would outweigh the good in this eventuality. I hope this outcome can be avoided.

I do not believe these reforms will be undone; the wheels are in motion, and it is too late to reverse course on a dime. There are earnest efforts underway by many to propose and enact improvements within the system, to help to mitigate some of the shortcomings we observed in the inaugural electoral process. I hope very much the government is receptive to some of these suggestions.

JI: If you could offer one takeaway or caution to other countries considering judicial elections, what would it be?

NELSON: I said earlier that I think these elections provide a solid “what not to do” in terms of electing judges, and I think that is the big takeaway here. Where judicial elections can be positive for the judiciary, they provide voters with an opportunity to weigh in on the direction of the bench, based on information about the candidates, as they select among high-quality candidates. If countries see the United States, Mexico, and Bolivia and want to adopt judicial elections, they should opt for institutional rules more similar to the United States — where ballot access is broad, candidates have the opportunity to campaign, and ballot designs are relatively simple — than to Mexico or Bolivia, where these aspects are absent.

DRISCOLL: One thing the Mexican elections teach us is that there are lots of ways countries could elect judges, and the “devil is in the details,” so to speak. Those “behind the curtains” choices about things like candidate selection, ballot design, and candidates’ campaign ability — all might seem technical or mundane but are hugely consequential in their impact. These decisions shape the bench’s composition after election day and the extent to which we might evaluate the elections as a net positive or negative once the election is over.

Rather than making big pronouncements about whether judicial elections are “good” or “bad” in the abstract, it is important to have conversations about what exactly reforms are intended to solve, and scrutinize the cumulative effect of institutional design choices, to objectively weigh the costs and benefits that this particular approach to judicial selection may carry.

Critically, the process by which these reforms occur is hugely consequential for the public’s perceptions of the legitimacy of the entire reform process, the elections themselves, and the legitimacy of the resulting judicial system. In Mexico, these reforms were viewed by many to have been a partisan play to take over the courts. These perceptions undermined participation and have polarized public support for the judiciary. Building back the public faith in the judiciary will be a considerable challenge for the future.

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AMANDA DRISCOLL is the Dr. J. Elizabeth Garraway Professor of Political Science at Florida State University (FSU) and a professor of law (courtesy) at FSU’s College of Law. Her research and teaching focus on comparative democratic institutions in Latin America, especially courts, separation of powers, and the rule of law.

MICHAEL J. NELSON is a professor of political science and affiliate law faculty at Pennsylvania State University. His research and teaching focus on public support for judicial institutions, judicial elections, and judicial behavior.

JULIO RÍOSFIGUEROA is an associate professor in the Department of Law at ITAM in Mexico City. His research focuses on comparative judicial politics, the rule of law, and empirical legal studies with an empirical focus on the Latin American region. Ríos-Figueroa’s research can be found at https://rios-figueroa.com/.

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1. The full version of this written discussion originally appeared in the January 2026 edition of Judicature International, https://duke.is/MexicosJudicialElections.
2. Presidencia de la República, Iniciativa con proyecto de decreto por el que se reforman, adicionan y derogan diversas disposiciones de la constitución política de los estados unidos mexicanos, de la ley orgánica del poder judicial de la federación, y de diversos ordenamientos legales, en materia de justicia (Feb. 5, 2024), https://duke.is/judicialreformdecree; María Calderón, Mexico's Constitutional Reforms Series: Judicial Reform, Wilson Ctr. Mex. Inst. (July 19, 2024), https://duke.is/wilson-center-politicization.
3. Guadalupe Salmorán-Villar, Judicial Elections in Mexico: The Risk of Capture in The Judicial Storm: Implications of Mexico's 2024 Reform 40 (Saúl López-Noriega & Javier Martín-Reyes, eds., 2025), https://eljuegodelacorte.nexos.com.mx/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/the-judicial-storm.pdf (noting "it is clear that merit, experience, and moral integrity are far from being the decisive criteria in selecting the candidates who will ultimately be presented to the public on election day.").
4. Azul A. Aguiar Aguilar, Rodrigo Castro Cornejo & Alejandro Monsiváis-Carrillo, Is Mexico at the Gates of Authoritarianism?, 36 J. Democracy 50 (2025); Julio Ríos-Figueroa, El poder judicial ante el populismo y la erosión democrática: el caso de México, 2018-2021, 198 Revista de Estudios Políticos (2022).
5. The election results from Mexico's National Electoral Institute (INE) confirm that Claudia Sheinbaum won the presidency with approximately 59.75% of all ballots cast. Record-Breaking 35.9M Votes for Claudia Sheinbaum in Final Results, Mexico News Daily (June 7, 2024), https://duke.is/Sheinbaum.
6. See Latinobarometer (2025), http://www.latinobarometro.org.
7. See generally OECD, OECD Integrity Review of Mexico City: Upgrading The Local Anti-corruption System, OECD Public Governance Reviews (2019), https://duke.is/OECD-integrityreview; Latinobarometer, supra note 6.
8. See id.
9. Lautaro Cella et al., Building Tolerance for Backsliding by Trash-Talking Democracy: Theory and Evidence From Mexico, Comp. Pol. Stud. (2025), https://duke.is/buildingtolerance.
10. Saúl López-Noriega & Javier Martín-Reyes, The 2024 Judicial Reform in Mexico: An Overview in The Judicial Storm: Implications of Mexico's 2024 Reform 24 (Saúl López-Noriega & Javier Martín-Reyes, eds., 2025), https://duke.is/judicialstorm (noting "instead of proposing a comprehensive reform, [President] López Obrador managed to spread the idea that the only solution was a complete cleansing of the judiciary and the introduction of the only mechanism that, according to his rhetoric, would confer democratic legitimacy: the popular election of judges").
11. Francisca Pou Giménez, Are Judicial Elections in the United States Comparable to the Popular Vote Established by the Mexican Judicial Reform? in The Judicial Storm: Implications of Mexico's 2024 Reform 33 (Saúl López-Noriega & Javier Martín-Reyes, eds., 2025), https://duke.is/judicialstorm (noting, "[t]he information available on the candidates will be uneven, if not null. They must campaign for three months but cannot receive public or private funding. The Constitution guarantees them airtime on public television and radio. Still, the National Electoral Institute stated that this presence will unfortunately not include individual information.").
12. See Amanda Driscoll & Michael J. Nelson, Judicial Selection and the Democratization of Justice: Lessons from the Bolivian Judicial Elections, 3 J.L. & Cts. 115, 131–32 (2015) (noting that "candidates who were listed toward the bottom of the ballot (e.g., high ballot position) received systematically lower expected vote shares").
13. See id. at 123–24 (noting the ban on campaigning limited voters' ability to "make informed choices on election day").
14. Conóceles, Practica y Ubica, Inst. Nacional Electoral, https://duke.is/cpu (last visited Jan. 4, 2026).
15. Denise Dresser, Mexico's Vote for Autocracy, Foreign Aff. (Nov. 13, 2024), https://duke.is/mexicos-vote-autocracy.
16. Comisión de Quejas y Denuncias del Instituto Nacional Electoral [Complaints and Reports Commission of the National Electoral Institute], Acuerdo respecto de la necesidad de adoptar medidas cautelares contra la página de internet https://justiciaylibertadmx.org/, dentro del procedimiento especial sancionador iniciado de oficio identificado con la clave alfanumérica UT/SCG/PE/PEF/CG/182/2025 (2025) (Mex.).
17. Amanda Driscoll et al., Partizanized Participation in Nonpartisan Elections: The Extraordinary Mexican Judicial Elections of 2025 (Working Paper, 2025).
18. Driscoll and Nelson's research, on file with the authors, is based in part upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant Nos. SES-2501293 & SES-2501294. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. Additional support for this project is provided by the Department of Political Science, the College of the Liberal Arts and McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Pennsylvania State University, and the Department of Political Science, the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy at Florida State University, and a seed grant from the Council on Research and Creativity at Florida State University. Driscoll and Nelson acknowledge the excellent assistance of Matheus Zanetti, who helped to compile some of the analyses discussed here.
19. Mexico Explains 5 Easy Steps to Register Online as a Candidate for a Spot on the Supreme Court, AP News (Nov. 11, 2024), https://duke.is/mexico-supreme-court-election (explicitly mentioning the requirement for a GPA of 3.2, which is the American equivalent of the Mexican 8.0 out of 10, and the need for five letters of recommendation from "neighbors or friends"); Decreto por el que se reforman, adicionan y derogan diversas disposiciones de la Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, en materia de reforma del Poder Judicial [decree amending, adding, and repealing various provisions of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States, regarding the reform of the Judicial Branch], Diario Oficial de la Federación [DOF], Sept. 15, 2024 (Mex.) (codifying the requirement of 9.0 in subjects related to the specific position); Pérez Correa González, Constitutional Reform of the Judiciary in Mexico (the "Judicial Reform"), (Dec. 9, 2024), https://duke.is/correa-gonzalez (noting that candidates for the Supreme Court now require five years of experience while candidates for judges and magistrates require three years of professional practice).
20. Andrea Pozas Loyo & Julio Ríos Figueroa, The Judicial Career after Obrador-Sheinbaum's Reform in The Judicial Storm: Implications of Mexico's 2024 Reform 61 (Saúl López-Noriega & Javier Martín-Reyes, eds., 2025), https://duke.is/judicialstorm ("On average, it took 16 years to become a trial court judge and 19 years and eight months to become an appeals court judge.").
21. See Alejandro Ponce et al., Elección popular de jueces federales en México 2025, El Juego de la Corte: Blog de la Revista Nexos (May 22, 2025), https://duke.is/popular-election; see also Julio Ríos Figueroa, Mapa para navegar la incertidumbre judicial, El Juego de la Corte: Blog de la Revista Nexos (Dec. 6, 2025), https://duke.is/election-map.
22. Ríos-Figueroa, supra note 21.
23. Ponce et al., supra note 21.
24. See Nancy Bermeo, On Democratic Backsliding, 27 J. Democracy 5, 10–11, 13 (2016) (noting executive aggrandizement "occurs when elected executives weaken checks on executive power one by one, undertaking a series of institutional changes that hamper the power of opposition forces to challenge executive preferences" and "strategic manipulation chang[es] electoral rules to favor incumbents").
25. The full version of this written discussion originally appeared in the January 2026 edition of Judicature International, https://duke.is/MexicosJudicialElections.
26. Presidencia de la República, Iniciativa con proyecto de decreto por el que se reforman, adicionan y derogan diversas disposiciones de la constitución política de los estados unidos mexicanos, de la ley orgánica del poder judicial de la federación, y de diversos ordenamientos legales, en materia de justicia (Feb. 5, 2024), https://duke.is/judicialreformdecree; María Calderón, Mexico’s Constitutional Reforms Series: Judicial Reform, Wilson Ctr. Mex. Inst. (July 19, 2024), https://duke.is/wilson-center-politicization.
27. Guadalupe Salmorán-Villar, Judicial Elections in Mexico: The Risk of Capture in The Judicial Storm: Implications of Mexico’s 2024 Reform 40 (Saúl López-Noriega & Javier Martín-Reyes, eds., 2025), https://eljuegodelacorte.nexos.com.mx/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/the-judicial-storm.pdf (noting “it is clear that merit, experience, and moral integrity are far from being the decisive criteria in selecting the candidates who will ultimately be presented to the public on election day.”).
28. Azul A. Aguiar Aguilar, Rodrigo Castro Cornejo & Alejandro Monsiváis-Carrillo, Is Mexico at the Gates of Authoritarianism?, 36 J. Democracy 50 (2025); Julio Ríos-Figueroa, El poder judicial ante el populismo y la erosión democrática: el caso de México, 2018-2021, 198 Revista de Estudios Políticos (2022).
29. The election results from Mexico’s National Electoral Institute (INE) confirm that Claudia Sheinbaum won the presidency with approximately 59.75% of all ballots cast. Record-Breaking 35.9M Votes for Claudia Sheinbaum in Final Results, Mexico News Daily (June 7, 2024), https://duke.is/Sheinbaum.
30. See Latinobarometer (2025), http://www.latinobarometro.org.
31. See generally OECD, OECD Integrity Review of Mexico City: Upgrading The Local Anti-corruption System, OECD Public Governance Reviews (2019), https://duke.is/OECD-integrityreview; Latinobarometer, supra note 6.
32. See id.
33. Lautaro Cella et al., Building Tolerance for Backsliding by Trash-Talking Democracy: Theory and Evidence From Mexico, Comp. Pol. Stud. (2025), https://duke.is/buildingtolerance.
34. Saúl López-Noriega & Javier Martín-Reyes, The 2024 Judicial Reform in Mexico: An Overview in The Judicial Storm: Implications of Mexico’s 2024 Reform 24 (Saúl López-Noriega & Javier Martín-Reyes, eds., 2025), https://duke.is/judicialstorm (noting “instead of proposing a comprehensive reform, [President] López Obrador managed to spread the idea that the only solution was a complete cleansing of the judiciary and the introduction of the only mechanism that, according to his rhetoric, would confer democratic legitimacy: the popular election of judges”).
35. Francisca Pou Giménez, Are Judicial Elections in the United States Comparable to the Popular Vote Established by the Mexican Judicial Reform? in The Judicial Storm: Implications of Mexico’s 2024 Reform 33 (Saúl López-Noriega & Javier Martín-Reyes, eds., 2025), https://duke.is/judicialstorm (noting, “[t]he information available on the candidates will be uneven, if not null. They must campaign for three months but cannot receive public or private funding. The Constitution guarantees them airtime on public television and radio. Still, the National Electoral Institute stated that this presence will unfortunately not include individual information.”).
36. See Amanda Driscoll & Michael J. Nelson, Judicial Selection and the Democratization of Justice: Lessons from the Bolivian Judicial Elections, 3 J.L. & Cts. 115, 131–32 (2015) (noting that “candidates who were listed toward the bottom of the ballot (e.g., high ballot position) received systematically lower expected vote shares”).
37. See id. at 123–24 (noting the ban on campaigning limited voters’ ability to “make informed choices on election day”).
38. Conóceles, Practica y Ubica, Inst. Nacional Electoral, https://duke.is/cpu (last visited Jan. 4, 2026).
39. Denise Dresser, Mexico’s Vote for Autocracy, Foreign Aff. (Nov. 13, 2024), https://duke.is/mexicos-vote-autocracy.
40. Comisión de Quejas y Denuncias del Instituto Nacional Electoral [Complaints and Reports Commission of the National Electoral Institute], Acuerdo respecto de la necesidad de adoptar medidas cautelares contra la página de internet https://justiciaylibertadmx.org/, dentro del procedimiento especial sancionador iniciado de oficio identificado con la clave alfanumérica UT/SCG/PE/PEF/CG/182/2025 (2025) (Mex.).
41. Amanda Driscoll et al., Partizanized Participation in Nonpartisan Elections: The Extraordinary Mexican Judicial Elections of 2025 (Working Paper, 2025).
42. Driscoll and Nelson’s research, on file with the authors, is based in part upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant Nos. SES-2501293 & SES-2501294. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. Additional support for this project is provided by the Department of Political Science, the College of the Liberal Arts and McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Pennsylvania State University, and the Department of Political Science, the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy at Florida State University, and a seed grant from the Council on Research and Creativity at Florida State University. Driscoll and Nelson acknowledge the excellent assistance of Matheus Zanetti, who helped to compile some of the analyses discussed here.
43. Mexico Explains 5 Easy Steps to Register Online as a Candidate for a Spot on the Supreme Court, AP News (Nov. 11, 2024), https://duke.is/mexico-supreme-court-election (explicitly mentioning the requirement for a GPA of 3.2, which is the American equivalent of the Mexican 8.0 out of 10, and the need for five letters of recommendation from “neighbors or friends”); Decreto por el que se reforman, adicionan y derogan diversas disposiciones de la Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, en materia de reforma del Poder Judicial [decree amending, adding, and repealing various provisions of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States, regarding the reform of the Judicial Branch], Diario Oficial de la Federación [DOF], Sept. 15, 2024 (Mex.) (codifying the requirement of 9.0 in subjects related to the specific position); Pérez Correa González, Constitutional Reform of the Judiciary in Mexico (the “Judicial Reform”), (Dec. 9, 2024), https://duke.is/correa-gonzalez (noting that candidates for the Supreme Court now require five years of experience while candidates for judges and magistrates require three years of professional practice).
44. Andrea Pozas Loyo & Julio Ríos Figueroa, The Judicial Career after Obrador-Sheinbaum’s Reform in The Judicial Storm: Implications of Mexico’s 2024 Reform 61 (Saúl López-Noriega & Javier Martín-Reyes, eds., 2025), https://duke.is/judicialstorm (“On average, it took 16 years to become a trial court judge and 19 years and eight months to become an appeals court judge.”).
45. See Alejandro Ponce et al., Elección popular de jueces federales en México 2025, El Juego de la Corte: Blog de la Revista Nexos (May 22, 2025), https://duke.is/popular-election; see also Julio Ríos Figueroa, Mapa para navegar la incertidumbre judicial, El Juego de la Corte: Blog de la Revista Nexos (Dec. 6, 2025), https://duke.is/election-map.
46. Ríos-Figueroa, supra note 21.
47. Ponce et al., supra note 21.
48. See Nancy Bermeo, On Democratic Backsliding, 27 J. Democracy 5, 10–11, 13 (2016) (noting executive aggrandizement “occurs when elected executives weaken checks on executive power one by one, undertaking a series of institutional changes that hamper the power of opposition forces to challenge executive preferences” and “strategic manipulation chang[es] electoral rules to favor incumbents”).