Subverting Judicial Legitimacy: Presidential Rhetoric and Democratic Erosion in Mexico

In recent years, Mexico’s judiciary has faced systematic assaults coming not only from the executive branch but also from the legislative power. Both the executive and the ruling party have criticized the judiciary’s role when deciding high-profile political cases, launching attacks that accuse judges of being a corrupt elite benefiting from hefty salaries. These attacks portray judges as protectors of interests that conflict with those of citizens and the democratically elected representatives. Under López Obrador’s administration, cases of significant political relevance have been brought before the courts. The Supreme Court has reviewed several of these cases and issued decisions against the president’s preferences – something that the literature on judicial politics recognizes as a key indicator of the Supreme Court’s independence – leading to executive attacks on the judiciary and its members, polarizing society, and uncovering mechanisms that the literature on democratization highlights as indicators of democratic erosion. This study delves into the dynamics of assaults on the judiciary and its relationship with the erosion of democracy: what steps do executive attacks follow to erode judicial legitimacy and independence? How can attacks on the judiciary lead to democratic erosion? What role do judges play in accelerating or stopping such regression? To address these questions, an original database was utilized. Through web-scraping techniques, stenographic transcripts of the President’s Morning Press Conferences, speeches, as well as plenary sessions of both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, were collected. The database comprises a total of 1,358 Morning Press Conferences and speeches delivered by the President between December 2018 and June 2023. Additionally, it includes 337 plenary sessions from the Chamber of Deputies and 382 sessions retrieved from the Senate’s website.