INTRODUCTION

Autocrats have a hard time enforcing political order. They are unable to rely solely on coercion to enforce rules against their subordinates in the state apparatus, the citizenry, and powerful members of the ruling clique0. This chapter explores the various strategies the Mexican autocratic regime employed to enforce political order and how courts were transformed from weak to more powerful institutions.

In democratic political systems, courts are employed to arbitrate all sorts of conflicts, ranging from commercial disputes, labor disagreements, and criminal cases to major constitutional conflicts arising between citizens and the state and between different branches and levels of government. Autocrats employ courts to enforce their commands directed to bureaucratic subordinates and the citizenry, but they normally do not resort to these institutions to arbitrate conflicts among members of the ruling elite. These types of conflicts are more likely to erupt into violence. What alternative instruments do autocracies use to enforce political order and arbitrate conflicts among members of the ruling elite? When are autocracies likely to empower courts to settle political conflicts? What other roles do courts play in autocratic regimes? This chapter answers these questions in the context of Mexico.

The literature stresses that autocracies often turn to courts as mechanisms for inducing bureaucratic discipline within the administrative apparatus (Moustafa 2006; Shapiro 1981). Akin to “fire-alarm” oversight mechanisms (McCubbins and Schwartz 1984), this form of oversight is driven by the citizenry, who can generate an independent stream of information about bureaucratic abuses that other forms of vertical oversight cannot.