Week Eight Contribution: Mexico's Judiciary

 Mexican senate gives final approval to sweeping changes to judiciary | Mexico | The Guardian

There is no clearer indication that voting is not all that is required to make a democracy than the recently approved judicial reforms in Mexico. Or, at the very least, it raises questions around the distinction between democracy and systems that we normatively see as creating good governance. The changes, brought in by the Morena party and spearheaded by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), require all judges to stand for election. Though on the surface this technically seems to be an expansion of democratic procedures - and indeed was legislated through democratic means - the criticisms that the policy has attracted attack it for allowing the incumbent party to stack courts with its supporters, increasing the ease with which the judiciary can be politically influenced, and radically lowering the qualifications of judges at every level. In other words, it is seen as an assault on the spirit of democracy. 

This points to the care that needs to be taken when classifying regime types. Is democracy the inclusion of as much voting as possible? Most people's conception of a liberal democracy is one with an independent, unelected judiciary, and this is certainly not that. This indicates one of two things: 

• Either democracy is not just the insertion of voting as a selection mechanism for as many positions of power as possible, and that care should be taken when properly characterising it, or
• It is, in which case we should avoid creating spectrums where "more democracy" is "good" and "less democracy" is "bad" (though of course, this should absolutely be done anyway for reasons that go beyond what has been discussed in this blog).