How Mexico Climbed the Populism Index Almost Overnight
The story of Mexico’s populist surge is inseparable from its revolutionary past. After the Mexican Revolution, the victors created the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to consolidate the power they had won. For seventy years, the PRI dominated Mexican politics, institutionalizing revolutionary ideals while building an authoritarian system that mixed socialism with centralized control.
By the late twentieth century, however, the party’s direction had shifted. With the rise of technocrats like Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the PRI embraced globalization and market reforms, moving away from its revolutionary discourse. In response, left-wing PRI figures such as Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and Andrés Manuel López Obrador broke away to form the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), claiming to defend the Revolution’s original ideals.
In 2000, Mexico’s long-awaited democratic transition came when Vicente Fox of the right-leaning, pro-market National Action Party (PAN) defeated the PRI for the first time. He was followed by another PAN president, Felipe Calderón, who faced López Obrador (then with the PRD) in a contested election that López Obrador claimed was fraudulent. The PRI briefly returned under Enrique Peña Nieto, defeating López Obrador once more. It was at this point that López Obrador struck out on his own, creating MORENA.
During the two decades of democratic alternation, with the pro-market PAN and technocratic PRI in power, Mexico’s place in the Latin American Left-Leaning Populism Index seemed to be trending downward. Year after year, it hovered far from the region’s populist hotspots. Then, in the final of the 2010s, the line on the chart didn’t just rise, it rocketed, vaulting the country into the top four almost overnight. What happened?
The restraint ended in 2018 when López Obrador assumed the presidency with a project defined by expansive social spending, open confrontations with autonomous institutions, and rhetoric that divided society into “the people” versus “the elite.” Within a year, Mexico’s score surged, vaulting the country into the top tier of Latin American populism.
The Latin American Left-Leaning Populism Index (LALLPI) goes beyond tracking political speeches. It measures active left-leaning populism by combining three dimensions. Economic populism captures policies that expand state control over the economy, increase subsidies, restrict trade, or reduce market freedoms. Institutional populism reflects actions that weaken checks and balances, undermine the rule of law, or erode property rights and freedom of expression. Populist rhetoric measures the extent to which leaders frame politics as a battle between “the people” and “the elite.” The overall score is the product of rhetoric and policy action, meaning that a high score indicates populist words are matched by populist policies. Importantly, the data for Mexico in the Latin American Left-Leaning Populism Index currently extends only to 2020. This means that the spike reflects the first two years of López Obrador’s administration, not his entire six-year term.
Mexico’s leap in the rankings wasn’t just about other countries falling, it was driven by a sharp rise in its own populism score. The chart below tracks the Overall Populism score for Mexico and five historically comparable Latin American countries from 2000 to 2019. While nations like Venezuela and Argentina have long maintained high levels of populism, Mexico’s scores stayed low for most of the period, until 2018, when they spiked dramatically.
Breaking down the sub-indices reveals the nature of this surge. Economic populism rose as the government expanded subsidies and state control. Institutional populism climbed with efforts to weaken checks and balances and centralize authority. Populist rhetoric remained consistently high, amplifying the impact of policy choices. Taken together, these shifts explain Mexico’s dramatic rise in the index.
Seen through this lens, MORENA represents a revival of the PRI’s old socialist and authoritarian traditions. Mexico’s abrupt turn raises a sobering question: will the country’s institutions prove resilient, or has it permanently joined the ranks of Latin America’s populist regimes?
Juan José Casillas Quezada | Research Assistant | jcasillasquez@miners.utep.edu
The views represented here are those of the author and do not represent the position of The University of Texas at El Paso or the Center for Free Enterprise.
