Mexico’s Radical Democratic Experiment
Mexico’s judiciary just underwent one of the boldest democratic experiments in the world. It’s time to judge it on structural merit.
By Dr. Hector Zenil FRSM
On June 1, 2025, Mexico held its first popular election of judges. More than 7,700 candidates competed for approximately 2,700 judicial positions across the country, including seats on the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. It was an unprecedented exercise aimed at opening up one of the traditionally most opaque and least accessible branches of government to the public. However, the voter turnout , ranging between 12.6% and 13.3% according to the National Electoral Institute (INE), generated a wave of criticism. From national media to international observers, many interpreted the figure as a symptom of citizen apathy or a sign of institutional illegitimacy. But such judgments are partial and lack context.
Thirty years of comparative political science show that voter turnout alone is not a reliable indicator of democratic health
Technical elections, those with low public visibility or held for the first time, often record similar or even lower turnout rates — even in well-established democracies. In 2012, the UK held its first elections for police commissioners with a national turnout of 15.1%, dipping to 8% in some regions. In 2014, Slovakia saw only 13% turnout for the European Parliament elections — the lowest in the EU that year. More recently, in 2023, a special election for a council seat in Los Angeles did not exceed 11%, and the first municipal election in Mableton, Georgia, barely reached 13%. None of these cases led to widespread accusations of illegitimacy, let alone fundamental questions about the political system.
The Mexican judicial election faced several participation-depressing obstacles — none implying democratic failure
First, there was its novelty: there was no precedent in the country (or the world) to help voters grasp the significance of the election. There was also no dominant media narrative to clarify the offices at stake or the consequences of the results. Second, the ballots were unusually complex, with many unfamiliar names, even to legal professionals. Brief, low-budget campaigns further reduced public visibility of the candidates.
Additionally, opposition groups and legal associations promoted strategic abstention as a form of protest, arguing that the ongoing judicial reform lacked legitimacy. They urged citizens not to participate. The isolated election date, which did not coincide with any other significant electoral processes, further diminished its visibility. Taken together, these factors explain the 13% turnout more as a result of institutional choices and structural conditions than of citizen apathy. The key question is not whether 13% or 70% voted , but whether all citizens had a real opportunity to participate and whether the vote was free and transparent.
To rigorously evaluate this exercise, international standards alone are insufficient. We must also compare it to the system it replaced. Until now, much of Mexico’s judiciary has operated under closed appointment systems — where judicial careers, economic interests, and political or corporate connections dictated promotions. In that model , documented in national and international reports , judges were often influenced by political or even criminal power structures, particularly in regions controlled by drug trafficking. Numerous cases have exposed corruption networks, favoritism, and threats compromising judicial impartiality.
Popular elections, imperfect as they may be, introduce a degree of systemic buoyancy. They break the closed cycle of coercion and patronage by enabling , at least theoretically , new profiles to access positions outside traditional institutional control structures. Moreover, this shift echoes one of Athenian democracy’s foundational principles: the use of sortition (lottery) and rotation to prevent power from concentrating in the hands of a few. In classical Greek democracy, many public offices were assigned by lot and limited in duration, based on the premise that chance distributed representation more equitably than meritocratic or aristocratic perpetuation. The logic was clear: constant power corrupts, and constant renewal protects the republic.
While Mexico has not adopted sortition, direct judicial elections share that spirit. They distribute power more unpredictably and participatorily, introducing friction into a system historically vulnerable to closed networks of loyalty. Legitimacy no longer resides exclusively in the elite but opens up to a broader citizen base.
A critical but under-discussed impact of this reform is its effect on gender equity
Mexico now has one of the most gender-equal power structures in the world. With the election of President Claudia Sheinbaum, a Congress composed of over 50% women, and a gender-parity (or near-parity) judiciary, where the Supreme Court will in fact have a female majority, this election has been transformative. Despite mockery directed at the Fourth Transformation (4T), Mexico today matches Scandinavian democracies in female political representation. Preliminary data suggests Mexico’s new judiciary could become the most gender-balanced globally. In contrast, countries like Sweden, Norway, or Finland have taken decades to achieve what Mexico has consolidated in under ten years through structural reforms and gender quotas. Today, Mexico has a woman president, female leaders in both chambers of the legislature, gender parity in both houses, 13 female governors out of 32, and a judiciary with historic female representation, including a female majority on the Supreme Court.
The harshest criticism is especially ironic when it comes from countries that offer no popular participation in selecting their Supreme Court judges. In the U.S., justices are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, an overtly partisan process with long-term institutional consequences and no direct public input. Yet, some U.S. states do allow direct judicial elections, typically driven by traditional parties and overtly partisan campaigning, where “cheat sheets” are not only allowed but expected, helping voters choose candidates aligned with their conservative or liberal ideals. And this criticism comes from a country experiencing full-fledged oligarchy, where just four years ago there was an attempted coup and the current president denies the results of democratic elections.
Democratic legitimacy doesn’t rely solely on participation rates or party involvement. In many Swiss cantons, public referenda draw just 20–35% turnout — and no one questions their institutional stability. Australia mandates compulsory voting to avoid abstention-based legitimacy debates.
The Mexican experiment will need improvements, these may include: clearer and more accessible candidate information; simpler processes; sample ballots; aligning judicial elections with more visible events; or simplifying the institutional design. Legalizing voter guides (“cheat sheets”) — which some criticized despite their practicality — should also be considered. While ideally nonpartisan, the process can’t be completely disconnected from party dynamics, especially at the grassroots level. Still, Mexico managed it more independently at the origin than many others.
Mexico’s judicial election may be the most innovative democratic experiment globally since Athenian democracy — born from a corrupt system’s unfixable despair. It breaks vicious cycles of corruption and enables new profiles to enter the judiciary — candidates who otherwise might never have reached such posts without relying on internal hierarchies, parties, or political networks. While the Mexican model does not implement direct sortition, and the judges are vetted, the elected appear to possess the knowledge, experience, and moral standing equal to current officeholders.
A crack opens in the rigidity of meritocracy, which has often been used to protect privilege and exclude alternatives. The introduction of popular voting — though partial and improvable — shares the Greek spirit of diversifying power sources and periodically renewing those who wield it. Of course, this carries risks, especially in a country grappling with organized crime, where cartels may attempt to corrupt or eliminate uncooperative judges — just as they did under the prior regime, which may have offered more “stability” once co-opted. This shift could increase visibility and violence as the cartels adjust their modus operandi.
A New Model for the Global South and Global North…
In this sense, this is Mexico’s most globally relevant political innovation since Ancient Athens. It emerges from the urgent need to reform a fundamentally corrupt system that could not be repaired from within.
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Dr. Hector Zenil is an Associate Professor at King’s College London. For over a decade, he has been associated with the UK’s Golden Triangle and Oxbridge, a former Senior Researcher and Faculty Member at Oxford’s Department of Computer Science, and a Researcher at the Machine Learning Group at the University of Cambridge. He is an elected member of the London Mathematical Society. He is an author of over 130 articles and around 10 books including one with a foreword by Sir Roger Penrose (Nobel Prize in Physics 2020) for editorial houses such as Cambridge University Press, Springer Nature and World Scientific Publishing/Imperial College Press.
