A State of Dementia: Populist Austerity and Cognitive Capacity in Mexico

In 2019, the Mexican legislature passed the Republican Austerity Law under pressure from the populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The law promised to cut federal public spending and redirect resources to pro-poor programs. In practice, austerity has meant a targeted reshuffling: Some state agencies have benefited from increased funding while others have been hard-hit. My research reveals that populist austerity interacts with pro-poor ideals, anti-corruption rhetoric, and anti-insitutionalism to make the technical state agencies, organizational subunits, and knowledge-infrastructures responsible for collecting, analyzing, publishing, and preserving official data and information particular targets. As a result, populist austerity has induced a state of dementia. By this, I mean a painful loss of institutional memory and perception and a diminishing of the state’s problem-solving and cognitive capacity. This book takes stock of the onset of the Mexican state’s dementia and efforts to fight it, and explains how these struggles over cognitive capacity affect state politics, development, and democracy in Mexico.