Introduction

There is a clear bias in the study of policy affairs with regard to local governments in Mexico. The existing literature places greater emphasis on the policy process than on what is known about local governments undertaking policy analysis. The purpose of this research is to go beyond the policy process research agenda to acknowledge the policy analysis in local governments. The underlying question is to what extent local governments’ institutional setting supports policy analysis activities. There is limited research on this topic in local governments in Mexico, and this chapter propose a theoretical model to understand how these tasks are done and to foster further investigations.

Current literature suggests that municipalities may not have the appropriate institutional capacity, in terms of time, money or human talent to perform policy analysis. Local governments, authors have said, have insufficient capacity to manage human resources (Merino, 2006), and their fiscal configuration hinders their policy autonomy even after experiencing two waves of decentralization (Cabrero, 2013). Furthermore, despite local democratic transitions, municipal administrations have usually been unable to open up the decision-making process to citizens (Guillén-López, 1996; Moreno-Jaimes, 2008, p 73), and, with regard to institutional capacity, municipalities score even worse now than when their development was assessed using the Human Development Index alone (Flamand and Martínez, 2010, p 156). Local governments’ policy agendas are expanding towards policy domains beyond their traditional attributions (Meza, 2015a, p 29) and this expansion is taking place within a time-limited policy cycle against the backdrop of a fragile, volatile set of policy networks in a fragile, volatile set of policy networks (Cabrero, 2007b, p 30).

However, an alternative view suggests that recent decentralization and democratization trends experienced in Mexico have led municipal governments to embark on some form of policy analysis. This chapter uses data from the municipal census as the main source for exploring the idea of policy analysis. The findings are complemented with strategically selected interviews to illustrate the stories behind them.

A four-cage model of local policy analysis is constructed in this chapter. The model is derived from the institutional implications of two macro-trends: decentralization and democratization. These two macro-trends have made local governments function in two governance modes: bureaucratic and democratic, respectively.