Six - Policy analysis in autonomous agencies

Summary

This chapter provides an overview on how policy analysis is done in constitutional autonomous agencies (organismos constitucionales autónomos, or CAAs) in Mexico, with a particular focus on the Instituto Nacional de Evaluación para la Educación (National Institute of Evaluation for Education, or INEE) and the Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones (Federal Telecommunications Institute, or IFT). The CAAs represent a new kind of public agency for the Mexican politico-administrative system. From an international perspective, CAAs are similar to non-majoritarian institutions existing in other jurisdictions: they are formally independent; their heads are neither elected nor hierarchically accountable to the executive power; and their internal life is not tied to political cycles (Majone, 1994, 1997; Thatcher and Stone-Sweet, 2002).

The study departs from an understanding of policy analysis as the set of activities that policymakers develop while considering future policies (Dobuzinkis et al, 2007; Adachi, 2015). Among other things, these activities include: gathering and assessing information; considering and comparing potential courses of action; making decisions about specific policies; and taking into account (or not) potential implementation and evaluation factors. We do not expect that this kind of “textbook” approach will necessarily exist in practice. However, we do think it provides a useful starting point for conducting our research, and we thus use it as an analytical and not as a prescriptive framework.

The chapter is based mainly on fresh empirical research conducted by the authors. In particular, we use information collected through a series of semi-structured interviews with senior officials and policy experts from the two institutions mentioned above.

We describe each case, and then compare them to produce broader insights regarding the nature of policy analysis in CAAs. While we cannot expect our findings to be representative of all nine CAAs that currently are in place, we do think our methodological approach to the subject is appropriate for the purposes of this study. First, it allows for collecting original information about policy analysis in CAAs, in line with the book's broader objectives. Second, because of the very limited amount of previous research on the subject, this qualitative exploration will allow us to generate some theoretical statements that might be tested or refined at a later stage.