Policy and Violence in Mexico

Abstract

In 2018, drug-related homicides in Mexico increased 15% year over year, at the same that the the Movimiento Regeneracion Nacional (hereafter MORENA) party came to national power and implemented policies intended to disempower cartels. This study implements a close election regression discontinuity design (RDD) to examine the effects of a MORENA win in a close election on a number of violence-related outcomes, including homicide rates and cartel presence. In order to examine this effect, I created a novel panel data set at the municipality-year level from 2015-2020, combining the panel data set from Sobrino (2020) that contains cartel indicators, with political data and homicides rate data publicly available through the Mexican government and its various agencies. The two most important findings from this paper are first, that a MORENA win leads to a general decrease in cartel presence and cartel number, and second, that this effect is reversed if MORENA was the incumbent party, where MORENA with incumbency status leads to increased cartel presence and number of cartels. To my knowledge, this paper is among the first that documents the effect of MORENA party policies in combatting cartels