Pre-commitment and coalitions in the Mexico City Constituent Assembly

Abstract

How can constituted powers bind constituent power? Under what conditions can a constituent assembly limited in its powers to restrict other actors expand the subnational constitutional sphere? This paper takes the Constituent Assembly of Mexico City as a case study to show the actors' logic of pre-commitment, in the form of a nested game (Tsebelis, 1990; Schedler, 2003) in which the constituted powers at the national level accepted holding a subnational Constituent Assembly, designing the rules for convening and selecting the members of the assembly as well as limiting its decision-making autonomy, while the ruling party in Mexico City supported the initiative of constitutional reforms that were of interest to the federal government. In the constituent process, despite these ties, the actors expanded the subnational constitutional space by signing agreements and forming coalitions to pass a constitution that reflected a set of fundamental rights and provisions underpinning the political organization of the capital.