Law enforcement at the margin of the law: Information provision and support for militarization in Mexico

Democracies have turned to the militarization of public security as a primary strategy to combat organized crime. Mounting evidence demonstrates that this policy results in the escalation of violence and human rights violations. However, militarization continues to enjoy broad public support. Widespread citizen support poses a challenge to democracy as it can result in the election and empowerment of political leaders favoring militarization, enabling further human rights abuses. We propose and test an information-based theory of change in policy support. We evaluate the effects of increasing the salience of information on state armed actors’ frequent collusion with criminal organizations vis-à-vis the human consequences of militarized operations, in addition to the systematic nature of state armed actors’ unlawful behavior as reported by human rights organizations. We test our hypotheses in Mexico using an original two-wave online panel survey with a conjoint experiment embedded in the second wave. The findings show that making collusion salient reduces support for militarization, independent of the state armed actor in charge. Exposure to information about lethal violence against innocents also results in overall lower policy support, but not information on the systematic nature of abuses. Further analyses suggest that this null finding results from high tolerance for unlawful state armed actors’ behavior, as long as it is perceived to serve the purpose of fighting criminals. However, unlawful behavior that reinforces organized crime, such as collusion, effectively reduces militarization support.