Unveiling the Features of a Regulatory System: The Institutional Grammar of Tobacco Legislation in Mexico

The United Nations will host a drug policy summit in 2016. This will be a good forum to evaluate the effectiveness of existing legal frameworks. The institutional grammar tool can help with such evaluation. This article uses the tool to analyze the inherent features of tobacco regulations in Mexico. The analysis shows that the legal framework seeks to curb consumption with a combination of information and choice rules, and administrative penalties. As the analysis reveals, the usefulness of the method depends upon the availability of a solid theory that allows one to link rule features and the behavior they expect to induce.