This article aims to contribute to the debates on the explanatory role that a political economy approach can have in the field of youth policies in Mexico and Latin America, specifically by explaining the recent adoption of an unprecedented workplace-based social policy for young people in Mexico. Several Latin American countries share similarities that go back to their similar industrialisation trajectories between the post-war period and the 1970s and the subsequent privatisation of strategic development sectors during the neoliberal period beginning in the 1980s. A political economy approach offers an account of the various institutional arrangements and educational, labour and youth policies in the region. The article draws on various existing approaches that together can constitute a proposal to bolster the study of these policies.

'Youth policy' is a developing and multidisciplinary theme of study whose central academic debates revolve around a diversity of scholarly work, ranging from the analysis of the political determinants of active labour market policies (ALMPs) in Europe (Bonoli, 2010) to the divergent configuration of national education and skills training systems (Busemeyer and Trampusch, 2012),  to the recent emergence of a myriad of 'policy devices' or 'policy innovations' focused on supporting young people amidst increasingly uncertain social and economic prospects worldwide (Jacinto, 2010).

Compared to studies focused on European countries and the global north, the Latin America region is still understudied, and its local institutional, political, and economic arrangements are still enveloped with homogenising and generalising conceptions, such as the notion of the ‘hierarchical market economy’ proposed by Schneider and Soskice (2009). At the same time, there is a recent resurgence of political economy approaches in the region that aims at inquiring into intraregional differences (Hernández López, 2017; Madariaga, 2019). In this sense, this article also seeks to contribute to this debate.

In December 2018, a newly elected left-wing government in Mexico announced the launch of a massive national workplace-based social policy for 2.3 million people between 18 and 29: 'Youth Building the Future' (JCF). In addition to paid work-based learning in all types of participating companies for up to 12 months, the policy grants beneficiaries social security. The main research question of this article is: What were the main material and ideational factors that led the Mexican government to adopt the JCF policy? To answer the question, the article draws on first-hand empirical evidence consisting of interviews with numerous policy stakeholders and an analysis of policy documents.

Theoretically, this article is informed by several currents of political economy studies, particularly the analytical framework of 'Cultural Political Economy (CPE), as developed by Jessop (2010). CPE continues in the critical tradition of social analysis that, since Marx, has understood social reality as 'conceptually mediated' (Fairclough, 2013). Its main claim is that policy adoption processes are explained by 'material' (economic, institutional, and political) and 'ideatic' or 'semiotic' (discourses and ideas) factors.

Jessop (2010) operationalised this analytical framework through the three ‘evolutionary mechanisms’ of variation, selection, and retention, where variation refers to the initial moment in which a subject area or domain is problematized in such a way that policy change is instigated; selection refers to the interpretative struggles, both of the causes and of the possible solutions that should be adopted to solve the problematized situation, and finally, retention refers to the moment of formal and legal institutionalization of a specific political solution. Not much research has applied CPE to the field of education and training, so it is still a budding field to which this article seeks to contribute.

Methodologically, this article draws mainly on an eminently qualitative study (Cervantes-Gómez, forthcoming) that was based on the analysis of semi-structured interviews with key policy informants and the analysis of primary policy documents. The study was conducted in three stages. The first comprised the analysis of the main policy documents, public debates in the media and plenary discussions between opposing political forces in the Congress that took place from September 2018 to February 2020. This analysis was essential for identifying the various discursive orientations, policy arguments and main points of conflict between multiple actors (Gasper, 1996), as well as for identifying key informants that were interviewed during the second stage of the study. The second stage consisted of conducting thirty-five interviews between November 2021 and October 2022 with actors involved in the adoption of the policy, as well as other informants considered relevant due to their knowledge of the subject. In total, we interviewed nine federal government policy stakeholders, eight actors from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) focused on youth and poverty studies, nine academics from public and private universities who work on youth policy and public policy issues, as well as nine actors from the private sector, among representatives of the organized business sector and independent experts on education and youth issues. Finally, in the third stage, a 'thematic analysis' (Terry, Hayfield, Clarke, & Braun, 2017) was carried out through the generation and iterative refinement of codes from the empirical data collected. The qualitative data analysis software NVivo 12 was employed to make sense of the data along the dimensions proposed by the CPE of variation, or of the initial problematization of politics; selection or of the discursive struggles and interpretations about the causes and possible solutions of the public problem; and that of retention, or the moment of formal institutionalization of the JCF.

The JCF policy was adopted by the Mexican government mainly as a consequence of the coming to power of a political coalition that reinterpreted longstanding structural problems that afflicted young people differently from how they had been explained and addressed by previous administrations, namely, as a matter of individual lacks of skills, education or experience, and where, consequently, the emphasis fell exclusively on the formal education system and other isolated and small-scale training programmes. By manifesting an express break with the previous development model endorsed by previous administrations portrayed as 'neoliberals', the government justified the attention of a disadvantaged population group more as a political imperative than a technical one. While the JCF has not entirely shed the jargon of 'skills' and 'training' and the aim of increasing 'employability', which are prevalent in the global trends of TVET and most likely explain the support for the policy by the business sector -given its ideological affinity with notions of supply of skills-, the JCF's policy design instead assembled an intervention that is more likely to be characterised as a 'youth policy' with an objective of social inclusion through occupation and productive activities, unprecedented in the region in its magnitude. Furthermore, the emphasis on inclusion rather than on the traditional economicist notions of impact, such as graduates' job placement or the certification of the skills obtained, was discursively justified by the country's structural characteristics, such as a highly heterogeneous structure of the labour market between regions, the high rates of informality and the predominance of micro and small firms.

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