When Do Legislators Become Entrepreneurs? Political Opportunity for Setting Pro-Trans Agenda

In Mexico, trans-related legislation has been introduced across multiple Mexican states from 2000 to 2025. What political conditions explain the variation in the timing of the presentation of pro-trans legislative initiatives across Mexican states? This article examines the introduction of pro-trans legislative initiatives through an Event History Analysis grounded in the Political Opportunity Structure Theory (POS) framework, with the aim of identifying the political conditions that facilitated or delayed the presentation of such initiatives. First, to analyze structural political opportunity, I conduct a longitudinal analysis using a Cox proportional hazards regression model, in which each state-year constitutes the unit of analysis. Second, to understand political opportunity as perceived by political entrepreneurs, I employ Firth logistic regression using legislator characteristics as the treatment group. The results indicate that trans legislation in Mexico is not primarily explained by structural opportunities such as elections, party alternation, or elite divisions, but rather by shared political opportunities from the LGBT coalition. In the case of political entrepreneurs, they tend to be plurinominal legislators affiliated with pro-LGBT parties, operating within legislative majorities while remaining in opposition to the executive branch. The results provide novel information on how the context of proportional representation deputies motivates them to promote certain agendas; furthermore, these findings reinforce the argument that (1) political entrepreneurs seek to minimize risks and maximize opportunities, (2) perceived political opportunity is more consequential for political entrepreneurship than structural political chance, and (3) POS is a useful framework for explaining agenda setting agency in issue-specific policy domains.