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Although regulatory authorities have always been a part of the institutional makeup of Mexican public administration, the idea of independent regulatory authorities was introduced only in the early 90's, when the process of economic reform was well underway. These independent regulatory authorities can be grouped into two broad categories. The first includes typical sectoral regulatory entities (e.g. energy and telecommunications). The second category comprises independent agencies created to anchor continuous horizontal reform processes, such as competition and access to information. Based upon the Mexican regulatory authorities' experience, this paper proposes a framework for the analysis of accountability mechanisms of independent regulators. An important lesson from this review is that the use of mechanisms such as access to information and regulatory impact analysis, enforced by other independent regulatory agencies, strengthen the horizontal accountability of sectoral regulatory authorities and reduces the risk of capture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]