  Corruption has a significant impact on economic growth, democracy, and
inequality. It has severe consequences at the human level are incalculable.
Public procurement, where public resources are used to purchase goods or
services from the private sector, are particularly susceptible to corrupt
practices. However, government turnover may bring significant changes in the
way public contracting is done, and thus, in the levels and types of corruption
involved in public procurement. In this respect, M\'exico lived a historical
government transition in 2018, with the new government promising a crackdown on
corruption. In this work, we analyze data from more than 1.5 million contracts
corresponding from 2013 to 2020, to study to what extent this change of
government affected the characteristics of public contracting, and we try to
determine whether these changes affect how corruption takes place. To do this,
we propose a statistical framework to compare the characteristics of the
contracting practices within each administration, separating the contracts in
different classes depending on whether or not they were made with companies
that have now been identified as being involved in corrupt practices. We find
that while the amount of resources spent with companies that turned out to be
corrupt has decreased substantially, many of the patterns followed to contract
these companies were maintained, and some of those in which changes did occur,
are suggestive of a larger risk of corruption.
