Eduardo Alemán

Comparing Cosponsorship and Roll-Call Ideal Points

We use bill cosponsorship and roll-call vote data to compare legislators’ revealed preferences in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Argentine Chamber of Deputies. We estimate ideal points from bill cosponsorship data using principal-component analysis on an agreement matrix that included information on all bills introduced in the U.S. House (1973–2000) and Argentine Chamber (1983–2002). The ideal-point estimates of legislators’ revealed preferences based on cosponsorship data strongly correlate with similar estimates derived from roll-call vote data. Also, cosponsorship activity in the U.S. House has lower dimensionality than cosponsorship has in the Argentine Chamber. We explain this lower discrimination as a function of individual- and district-level factors in both countries. The comparative analysis of legislative voting behavior has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in the last decade (Carey 2006; Morgenstern 2004; Sieberer 2006). New statistical techniques and the greater availability of data now allow researchers to map legislative coalitions, explore party discipline, and explain political realignments in multiparty systems (see, for examples, Aleman and Saiegh 2007; Amorim Neto, Cox, and McCubbins 2003; Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers 2004; Desposato 2005; Haspel, Remington, and Smith 1998; Hix, Noury, and Roland 2006; Hug and Schulz 2007; Jones and Hwang 2005a; Londregan 2000; Morgenstern 2004; Poole 2005; and Rosenthal and Voeten 2004). Efforts to understand voting behavior in legislatures across Europe and Latin America not only expand our knowledge about lawmaking and legislative parties, but also promise to shed new light on the forces that shape legislators’ preferences within different institutional contexts.

Institutions and the Legislative Success of 'Strong' Presidents: An Analysis of Government Bills in Chile *

This paper examines the approval of government bills in Chile, evaluating the effect of presidential prerogatives and policy substance, and considering both bill-specific and contextual effects. The results show that presidential prerogatives over financial policy, as well as the ability to affect the congressional agenda through urgent bill scheduling, significantly influence government bill approval. As expected, government success is enhanced during the honeymoon period. However, changes in public approval of the president do not appear to exert a significant effect on the passage of presidential bills.

Unified Government, Bill Approval, and the Legislative Weight of the President

This article proposes a new approach to measuring the legislative weight of the president and Congress based on the approval of each actor’s legislative agenda. The authors focus on presidential systems where presidents possess both formal authority to introduce their own bills and a variety of prerogatives to influence the passage of legislation. The authors argue that the legislative weight of the president varies over time in response to contextual political variables. After devising a general model to measure changes in the legislative weight of the president vis-à-vis Congress, the authors empirically test their propositions using data from Argentina. The results indicate that the policy and productivity weights of the president actually increase in the absence of unified government.

Explaining Policy Ties in Presidential Congresses: A Network Analysis of Bill Initiation Data

Policy networks formed by co-authoring and co-sponsoring bills reflect one of the most important types of connection legislators develop while in office. We expect that in presidential countries, the probability of a tie between two legislators should be influenced by partisan membership, territorial linkages and the policy areas in which they develop expertise. Given the complex nature of relational data and the particular characteristics of bill initiation networks, we propose a new approach – bootstrapping an exponential graph model using augmented data reflective of the frequency of ties – to address the challenges of thinning dense networks.

Institutions, Political Conflict and the Cohesion of Policy Networks in the Chilean Congress, 1961–2006

This paper focuses on congressional politics in Chile before and after the 1973 coup. It challenges a common perspective that sees the congressional decay of the early 1970s as being caused by stringent limits on particularistic bills and by presidents with wide-ranging formal prerogatives. It presents an alternative argument that focuses on electoral competition and ideological radicalisation, derives testable implications, and provides the first empirical comparison of legislative behaviour before and after the 1973 coup. The evidence, which centres on the analysis of policy networks derived from the joint sponsorship of legislation, appears incompatible with the implications of the conventional argument.

Policy Positions in the Chilean Senate: An Analysis of Coauthorship and Roll Call Data

This paper examines the policy positions of Chilean senators. The empirical analysis focuses on two different legislative activities: voting and coauthoring bills. The roll call analysis evaluates the degree to which coalitions act as cohesive policy teams on the floor of Congress, whether parties’ positions match conventional ideological rankings, and the dimensionality of voting decisions. The coauthorship analysis provides alternative ideal points to examine similar questions. The findings of the voting analysis reveal a rather unidimensional world with two distinct clusters matching coalitional affiliation, while the analysis of coauthorship illuminates a more complex pattern of associations. Neither roll call votes nor coauthorship patterns, however, reveal substantive fissures within the governing coalition. In comparison, the opposition coalition appears more divided along partisan lines.

Political realignment and democratic breakdown in Argentina, 1916–1930:

This article revisits one historical event that has been repeatedly discussed in the literature on democratic breakdown: the rise and fall of Argentine democracy between 1916 and 1930. First, we demonstrate why the claim that demands for drastic redistribution led to democratic breakdown is not a convincing explanation for the 1930 coup. Instead, we contend that the coup was the product of a polarizing political realignment that led to a legitimacy crisis. We evaluate this argument using estimates of Argentine legislators’ latent preferences (ideal points) between 1916 and 1930. Our roll-call data analysis suggests that disputes over socio-economic issues did not precipitate the breakdown of the regime. What mattered was the allocation of political power. These findings support the view that stable democracy requires that all major groups in society have a sufficiently large chance of being in power.

The hidden electoral connection: analysing parliamentary questions in the Chilean Congress

ABSTRACT Legislators in presidential countries use a variety of mechanisms to advance their electoral careers and connect with relevant constituents. The most frequently studied activities are bill initiation, co-sponsoring, and legislative speeches. In this paper, the authors examine legislators’ information requests (i.e. parliamentary questions) to the government, which have been studied in some parliamentary countries but remain largely unscrutinised in presidential countries. The authors focus on the case of Chile – where strong and cohesive national parties coexist with electoral incentives that emphasise the personal vote – to examine the links between party responsiveness and legislators’ efforts to connect with their electoral constituencies. Making use of a new database of parliamentary questions and a comprehensive sample of geographical references, the authors examine how legislators use this mechanism to forge connections with voters, and find that targeted activities tend to increase as a function of electoral insecurity and progressive ambition.

Partidos Políticos y Coaliciones de Gobierno en las Américas

This paper focuses on the coalition formation process in presidential systems. It shows that institutions and party positions influence the formation of government coalitions. It argues that presidents will tend to include in their cabinets parties that are politically close to their own policy positions, and will be more inclined to do so when Congress is relatively strong and made up of legislators with significant oversight authority. We corroborate our arguments with data from 13 countries with presidential systems in the Americas.