Ernesto Calvo

Federalism and Low-Maintenance Constituencies: Territorial Dimensions of Economic Reform in Argentina

How does the territorial distribution of political and economic resources within national polities influence politics and policy making? This article examines the electoral dynamics of market reform in Argentina between 1989 and 1995. It provides insights into the way that the distribution of economic and institutional resources in federal systems shapes policy making and coalition building options for reformist governments. The electoral viability of the governing Peronist Party during the economic reform period was facilitated by the regional phasing of the costs of market reform. Structural reforms were concentrated primarily on economically developed regions of the country, while public spending and patronage in economically marginal but politically overrepresented regions sustained support for the governing party. Statistical analyses contrast patterns of spending and public sector employment in “metropolitan” and “peripheral” regions of the country during the reform period, as well as the social bases of electoral support in those regions. A conceptual distinction between “high-maintenance” and “low-maintenance” constituencies is also introduced to shed light on the dynamics of patronage spending in contexts of market reform.

The Responsive Legislature: Public Opinion and Law Making in a Highly Disciplined Legislature

This article analyses how institutional and contextual factors explain the approval of presidential initiatives – presidential legislative success – in highly disciplined and cartelized assemblies. Of particular importance is to test whether public opinion, the electoral cycle and the use of different institutional rules affect the approval of presidential initiatives in Congress. Using a multilevel Bayesian model of legislative success, I model bill approval rates at individual and aggregate levels. This strategy is extremely flexible, allowing us to disentangle the different institutional and contextual factors that determine the approval of presidential initiatives in the Argentine Congress.

When Parties Meet Voters Assessing Political Linkages Through Partisan Networks and Distributive Expectations in Argentina and Chile

This article provides a new comparative methodology for the study of party–voter linkages from the perspective of voters, where the critical question that distinguishes clientelistic from programmatic parties is access to publicly provided benefits. In the former case, partisan networks mediate access to goods. In the latter, beneficiaries are defined by policy and access is independent from partisan distribution networks. We show that these different access mechanisms shape voters’ distributive expectations and the nature of their linkages to political parties by developing a unique methodology to measure party networks. We test it using original survey data from Argentina and Chile and show variation both across and within countries on party–voter linkages based on differential access to benefits and parties’ organizational capacity.

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.

The Governor's Backyard: A Seat-Vote Model of Electoral Reform for Subnational Multiparty Races

Evaluating the fairness of electoral reforms is a critical requirement for electoral accountability in any democracy. There is, however, no research measuring the expected seat benefit for incumbent reformers in newly democratized countries. Much of this delay is due to the technical difficulties of generalizing previous seat-vote models to multiparty races, a problem that has limited both subnational and cross-national comparisons of electoral regime change. Using a multilevel Bayesian model we solve this analytical problem and produce comparable estimates of partisan bias and majoritarian bias across the Argentine provinces. Our model estimates the effect of reforms across many electoral regimes and can be applied to comparative analyses of electoral reforms within and across countries. In the particular case of Argentina, we show large seat premiums for incumbent parties initiating electoral reforms.

The Local Voter: A Geographically Weighted Approach to Ecological Inference

expressed in the spatial structure of much ecological data. In this article we propose a Geographically Weighted Regression approach (GWR) for solving problems of spatial aggregation bias and spatial autocorrelation that affect all known methods of ecological inference. The estimation process is theoretically intuitive and computationally simple, showing that a wellspecified GWR approach to Goodman and King’s Ecological Inference methods may result in unbiased and consistent local estimates of ecological data that exhibit extreme spatial heterogeneity.

The Competitive Road to Proportional Representation: Partisan Biases and Electoral Regime Change under Increasing Party Competition

One of the most noteworthy political regularities in the early twentieth century was the shift away from majoritarian electoral rules in Western Europe. The conventional wisdom suggests that proportional representation (pr ) was introduced by elites who believed that under the existing majoritarian rules (simple plurality, block-vote, two-ballot rules) they would soon lose power to rapidly growing socialist parties. But this does not explain why many electoral reforms were carried out in countries with weak or nonexistent socialist parties. The author shows that increasing the number of parties distorts the seat-vote properties of electoral rules to a larger degree than previously anticipated. Under increasing party competition, electoral regimes display larger partisan biases than those observed in two-party races and crowd out minority parties that have territorially dispersed constituencies in favor of minority parties that have territorially concentrated constituencies. Using a dynamic Bayesian model for seats and votes, the author measures the partisan biases brought about by the expansion of voting rights in the late nineteenth century to explain the drive to reform majoritarian electoral systems.

Ultimas imagenes antes del naufragio: las elecciones del 2001 en la Argentina

Resumen: Las elecciones de octubre del 2001 constituyen, sin duda, una coyuntura clave para interpretar el actual proceso de reestructuracion del sistema de partidos en la Argentina. Por primera vez en la historia, y sin el Peronismo proscrito, los dos partidos mayoritarios obtuvieron menos de la mitad de los votos validos emitidos y, ademas, el voto blanco, el voto nulo y el voto por terceras fuerzas acumularon el 56% de las preferencias ciudadanas. Uno de los elementos fundamentales para la interpretacion de este fenomeno es la estimacion correcta de la procedencia partidaria de los votos que lo construyeron. En este articulo se estiman las transferencias de votos producidas desde las fuerzas politicas mayoritarias de 1999 hacia el “voto protesta” y las terceras fuerzas en el 2001. Los resultados, obtenidos mediante la aplicacion de tres modelos distintos de inferencia ecologica (Goodman, EI y GWR-EI), muestran diferencias significativas entre los partidos politicos analizados. En este sentido, la mayor transferencia de votos Aliancistas hacia terceras fuerzas contrasta con las moderadas transferencias al voto blanco observadas desde el Peronismo o la importante transferencia de Accion por la Republica hacia el voto nulo. Este estudio de transferencias del voto 1999-2001 permite observar los realineamientos de preferencias de los votantes y explicar las significativas diferencias geografico-partidarias que acompanan la crisis y reestructuracion del sistema politico argentino.

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.