Juan Pablo Micozzi

Alliance for Progress? Multilevel Ambition and Patterns of Cosponsorship in the Argentine House:

How does political ambition affect strategies of cooperation in Congress? What activities do legislators develop with their peers to maximize their career goals? One of the main collaborative activities in a legislature, cosponsorship, has been widely analyzed in the literature as a position taking device. However, most findings have been restricted to environments where ambition is static (i.e., legislators pursuing permanent reelection), which restricts de facto the variety of causes and implications of legislative cooperation. I analyze patterns of cosponsorship as a function of ambition in a multilevel setting where legislators praise subnational executive positions more than a seat in the House. Through the analysis of about 48,000 bills introduced in the Argentine Congress between 1983 and 2007 and the development of a map of political careers, I follow a social networks approach to unfold different patterns of legislative cooperation. Findings show that patterns of cooperation among prospective gubernatorial candidates are strongly positive, while similar effects are not observed at the municipal level.

From House to Home: Strategic Bill Drafting in Multilevel Systems with Non-static Ambition

How do legislators behave in systems where pursuit of re-election is not the rule, and ambition is channelled through multiple levels of government? Is their legislative behaviour biased towards their immediate career goals? In this paper, the Argentine case is analysed in order to explore the link between political ambition and legislative performance in a multilevel setting where politicians have subnational executive positions as priorities, rather than stable legislative careerism. The piece demonstrates that legislators seeking mayoral positions tend to submit more district-level legislation than their peers. This finding contributes to the knowledge of strategic behaviour in multilevel settings, and provides non-US-based evidence regarding the use of non-roll call position-taking devices.

An empirical stochastic model of Argentina's Impossible Game (1955-1966)

Argentine politics from 1955 to 1966 was characterized by the conflict between the Peronists and the anti-Peronists. While each camp could veto the other’s project, neither could advance their own agenda. In his canonical interpretation, O’Donnell (Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism. Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1973) concluded that party democracy during this era was tantamount to an ‘impossible game.’ While we recognize the significance of O’Donnell’s analysis, we believe that it presents a number of problems. To address its main shortcomings we consider a spatial model that emphasizes the importance of voters’ judgments about the characteristics of party leaders. We recover the positions of Argentine parties using a mixed logit stochastic model and an original dataset of recorded votes in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies during this era. Our results suggest that the electoral logic forced the Peronist party to adopt relatively radical positions away from the center in order to maximize its support. In turn, non-Peronist parties had little incentive to seek the support of moderate, and thus ‘unrepresented,’ Peronist voters by locating themselves at the electoral mean. In particular, valence differences associated with Peronism prevented larger parties from converging toward the center. We thus conjecture that the rules of the impossible game were a constraint imposed by the populace on Argentine political elites rather than a choice made by the latter behind the people’s back.

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.