The name is absent

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Chapter 7: How Bill Drafting affects Success

Making Bills Count

Bill drafting is one of the easiest ways to contribute to the creation of a political
capital in Argentina. Legislators (especially prospective mayoral candidates) use projects
as devices to generate ties with voters and signal to party leaders that they are relevant
actors. Following a rational choice perspective, an implication of this is that bill drafting
should contribute to legislators' electoral success. If legislators pursuing a subnational
position have strategically proposed legislation period after period, should success not
be a frequent output? Otherwise, why would congressmen do it?

Despite that this logic sounds compelling, there are some counterintuitive issues
at the stage of unfolding the causal mechanism. It is true that bill submission needs to
involve some expected utility. However, it is not easy to assess what the impact of that
activity is. If such a question becomes a whole empirical and methodological challenge
for a social scientist; it is less clear how a single politician with other priorities would
recognize and evaluate that influence. Legislators will hardly take time to observe how
many local bills their colleagues have sent in the past and how those bills have affected
their success in the electoral race. Such a calculation might be the norm in an
environment where bill drafting implies large investments; yet, as mentioned, writing
bills does not involve substantial costs. Thus, mere expectations (rather than evidence of
concrete revenues) about the impact of bills should be persuasive enough for legislators'
to strategically introduce legislation. Nonetheless, behavior is not fully dissociated from
expectations of success. If mere inflation of locally-targeted pieces mechanically
provided high revenues, almost every single legislator should be tempted to author

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