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Chapter 8: Conclusion
This dissertation aimed to fill a theoretical gap in the literatures of political
ambition, political careers and legislative behavior in multi-level systems with
progressive ambition. As well as the detailed scope of the universe would have
predicted a relatively simple task; the complexity of the multiple interactions among
actors, goals, institutions and political arenas foresaw how difficult this enterprise
would be. Even though this project ended up being extremely time- and energy
consuming, I feel it has been worth it to solve several empirical and theoretical
questions, while raising new and more interesting questions.
The first contribution lies at the theoretical level. Throughout this dissertation, it
was asked if politicians acting in an environment with well known constraints (low
pursuit of reelection, multilevel ambition) had incentives for strategic anticipation of
further goals. As the empirical tests have demonstrated, this statement can be judged
true for the case under study. Current legislators having a subnational executive
expectation face incentives to highlight aspects of their prospective constituents in the
content of their bills, and so they do. This behavior has been particularly true in the case
of Deputies who have mayoral expectations. As Schumacher (1973) said, "Small is
beautiful", and that is the way these legislators seem to think at the moment of writing
legislation. By targeting municipalities, ambitious politicians try to maximize their
(relatively scarce) available resources associated with their office, and expect to improve
their future perspectives. In sum, following rational choice statements, ambitious
legislators have been doing tire right filings, considering their preferences over
outcomes.