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A second contribution of this project is also theoretical, and explores the links
between two literatures that have barely spoken each other: political ambition and
legislative performance. As stated repeated times, scholars in American politics have
(almost tacitly) considered this relationship as a logical extension of their main causal
mechanism. Statically ambitious legislators without many party constraints face
multiple incentives towards individualization, construction of a personal capital and
diffusion of their work in office. In this sense, political ambition and legislative
performance are heads and tails of the same coin, at the same time. Conversely, studies
of comparative settings with different frameworks and motivations from those of the
U.S House have never analyzed how anticipation of multi-level career goals shapes >
cιπτent legislative activity. One of the reasons for this apparent lack of interest may be ⅛
linked to the supposed marginal importance of legislatures in the policy making process
in presidential regimes outside the U.S. Other sources of scientific apathy might have to
do with one of the main discoveries of this dissertation for the Argentine case:
individual-level attributes matter for legislative activity, something that has been
overlooked by the literature in the area until these days. If legislator-level activity is
assumed to be irrelevant, linking ambition and bill drafting is definitely a waste of time.
After realizing that individual activity does make a difference, increasing efforts
towards understanding the motivations behind bill drafting should be seen.
However, as several Americcinists have highlighted in presentations of this
project, the theoretical question should not be "why look at bill drafting and ambition
together?", but "why have ambition and bill drafting been always analyzed separately?" Are
they not interdependent? Scholarly research in European legislatures (Doring 1995) has
explored how legislators try to submit private legislation that targets their constituents.