107
If such a behavior is visible in strongly party-based political regimes like parliamentary
countries, why should it not also be characteristic of legislators in presidential systems?
This was the question and the answer is "they do", even in environments that would not
predict its existence, such as the Argentine case. Nested analysis of drafted legislation
and career goals are also likely to contribute to the advancement of studies on political
recruitment, patterns of cabinet composition, agenda control and responsiveness, among
others. Representative of this research line is the recent top-notch project led by
Meserve, Pemstein and Bemhard (2009), where they collected information on the
backgrounds of every member of the European Parliament. They explicitly discuss
parties' nomination strategies and individual-level predictors of getting a regional seat;
and will extend their analysis to bill drafting and career decisions in the next months.
Similar perspectives are likely to emerge for more comparable cases of multilevel
systems such as the Mexican46 case.
The third theoretical contribution of this project has to do with the expected
effects of electoral systems. Even though the mayor theoretical findings of the literature
have remained untouched (i.e. the effects of closed Hsts and proportional representation
over legislators' degrees of freedom), this project highHghts how important the federal
dimension can be. Systems including most of the predictors of no individual-level
activity might fail accounting for how mixed incentives from territorial bases of support
can affect legislators' behavior. Parties can matter in many ways, including the
prosecution of further offices. However, whenever loyalty and maintenance of bases of
support struggle, predictions made at the institutional level can be flawed, and
46 As discussed with Joy Langston and Javier Aparicio, a replication of this analysis for the Mexican case is
almost a must-do that might become subject of collaborative research in the short future.
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