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politics suggest just to analyze final passage votes; an attentive observer might criticize
that the full sample could be full of irrelevant legislation that is not the core of political
conflict Rather, analyzing just public bills, or those involving most of the budget, might
give a more accurate depiction of the political process in Argentina. Once again, as
stated, no choice is perfect and free of problems; however, I still believe that looking at
the whole picture is a more accurate strategy than just analyzing an arbitrarily cut
sample of bills. What would be the impact of such a strategy on the findings of the
existing literature? Would it help solve the controversies between party-free (Ames 1994,
Samuels 2004) versus party-based (Limongi and Figueiredo 1998) behavior in the
Brazilian House? Would it alter the patterns of inter- and intra-coalition voting behavior
in Clule, in comparison to what Aleman and Saiegh (2007) found? What would be the
impact on Crisp et al's (2005) conclusions about vote-seeking behavior in ten Latin
American chambers? These questions recognize the relevance of previous findings, but
also pose challenges to conventional knowledge, more on the side of data and measures
than to the authors' substantive questions.
In terms of the contributions to the Argentina-based research, this dissertation
fits well as a bridge among some of the best existing pieces in the literature. As pointed
out in chapter 3, findings about congressional performance (Jones 1997, Mustapic 2000,
Jones and Hwang 2005, Calvo 2007, Aleman and Calvo 2008, Jones, Hwang and Micozzi
2008), political careers (Jones et al 2002) and federalism (Benton 2003, Spiller and
Tommasi 2007) have rarely been related. This study not only integrates the excellent
empirical literature about careers and legislative activity, but also includes a dimension
that was totally absent in previous research: individual-level behavior. However, as I
clarified in previous sections, the goal is not to deny that parties and leaders are central