The name is absent

14

that the American Congress is considered one of the strongest among those without
confidence procedures (Polsby 1968). Therefore, the U.S. might be more the exception
than the rule; the question of why is it not performing as a "typical" federal case must be
answered somewhere else. Nevertheless, departing from the American perspective has a
significant implication for the analysis of career ambition. Conceding that the federal
legislative branch is not necessarily the end of careers and, therefore, people occupying a
seat in Congress at a particular time point will not always (nor usually) seek consecutive
reelection; the predicted direction of ambition might perfectly differ, and so might the
expected activities performed by legislators during their tenure do. Thus, a theoretical
adjustment becomes necessary before in order to understand how ambition, career
paths, and legislative activities work in multilevel systems.

The Electoral Connection in Multi-Level Systems with Non-Static Ambition

As mentioned above, the coexistence of formally separate arenas of government
make multilevel systems a very interesting setting to investigate political careers. In
particular, the de facto interdependence of the different tiers makes politics likely to also
be nested across levels. The underlying structure of incentives may allocate a specific
value to each position at any of the levels of government. Thus, politicians are likely to
have their own scale of preferences over office in different moments of their careers. If
the distribution of material, symbolic and political resources in general is mostly
concentrated in the executive positions; it is reasonable that politicians prioritize these
offices to some others, even including legislative positions at the national level. In such a
scenario, would the Mayhewian framework still be valid? Once the reelection
assumption has been relaxed, the original model of the "electoral connection" becomes

<<   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   >>

More intriguing information