The name is absent

18

Chapter 3: Legislative Performance in a Multi-Ievel System with Non-
Static Ambition: The Case of Argentina

How do legislators perform in office when their ambition is non-static and
subnational positions are almost necessary references? The empirical test of such a
question requires a substantive conceptualization effort. Due to the nascent state of the
literature, it is unclear how many cases can be put into the category "multi-level systems
with progressive ambition". As an additional constraint, I am interested in
understanding how these characteristics affect politics in federal designs. The reason is
straightforward: even though some unitary countries run elections to choose governors
and/or mayors; the likelihood of these positions concentrating substantive shares of
power is clearly lower than in well established federal regimes. The interaction of the
"home rule" (local original pertinence) and the "shared rule" (coexistence of different
units in a national arena) gives subnational units a significant degree of autonomy in
federal regimes¹. Even though a federal status is not a sufficient condition for
subnational strength (countries can be federal de jure, but de facto unitary²), working with
federal regimes is, nevertheless, the safest strategy to test a theory that requires
relevance of subnational political units. As specified above, it is somewhat predictable
that systems involving confidence procedures to appoint and dismiss cabinet members
create incentives for legislators' permanent reelection. Thus, working with presidential
regimes is more accurate for analyses that relax the aforementioned Mayhewian
assumption. So far, three cases do fit in the classification: Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.

¹ See Riker (1964), Elazar (1987) and Stepan (2001)

² The pre-1989 Venezuela and current Russia might be good examples. See Penfold-Becerra (2004) for the
former and Remington (2008) for the latter cases.

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