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before reaching the national arena6. Elected offices in Argentina are reached through
parties, which have the monopoly of candidacies7. Even though politicians have not
always pursued careers within the same party, they need to be enrolled in a party at
each stage. Parties choose candidates, run internal elections, organize factions, make
collective decisions, fire (or later forgive) cheaters and approve alliances. As mentioned,
most of these intraparty activities take place at the provincial level. As a consequence of
the almost necessary province-level political activity required to develop a typical
career, national level politics is profoundly affected by subnational forces in Argentina.
The Theoretical Puzzle
As the specialized literature demonstrated, subnational political strength is
connected with legislative dynamics at the federal level. Candidate selection
mechanisms are partisan but take place at the provincial level for different elected
positions (De Luca & al. 2002, Jones 2008). Since subnational actors (i.e. governors or
local bosses) generally determine legislators' futures, current federal representatives
should be responsive to their leaders in equilibrium. Jones (1997), Morgenstem (2004)
and Jones, Hwang and Micozzi (2009) point out that discipline and party unity are high
in the House. Jones and Hwang (2005) find that provincial party machines delegate
power in the leadership of the Chamber of Deputies to get their policies passed; implicit
to this is the presence of strict party discipline, enforced both by the majority party
6 Jones (2002) shows that provincial deputy is the most common category help by politicians before getting
a seat in the Federal House
7 Recently, well-known outsiders (i.e. technocrats, social leaders or soccer club presidents) have created
their own parties to run for elective positions. Nevertheless, this tendency is more typical of the City of
Buenos Aires than representative of the whole country. Very popular outsiders decided to join already
existing parties and developed national careers within those (i.e. Daniel Scioli, Ramon Ortega, Domingo
Cavallo or Carlos Reutemann)