The name is absent

39

have dealt with variation in the kinds of legislation submitted. Taylor-Robinson and
Diaz's (1999) foundational piece verifies that Honduran legislators do not submit
particularistic bills to target constituents; rather, this activity is mostly performed by the
president. This work entails a substantive contribution to the empirical analysis of
legislative performance in presidential regimes, as the authors coded about 2.000 bills
over the basis of the level of aggregation and effect of the proposal. Thereafter, different
pieces have distinguished among kinds of bills. Crisp et al. (2004) distinguish between
targetable and non-targetable bills to verify the effects of the personal vote in ten Latin
American Chambers. Molinas, Perez Linan and Saiegh (2004) studied the different
chances of passage depending on the bill's intent and scope. Mejia-Acosta, Perez Linan ⅛
and Saiegh (2006) have analyzed the effects of different electoral rules over the
submission of particularistic bills in Paraguay and Ecuador, differentiating proposals by
type of public policy and policy target. More recently, Gamm and Kousser (2007) have
created a database of 170.000 bills introduced in American State legislatures and
distinguished them among special (local-particular), general local and statewide bills.

For this research project, the strategy I chose to deal with legislative production
is similar to those of the aforementioned articles, but adding an innovation: rather than
classifying the bills by their scope and aggregation²³; I am interested in capturing the
territorial destination of the content of the bill. In particular, I am not just trying to
disentangle whether a single piece targets a province or a municipality. Rather, I will
recognize what municipality (or municipalities) and/or what province (or provinces)
are being mentioned in the content of a legislative project. This strategy demands huge
efforts and seems extremely time consuming, but it is the most reliable approach I

²³1 already conducted that strategy in Micozzi (2006)

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