The name is absent

40

figured out to deal with my research question. Once I have got that information, I will be
able to recognize whether any legislator with territorial ambition has increased the
delivery of bills targeting her prospective constituency²⁴.

In order to discriminate these data, I had to gather the information about the
bills. Fortunately, the complete records of legislative submission are publicly available in
the webpage of the Argentine Chamber of Deputies (www.hcdn.gov.ar). I was able to
gather data of each of the 178.119 bills introduced in the House or the Senate between
December 18^th and October 9^th 2007, which made it possible to work with the most
complete existing database of the Argentine Congress²⁵. Each observation (a bill) has
information at different levels:

• Bill-level: it includes the date of submission, final status (stacked in
Committees, half-sanction, withdrawn, rejected, or passed), date of
passage (if approved) number of committees (House and Senate), number
of sponsors, and also the title and description of the content.

• Legislator-level: information about the name, party membership, province,
tenure, committee membership, committee chairmanship, membership to
the president's party, the majority and/or her province's governor party,
and Chamber's authority position are included

• Province-level: District magnitude for federal Deputies and Provincial
Deputies, the effective number of competing parties for both categories,
and information about provincial electoral systems are incorporated.

²⁴ Hiis strategy has some points in common with Carey’s (1996) strategy to uncover legislators’ bailiwicks
in Costa Rica. However, the scope of my sample is clearly much bigger than the partidas especiales he
analyzes.

²⁵ Emesto Calvo deserves substantial credit for the creation of this database.

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