41
• Congress-level: Percentage of seats of the most relevant parties, percentage
of provincial governors of the principal parties, divided government,
honeymoon years and the effective number of blocs are part of the
database.
This exhaustive data collection gave me material to test multiple assertions about
the Argentine congress. However, for the sake of the improvement of controls at the
individual-level, I decided to include the estimates of the first-dimension ideal points
derived from cosponsorship26. This should exhaust the set of covariates I might put on
the right side of my equations; and also let me generate my dependent variables in a
Correctmanner.
Career Ambition
As mentioned in Chapter 2, the origins of the most popular literature about
political ambition lie in American politics. Not only have the theoretical notions been
exported to comparative settings, but also the indicators and the approach to empirically
assess hypotheses. The almost "natural" way of dealing with careerism has been simple
and predictable for the U.S. Congress: look at the incumbent's primary, regard the
challenger party's primary and then observe the patterns of continuity or disruption in
the general election (Cox and Katz 2002). Once the sight was put over progressive
ambition, it became forceful to track people's trajectory in different offices, at different
levels and in different time points. Of course, this made things harder. Even though data
26 Estimations are reported in Aleman, Calvo, Jones and Kaplan (2009). This paper also demonstrates that
ideal points derived from roll-call analysis and cosponsorship don’t show any substantive difference for the
Argentine case.