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proposals. To do so, I created one variable per province, and also one for each existing
municipality. For the provincial level, I created 24 dummy variables, each of which
equals 1 if the name of the district of interest is mentioned in the title or description of
the bill, and 0 otherwise28. For the case of the municipalities, the number of variables
equals 2.223, a quantity that keeps track of every single ever-existing municipality in
Argentina for the last 25 years29. Some additional refinements have been necessary; since
several municipalities have the same name (i.e. five are called "Hipolito Yrigoyen", "San
Pedro" and "Santa Ana"), I needed to clearly specify other conditions to allow a correct
discrimination. In as much, wording made the task complicated, as strings may be
differently specified, or may include mistakes that make it hard to be recognized by
Stata (as an example, if a district called "Saint John's" is spelled "St. John's", "St Johns",
or "Saint Johns", the program will recognize three dissimilar districts). Thus, double,
triple and quadruple checks became necessary.
The next step was to identify what legislators have had some kind of subnational
ambition, either having won or having pursued a mayoral or a gubernatorial position.
Over the basis of the two databases I created, I identified in what year a legislator ran for
mayor or governor, and in what year she won it (if she did). Doing so, I could then
verify whether it was before or after her congressional mandate. This let me also identify
the home district of every legislator that ran for mayor, in order to link the content of the
bills and the territorial target. Doing so, I also created a variable called "relative", where
I identified whether the Congressman has a tie to any territorially concentrated power.
Even though a legislator with that profile may not necessarily have the ambition of
28 State’s command strpos was extremely useful for that task
29 Municipal structure changed across time in Argentina. New districts have been created, some others have
been split into two or more, and others were merged.