48
labor or agricultural unions), or simply belong to the City of Buenos Aires30. Thus, it is
complicated to attach a specific legislator that has not run for a subnational spot to a
particular municipality. Different sources such as newspapers, internet, speeches or
campaign activities might serve as proxies; however, the reliability of the information is,
at least, поп-systematic, and it becomes harder to get as legislators' terms have taken
place longer before. I attempted to follow this strategy with the Province of Buenos
Aires, and about 30% of the sample remained blank. This province is the biggest and
also the one where most newspapers and media coverage exist. Thinking on gathering
this information in smaller, less urban and poorer districts seem to bring even less
substantial results.
In as much, the coexistence of reliable information with other derived from
diffuse sources is likely to add some kind of systematic noise. One alternative to that
might be working only with those legislators that have πm for a subnational position.
However, this dependent variable-based choice would seriously bias the sample (King,
Keohane and Verba 1994). Doing so, I would not be able to capture the expected effect of
non-candidacy over legislative submission. Thus, the most feasible alternative I found
was to make a strong assumption. Given that I identified whether a municipality is
targeted in a bill, and I also know to that province this municipality belongs to; I coded
the variable with a 1 if it mentioned a municipality of the province of the bill's sponsor.
The strong assumption made is that targets to different municipalities of the province
are normally distributed around the mean, which is where the home municipality is
30 The City ofBuenos Aires used to be a federal district. Even though it does not have a full provincial
status, it gained autonomy in 1996 and is now closer to a province than to a municipality. Nevertheless, it
does not have any municipal structure yet. That does not mean that legislators from the City ofBuenos
Aires do not do territorial work in the neighborhoods; however, for the goals of this project, it is technically
impossible to link them with a particular territorial ιmit.