The name is absent

60

as a strategy to bypass the low expectations of bill passage³⁴. As shown in Aleman and
Calvo (2008), members of majority party are more Hkely to have bills passed. Thus,
members of parties in the opposition might also increase the chances of submitting
local legislation.

5.4: The farther away is a legislator from the majority party median ideal point, the
higher the chances of submitting loca∏y-based legislation

Something similar can be thought about Committee Chairs. As Aleman (2006) and
Aleman and Calvo (2008) find, agenda controls affect the probability that a bill reaches
the floor, and therefore that it is passed. If chances of passage might depress the rate of
submission, Committee chairmanship might also be negatively related to the chances of
writing bills.

5.5: Committee Chairs are less likely to submit locally-based legislation

Data and Estimations

In order to empirically assess the validity of the mentioned hypotheses, I
run several statistical models. As explained in Chapter 4,1 have gathered information at
the bill, legislator and provincial level, where each observation is a bill i submitted by a
legislator j at time t. This legislator belongs to the province k, which has its own
particular characteristics. Over that basis, my dependent variable captures whether a
submitted bill involves a provincial or a municipal target. For the municipal hypothesis,
the variable equals "1" if a XnunicipaHty of the sponsor's province is mentioned in the
content of the bi∏, and "0" otherwise³⁵. For the governorship-related hypotheses, the

³⁴ As it can be remembered from Chapter 3, the overall chances of passage are 30%.

³⁵1 already discussed the pros and cons of this strategy in Chapter 4.

<<   70   71   72   73   74   75   76   >>

More intriguing information