66
level bills. Predicted probabilities confirm the enounced direction. For non-eomɪnittee
chairs, the relative decrease in the submission of province-based legislation is 30%, while
the rate for committee members diminishes to 30%. I let predicted probabilities vary by
party, but the expected decrease equals thirty percent in every case overall. This finding
forces a new interpretation of the role of these former provincial executives with a place
in the House. What is, ultimately, their goal and raison d'être? What do they really care
about dining their tenure? Are they really political corpses? In order to state this, the
term limits hypothesis should be checked, as a mean of verifying whether this lack of
territorial target is general or just restricted to governors that left for other reasons than
normative barriers.
As Table 5.9 shows, term limits is not a significant covariate to predict provincial
bill submission in any of the models. While hypothesis 3 expected that, given their
possible expectations to go back to the district, term limited deputies should behave
more district-oriented; it is clear that this variable does not differentiate legislators in
terms of their congressional activity. This finding casts even more doubts about the
political vitality of former provincial executives in the House. Is the Chamber definitely
a political geriatric, in that case? It is not easy to answer such a question categorically,
given the available information. What seems to be clear is that these officers' behavior is
far from reflecting what an ambitious politician should do. Another explanation might
be beyond the current analysis: former governors with political aspirations need other
kinds of resources that cannot be achieved in the Chamber of Deputies.
On the contrary, other covariates like Committee Chairmanship and the
absolute distance to the majority party median legislator (in the clustered SE model) are
negatively related to the submission of targeted legislation, as in the case of former