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Chapter 6: How Further Career Ambitions affect Legislative
Performance
TheFuturebeginsToday
In the previous chapter, I analyzed the effects of subnational executive career
backgrounds over legislative behavior. As theoretically expected, former mayors tend to
act defensively, submitting additional amounts of legislation that target past municipal
constituents. The causal mechanism posits that legislators tend to anticipate their future
perspectives by keeping their home district's voters symbolically fed. For that analysis,
present behavior is a function of the past. However, the past is undoubtedly related with
immediate future. Non-ambitious politicians would hardly create systematic biases ⅛
towards any territorial group, unless their goals exceeded political careers37. Whenever
politicians have further expectations, and those involve some kind of territorial
component, why shouldn't they try to use legislation on their favor?
Putting an eye over prospective constituents seems an almost logical step before
entering an electoral race. If, as pointed out in Chapter 3, introducing legislation is not
costly in Argentina and it can be useful for that goal; legislators might try to take
advantage of one of the best available resources during their congressional tenure. Thus,
legislators with further subnational ambition should bias legislation towards their future
voters. The causal mechanism is slightly different from the one explained in chapter 5.
Specifically, legislators are not trying to keep their past electoral support; rather, they are
trying to create it. This does not imply the assumption that every legislator is in a tabula
37 Remington (2008) highlights that Russian deputies have discrete ambition, and all they want to do is to
be rewarded by the interest groups they tend to benefit with legislation. Even in such an environment,
assuming that IIGGs are not territorially concentrated, there should not be any need of care about local
preferences.
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