The electoral connection in multi-level systems with non-static ambition: Linking political careers and legislative performance in Argentina

Abstract

Legislators who do not expect to be permanently reelected are not necessarily non-ambitious politicians. Whenever current legislators have different office goals in mind, it is likely that they try to use their available resources to further those aims. Thus, it can be expected that they bias the content of the bills they draft towards their prospective constituents. Through the analysis of 180,000 bills and an original database of candidacies in Argentina, I demonstrate that legislators who have subnational executive ambitions tend to submit more municipality-based legislation. This finding is substantive for the literature on electoral systems, political careers and representation in federal regimes; as well as the keystone towards the creation of a general theory of legislative performance in multilevel systems