Minorities at the gate: the legislative contribution of opposition minorities and the committee system. Evidence from Argentina

ABSTRACT

Opposition minorities are often overlooked in presidential regimes, as they seem to lack the political clout to affect legislative outcomes. In this article, I challenge this claim, proving that opposition minorities play a significant role in the amendment and approval of executive initiatives at the committee stage. Using an original dataset that records legislators’ positions on politically relevant committee reports in Argentina (1983–2017), I show that opposition legislators frequently contribute to the president’s success in committee. This collaboration increases in more denationalised political contexts and for legislators aligned with the party of the provincial executive.

KEYWORDS:

• Committee
• opposition
• president
• subnational connection
• executive-legislative relations
• denationalisation

Acknowledgements

In a previous version this article benefited from comments from Alejandro Bonvecchi, Patrícia Calca, Ernesto Calvo, Sarah Chartock, Carlos Gervasoni, Kelly McMann, Stephanie McNulty, Juan Negri, Rachel Riedl, Or Tuttnauer, Debora Yashar, and the participants in the Scholars from Emerging Countries Workshop organised by Comparative Democratization APSA section in 2019. I also appreciate the comments from the two anonymous reviewers and the research assistance from Gastón Pérez Alfaro and Gabriel Salgado.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Paula Clerici is professor at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and Universidad de Buenos Aires. Dr in Political Science (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella), MA in Social Research (University of Warwick), and BA in Political Science (Universidad de Buenos Aires). Researcher at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). Postdoctoral research visiting at University of Maryland and Otto-Friedrich Universität Bamberg. Paula’s interest are electoral studies, political coalitions, party system, executive-legislative relations, legislative studies and federalism.

Notes

1 I consider opposition here ‘as the group of legislators who do not belong to the president’s party or to any party which has membership in the president’s cabinet’ (Morgenstern et al., 2008, p. 165).

2 Legislative blocs are the units of groups of legislators in the Argentine Congress. A bloc may be equivalent to a legislative party or legislators from the same party may belong to different blocs.

3 Some exceptions are studies from Calvo and Sagarzazu (2011), Calvo (2014) and Kikuchi (2018), which provide a systematic analysis of individual attitudes towards bills in committee.

4 Although Gervasoni and Nazareno (2017) highlight that there is a tension regarding whether alignment prevails within the national party line or with the provincial party leaders.

5 There is extensive literature elaborating on the power of Argentine governors, De Luca et al., 2002; Gervasoni 2018; Gibson & Calvo, 2011; Lodola, 2009; among many others.

6 Deputies are elected for four-year terms from closed party lists using D’Hondt. One half of the lower house is renewed every two years, with every district renewing one half of its legislators (or the closest equivalent). Provinces have a minimum of five deputies according to their number of inhabitants and district magnitude ranges from two to 35 (with a median of three seats). Reelection is low: 77 per cent of a total of 1977 deputies elected between 1983 and 2015 (including alternate representatives) served only one term in office (author’s calculations).

7 ‘Many provinces (…) rely on plentiful ‘free’ fiscal resources – what I call ‘fiscal federalism rents’ – and have little to worry about in terms of the provincial opposition’ (Gervasoni 2018, p. xiv).

8 In spite of this relatively proportional distribution, there is a majoritarian party bias when a bloc controls 50 per cent of the plenary seats (it may receive up to 80 per cent of the chairs approximately) (Calvo, 2014).

9 There are different criteria to assess the importance of committees (for a broader discussion, see Gaines et al., 2019). I use here the number of executive bills referred to each one between 1983 and 2017.

10 Calvo (2014) mentions that sometimes high-profile bills are informally pushed towards key committees by the Chamber President.

11 Technically, legislators in committee do not vote a bill; they report to the floor. However, as a majority is needed to discharge a bill to the floor, every individual position counts as if one vote.

12 Lower house internal regulations do not consider the distinction between (b) and (c) (disidencia parcial and disidencia total). However, usage transformed these different stances into an informal institution.

13 Related to the Senate, Kikuchi (2018) finds that 22.5 per cent of executive bills were amended.

14 It might be possible to argue that as presidents are aware of the legislative procedures in the Chamber and the level of support on the floor, they act strategically submitting legislation approvable (Saiegh, 2009). Nevertheless, neither all the bills sent by presidents are passed nor all the ones approved are original versions. In fact, Argentine executive’s legislative success rate (61.6 per cent according to Alemán & Calvo, 2020) is lower than that of other presidents in Latin America such as Brazil (84.9 per cent), Chile (72.6 per cent) or Mexico (94.2 per cent) (Kikuchi, 2018).

15 According to Zelaznik (2014), non-relevant bills include: (a) appointment of consuls, acceptance of decorations, (b) authorisations for the president to be absent from the country, (c) authorisation of entry and exit of Argentine and foreign troops for exercises, (d) donation of real estate, (e) changes of official time, (f) holidays and non-working days, (g) location of monuments, post-mortem military promotions, and (h) international agreements. International agreements are considered under close rule, legislators are not able to amend them. Additionally, the negotiation for an international agreement typically runs during more years than the executive term. For this reason, its signature is not easily attributable to one president or another.

16 In supplementary material, Figure A shows, for comparison purposes, the share of legislators from the government party and the opposition who support the president’s initiatives in the lower house in every two-year congress. As expected, the support among government legislators is almost taken for granted. More than 97 per cent of ruling party representatives recommend that the floor enacts the bill, almost 2 per cent of them suggest changes to the original initiative and only 0.5 reject the bill in committee.

17 Descriptive statistics of all variables may be found in Table A in supplementary materials.

18 In order to check the robustness of the results, the models were also run with the indicator party system nationalisation score from Jones and Mainwaring (2003). It is also measured between 0 and 1, but conversely to Cox’s, 0 means that the party system is perfectly denationalised while 1 implies perfect nationalisation. Jones and Mainwaring’s indicator produces similar results for the six multilevel models, which may be found in the supplementary materials.

19 Although district magnitude and the distinction between metropolitan provinces and peripherals are highly relevant variables to understand subnational connection (Gervasoni 2018; Gibson & Calvo, 2011), I decided to omit them from the models to avoid collinearity with governor alignment. The provinces with low district magnitude usually correlate with peripherals or/and rentier ones and are the ones whose governors tend to align with the president, independently of which party they belong to.

20 Based on model 1, Figure B in the supplementary materials shows that the estimated coefficient for aligned governor is higher when same party as the governor’s also increases its value from 0 (no) to 1 (yes).