Committee collaboration, competing principals, and partisanship in Argentina

ABSTRACT

When will legislators assigned to the same committee cooperate with each other? In federal presidential regimes, both the President and governors demand policy answers from members of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Legislators’ preferences sometimes coincide with those of the President and the governors of their home states; on other occasions, they only align with the preferences of the President or the state governor; and, finally, at times preferences align with neither. In this paper, I analyse the committee system of a multi-party and multi-level legislature and test the partisan and territorial determinants of committee collaboration. My theory elucidates the inner workings of committee systems with competing principals and multiple parties to explain why we observe more active collaboration among supporters of the President and less active collaboration among those only aligned with the governor or with the opposition. I exemplify with the Argentine House of Representatives (1993–2017).

KEYWORDS:

• Competing principals
• party system
• legislative studies
• networks
• committees

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 A tie describes a connection between two nodes and its strength describes the probability (or the frequency) of such collaboration (Granovetter, 1973).

2 The executive’s agenda success or failure is not under scrutiny in this study.

3 Porter et al. (2013) use network analysis to investigate the networks of committee and subcommittee assignments in the United States House of Representatives.

4 Legislative blocs are the units of groups of MCs in the Argentine Congress.

5 The City of Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital, is an autonomous district with a special status, i.e., neither a province nor a municipality. For this reason, its Head of Government is neither a governor nor a mayor, although they are a combination of both figures.

6 Following Zelaznik (2014), non-relevant bills include: (a) appointment of consuls, (b) authorizations for the President to leave the country, (c) donations of real estate, (d) changes of official time, (e) introduction of federal holidays, and (f) location of monuments. I also exclude international agreements, which are considered under a closed rule, because MCs cannot amend them.

7 See Calvo (2009) for an application related to electoral studies and Alemán and Clerici (2022) for individual legislative productivity.

8 The Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) is the most used estimator to analyze network data. I have two reasons for preferring the generalized linear mixed effects model over the ERGM. First, the limitation of ERGM in this study is that it allows the analysis of one committee network at a time (in each model). In Argentina, participation in committees lasts one congress (two years) due to partial renewal in the midterm elections. This means that one network is formed every two years. As my sample considers president’s bills, there is a limited number of committees (and MCs) that debate them. And this also depends on the specific congress, since political scenarios alter the intensity of the activity in the lower house (electoral years, every other year, see a significant decrease in congress activity). As a result, it is difficult to establish a comparison. Second, since the ERGM must be run for a congress at a time, it is not possible to include the systemic controls (denationalization of the party system and fractionalization of the plenary), which are variables at the congress level. However, ERGM models in Table H in the SIF, one per congress for the 12 congresses.

9 When a formal inter-bloc is formed (Alianza, during Fernando de la Rua’s government, and Cambiemos, during the government of Mauricio Macri), I consider it to define whether two legislators belong to the same bloc.

10 It is based on Cox’s inflation indicator (1999). This is intended to capture the degree to which the national-level party system is ‘inflated’ compared to the average size of sub-national party systems. Moenius and Kasuya revisit this concept by also measuring the contribution that each sub-national unit makes to that inflation. The indicator is suitable for Argentina, whose district magnitude ranges from two to thirty-five (with a median of three seats).

11 It is reasonable to suppose that fragmentation at the national level is more likely when party systems are denationalized. Notwithstanding, it is not exactly the case in Argentina. Except for the Congress of 2009-2011, denationalization and fragmentation of larger values do not coincide.

12 I want to thank one of the reviewers for their comments suggesting that I divide the sample to show this difference.

13 As there are many statistically significant observations and coefficients, tables F and G in the SIF present the same models 1 and 2 with the sample split into two parts (each considering three congresses) with six different cuts. The sample size ranges from 7,141 to 84,235 cases: 1993–1999–1999–2017, 1993–2001–2001–2017, 1993–2003–2003–2017, 1993–2005–2005–2017, 1993–2007–2007–2017, 1993–2011–2011–2017. With some exceptions, the coefficients remain statistically significant.

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Paula Clerici

Paula Clerici Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina (CONICET), and Associate Professor of government and politics at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and the Universidad de Buenos Aires. I am Director of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Computational Social Science (iLCSS – University of Maryland) in Argentina. I hold a PhD in Political Science (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella) and MA in Social Research (University of Warwick). I was postdoctoral research visiting at University of Maryland (2017) and Otto-Friedrich Universität Bamberg (2018). I am also Chevening and Fulbright fellow. My research interests centre on the relationship between electoral competition and decision-making, with a focus on the study of political institutions, legislative behaviour, executive-legislative relations, cabinets, political coalitions, party system, and federalism. My research has appeared in Legislative Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Legislative Studies, Governance, Publius, and several Spanish-speaking journals like Revista de Ciencia Política (Santiago) y Política y Gobierno.  My personal website is https://paulaclerici.com/