Collaborative Research on Variation in Legislative Entrepreneurship in Presidential Systems: Data from Beyond the U.S. Case

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Legislators from the same party can entrepreneurially seek to serve particular constituencies, they can work together to pursue common programmatic goals, or they can more commonly, strike a balance somewhere along the continuum between the two. Entrepreneurial behavior by legislators to promote their own electoral survival can include breaking party discipline on the chamber floor, initiating constituency focused legislation, seeking district-targeted committee assignments, and allocating resources to local offices and staff. The extent to which they seek votes by stressing their own individual attributes (the `personal vote`) has profound consequences for whether representation will be particularistic or programmatic, whether or not regional and parochial concerns will be delegated to other levels of government, and whether or not interbranch stalemate and democratic instability are likely. This project measures legislative entrepreneurship in four Latin American presidential democracies: Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela. Until now, virtually all comparative studies of entrepreneurship have included detailed data from only one presidential system - the United States. while comparing presidential and parliamentary systems is important, the fact that the executive and legislative branches in parliamentary systems do not have independent electoral origins dramatically changes the nature of interbranch relations, theories of representation, and the prospects for entrepreneurship. The researchers test their hypotheses using data on nomination procedures, electoral systems, and entrepreneurship collected during field work stays in each of the four countries. The resulting data base of information on behavior within legislative chambers is analyzed using quantitative and qualitative methodologies designed to exploit the variance in legislative entrepreneurship both cross-sectionally and time serially. The research fleshes out a recently developed model for explaining the likelihood that legislators will behave entrepreneurially and develops a research design for testing the model empirically. The findings should enhance our knowledge of the institutional incentives of politicians and offer ideas about how to explicitly design particular forms of representation, decentralization, and interbranch relations in presidential systems. The resulting data base will be of use to numerous scholars interested in the topic.