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

来自同一政党的立法者可以创业地寻求为特定的选民服务，他们可以共同努力追求共同的纲领目标，或者更常见的是，他们可以在两者之间的连续体中的某个地方取得平衡。议员们为促进自己在选举中的生存而采取的创业行为可能包括违反众议院的政党纪律，发起以选区为重点的立法，寻求针对地区的委员会分配，以及将资源分配给地方办公室和工作人员。他们通过强调自己的个人属性(“个人选票”)寻求选票的程度对代表权是否具有特殊性或纲领性、是否将区域和狭隘的关切委托给其他级别的政府以及是否可能出现分支机构间的僵局和民主不稳定具有深远的影响。该项目衡量了四个拉丁美洲总统民主国家的立法企业家精神：阿根廷、智利、哥伦比亚和委内瑞拉。到目前为止，几乎所有关于创业的比较研究都只包含一个总统制国家的详细数据--美国。虽然比较总统制和议会制很重要，但议会制中的行政和立法部门没有独立的选举来源，这一事实极大地改变了部门间关系的性质、代表制理论和创业前景。研究人员使用在这四个国家进行实地考察期间收集的有关提名程序、选举制度和创业精神的数据来检验他们的假设。使用定量和定性的方法分析了产生的关于立法机构内部行为信息的数据库，这些方法旨在利用立法创业方面的差异，既有跨部门的，也有按时间顺序进行的。这项研究充实了一个最近开发的模型，用于解释立法者将采取创业行为的可能性，并开发了一个研究设计，用于对该模型进行实证测试。这些发现应该会增强我们对政治家制度激励的了解，并为如何明确设计总统制中特定形式的代表制、分权制和分支机构间关系提供思路。由此产生的数据库将对许多对这一主题感兴趣的学者有用。

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.