Dissertation Research: Heightened Competitiveness in a Party System Matter? Its Effect on Candidate Quality and Deputy Behavior in Democratizing Mexico

这一论文项目确定了政党体系中竞争力的提高对候选人素质和墨西哥代表行为的影响(如果有的话)。假设随着政党制度从一党主导向两党或多党转变，候选人的素质会相应提高，立法机构相对于行政机构和/或以前的主导政党的代表行为也会发生变化。“竞争力”是以相对多数选区的水平来衡量的，即每个政党的候选人从一次选举到下一次选举获得的选票数量。候选人的“质量”是根据候选人在竞选立法机构席位之前的政治经验的程度和性质来衡量的。副手行为的改变既是对选区服务量的改变，也是对主要行政部门发起的立法提出的实质性修正案的数目的改变。政党制度中不同程度的竞争如何影响候选人的质量和代表的行为是一个重要的问题，因为它直接影响到相对于行政和以前占主导地位的政党的立法自治。换句话说，政党制度的竞争力对于立法机构更充分地参与决策过程是否重要，从而影响民主的性质或民主化的进程？为了回答这些问题，对政党领导人和公职人员进行了访谈，以获得有关在选择候选人时重视先前政治经验的程度以及选民个案工作的重要性的信息。这些面谈补充并更好地解释了墨西哥众议院和联邦选举研究所图书馆的档案研究，方法是确定每一次地区一级的竞选活动花费了多少资金，并确定与上一届会议相比，行政立法代表在一届会议上提交的与宪法有关的修正案的数量。对访谈和档案研究获得的数据进行编码和比较，以确定两次选举之间的差异是否与每个政党在地区一级的选票总数差异有关。

This dissertation project determines what effects, if any, heightened competitiveness in a party system have on candidate quality and deputy behavior in Mexico. It is hypothesized that, as party systems transform from being one-party dominant to being two-party or multi-party, there is a corresponding improvement in the quality of candidates and a change in deputy behavior in the legislature vis-a-vis the executive and/or the formerly dominant party. "Competitiveness" is measured at the level of relative majority districts in terms of the number of votes received by each party's candidate from one election to the next. Candidate "quality" is measured by both the degree and nature of a candidate's political experience prior to running for a seat in the legislature. Changes in deputy behavior are operationalized as being both a change in the amount of constituency service and in the number of substantive amendments filed to major executive-sponsored legislation. How the varying degrees of competiitiveness in the party system affect both candidate quality and deputy behavior is an important question since it has direct implications for legislative autonomy vis-a-vis the executive and the formerly dominant party. In other words, does party system competitiveness matter for enabling the legislature to participate more fully in the policymaking process, and thereby affect the nature of democracy or the process of democratization? To answer these questions, party leaders and officeholders are interviewed to obtain information on the degree of importance placed on prior political experience in selecting candidates and on the importance of constituent casework. These interviews supplement and allow for better interpretation of archival research in the library of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) by determining how much money was spent on each district-level campaign, and by ascertaining the number of constituent-related amendments filed by deputies to executive-sponsored legislation in one session as compared to the previous session. Data obtained from both the interviews and the archival research are coded and compared to determine whether differences between the two elections are correlated with differences in district-level vote totals for each party.