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What factors impact on the productivity of legislators? In this paper, we argue that legislative productivity depends not only on party affiliation, seniority, gender, and other contextual considerations (e.g., alignment with the executive), as previous studies have shown, but also on the connections between legislators. Our main argument is that legislators' effectiveness in getting their proposals approved by the chamber depends on their centrality in the cosponsorship network. Unlike previous studies of Latin American legislatures, which usually consider bills as the unit of analysis, we focus on legislators and their individual records. We consider individual productivity as the number of authored bills approved by the chamber in a two-year congress. To test our hypothesis, we use data from the Argentine Chamber of Deputies from 1983 to 2019. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the first year of government of Mauricio Macri, leader of the Cambiemos coalition. His victory in 2015 over the candidate of the incumbent Front for Victory marked a turning point in the country’s politics. We present the main political, social and economic events of the year and outline the fundamental positions of the new government in relation to these fields. We show the tensions of this center-right reorientation currently unfolding in Argentina, based on a vision of managerial modernization of politics and the state and controlled economic deregulation. We also explain how this project must deal with economic imbalances and social-structural conflicts, in addition to governing with a parliamentary minority and without control of most of the provincial governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes two contributions to the classical thesis in American Political Science on the existence of "two presidents", as applied to the Argentine case. Analyzing rollcall votes for the recent period, we confirm the validity of the thesis in a markedly presidential and multiparty system. Furthermore, comparing international and domestic legislative topics, we analyze which factors affect the legislative support received by the president. Using robust regressions, we find that popular approval is positively associated with the level of support that the president received for domestic but not international initiatives. The use of Necessity and Urgency Decrees, the economy's performance, the ideological polarization between the parties in Congress, and the chamber in which the initiative is submitted are all variables that affect legislative support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an alternative causal mechanism to explain why parties monitor voters. The ability to monitor voters, defined as a clientelistic party's capacity to convince voters that it can identify the candidate(s) for whom they voted, remains a core assumption in the literature. The underlying logic of the argument is that if clientelistic parties cannot monitor voters, they run the risk of voters taking the goods with one hand and voting with the other. Instead of focusing on commitment, I argue that monitoring makes clientelism work by forcing voters to publicly signal their electoral support before getting to the voting booth. Using empirical evidence from Argentina, this article shows how parties mobilize and monitor voters before elections to avoid the costs of verifying their electoral choices on an individual basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the distributive strategies of presidents in federal countries under different contexts of fiscal centralization and party system nationalization by studying the allocation of discretionary fiscal transfers to the Argentine provinces and comparing two periods in which presidents from the same political party (Peronist) operated under different contexts: one of fiscal decentralization and party system nationalization during Carlos Menem's presidencies; and another of fiscal centralization and party system denationalization during the presidencies of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The analysis shows that in both cases the distribution followed strategic considerations even when this means, in the first case, to reward the over represented provinces and, in the second, the copartisan ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new political cycle characterized the 2010-2011 period in Argentina. The death of former president Néstor Kirchner was followed by the consolidation of Cristina Kirchner as a leader in her own right, leading to an overwhelming electoral victory in late 2011. Some changes, which occurred at the institutional level, have the potential to transform the political landscape in the long term. This paper reviews the political, economic and social development of Argentina during these two years in light of the trends observed in previous years and longer-term determinants. It reviews the main institutional and policy changes of these years, and highlights the legislative process, public opinion trends, and electoral results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]