7. Why Is Legislative Malapportionment Immaterial in Argentina?
As we have shown in Section 5, we cannot attribute the biases in the tax sharing system to
malapportionment during democratic periods. Why have changes in legislative malapportionment had no
effect on the shares of the different provinces? The model we have developed in Section 6 suggests that,
in democracies dominated by the executive branch, legislative malapportionment is not very relevant. In
Section 5, we have also shown that military governments did not reverse the distribution of federal tax
revenues among the provinces. Since military governments closed the Congress and concentrated
legislative power in their own hands, this result also deserves a more detailed explanation. Why did
biased distributions persist under non-democratic regimes? The model we have developed in Section 6
suggests that geographic representation may not be very sensitive to the type of political regime that is in
place. In this section we further explore these questions.
7.1. The Argentine Federal Budget
Although the tax sharing system is the main mechanism for the geographical distribution of revenues
among the Argentine provinces, it is not the only one. The federal government can also use its budget to
channel resources to certain districts (through infrastructure projects, for example). Thus, we cannot
theoretically exclude the possibility that legislative malapportionment affects the federal budget rather
than the shares of the provinces in the tax sharing system. However, the available evidence suggests that
this is unlikely.
As Figure 3 shows, the proportion of revenues that the tax sharing system channels to the provinces
(primary distribution) has invariably increased except on two occasions: 1967-1968 and 1981. Military governments were in power at both of these times. The proportion of revenues going to the provinces has
never decreased under a democratic government. Moreover, as Figure 3 shows, democratic periods in
which there were high levels of malapportionment (a higher Gini coefficient for inhabitants per seat) are
associated with periods in which a larger proportion of revenues went to the provinces. Thus, it seems
that the evidence does not support the hypothesis that higher levels of legislative malapportionment lead
to stronger biases in the allocation of revenues among provinces via the federal budget for the reason
that higher levels of legislative malapportionment are not associated with a larger share of revenues
staying with the federal government. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper, we conjecture that a
more detailed study of the geographical impact of the federal budget will also reveal the absence of a
causal relationship between legislative malapportionment and any bias in the geographic allocation of
revenues.
7.2. Legislator Behavior, Party Discipline and Parliamentary Coalitions 31
A necessary condition in order for changes in malapportionment to have an effect on policy outcomes is
the existence of a correlation between legislator behavior and the preferences of the constituents whom
they represent at the district level. If party discipline is strong, then the geographic origin of legislators
may not be relevant, since their party affiliation is what will matter the most.
The evidence, however, shows that legislators respond to subnational interests, although in very different
ways. Members of the U.S. Congress exhibit a great deal of autonomy in choosing whether or not to follow
the party line on many issues, as Snyder and Groseclose (2000) show. Only on national issues such as the
debt ceiling, tax policy and budget resolutions is the vote mostly partisan. On issues which usually have a
clear geographic dimension, such as transportation, public works or agriculture, the party whip wields
much less power. The main reason for such behavior may be that U.S. legislators are very responsive to
electoral incentives at the constituency level because of the uninominal nature of congressional districts.
Concerning the case of Japan, Kato (1998) analyzes the split of the Liberal Democratic Party in 1993 and
shows that legislators with local support bases tended to be part of the “rebel” group that separated from
the party at that time. The internal tensions that preceded the rupture of the other long-standing
Japanese party –the Social Democratic Party– in 1996 also had to do with legislators’ responsiveness to
local interests: as the breakup of the party was particularly unpopular among its rank and file, Diet
members who were elected by single-seat constituencies tended to side against the “rebel” group during
party debates in 1994.
Jones et al. (2002) analyze the situation in Argentina and show that the link between subnational
interests and legislators’ behavior is mediated by the fact that deputies are generally beholden to
provincial governors. Unlike the situation in the U.S., a seat in Congress is seen as a temporary stage in a
person’s political career. Indeed, most of the Argentine legislators remain in office for only one term: the
reelection rate in the Chamber of Deputies is around 20%. The careers of Argentine politicians are mostly
province-based and, as a result, legislators in Congress will tend to cater to the regional interests
espoused by local party bosses – especially governors. As Levitsky’s work (2003) has shown, this
“territorialization” of political incentives is clearly discernible in the most important party in Argentina –
the Peronist (or “Justicialista”) Party, which has governed Argentina during most of its periods of
democracy since 1945. 32
A more subtle condition that is required in order for changes in malapportionment to have a significant
effect on the pattern of policy biases is that the changes must be large enough to destabilize the majority
coalition in Congress. For example, we could attribute the key biases of the Argentine tax sharing system
to the existence of a majority congressional coalition composed of poor provinces that have won out over
the richer Buenos Aires Province and capital district. Although the changes in the degree of legislative
malapportionment that have occurred during the existence of the tax sharing system have probably not
been dramatic enough to pose a challenge to this majority coalition, it is more difficult to argue
convincingly that the observed changes in legislative malapportionment have not been large enough to at
least modify the distribution of revenues among the members of that coalition. And yet, our results show
that legislative malapportionment has had no causal impact on the shares received by the various
provinces.
7.3. The Predominance of the Executive Branch
A more compelling hypothesis to explain why legislative malapportionment does not matter is that, in
Argentina, key political decisions are the outcome of a bargaining process among executive authorities --
more specifically, between the president and the governors. In fact, Braun and Tommasi (2002)
document the fact that legislative representation of subnational entities in Argentina is relatively poor
and that the relationship between the central government and the provinces is scarcely institutionalized
at all and instead consists mainly in a direct dialogue between the national executive authority (the
president) and the provincial executives (the governors). In other words, Congress is not the locus of
bargaining and, by the time a bill reaches Congress, it has already been discussed with the governors. As a
consequence, there is no need to form a coalition to give expression to provincial interests in Congress
because the preferences of the provinces have already been taken into account.
The predominance of the Argentine executive branch can be traced back to a variety of factors. For
example, on several occasions, the Argentine Congress has delegated part of its legislative authority to
the executive branch. National legislators frequently leave their seats in order to become part of the
executive branch or to run for office at a local level, implicitly revealing their assessment of the relative
importance of a seat in Congress vis-à-vis a position in a ministry or the possibility of running for mayor.
Even in the case where a president has resigned, political power rests with the governors of the
provinces rather than with Congress. In point of fact, in 2001, during a profound economic and political 33
crisis, the president of Argentina did resign. Although, nominally, Congress was in charge of designating a
new president, the actual bargaining involved in that appointment was carried out among the governors.
As it happened, Congress temporarily selected the governor of San Luis as the president, but, in less than
a week, he fell out of favor with the other governors and was replaced by the governor of Buenos Aires.
7.4. Geographic Representativeness of the Executive Branch
The predominance of the executive branch is potentially a convincing explanation for why legislative
malapportionment does not affect the tax sharing system under democracies in Argentina. The
predominance of the executive branch cannot by itself explain why military governments have not
significantly altered the allocation of revenues among provinces, however. After all, we would tend to
expect that the powers of the executive branch under autocracies and democracies would differ in many
ways. Yet, in Argentina, the geographic representativeness of the federal executive branch does not
appear to change significantly from one political regime to the other.
In order to measure the geographic representativeness of the executive branch, we have created a
database with information on the province of birth of the main members of all the governments between
1935 and 2011.24 For democratic governments, we have gathered information referring to the president,
vice-president, minister of economic affairs