Eduardo Alemán

This study analyzes direct lobbying in the Chilean Congress, contributing to the debate over which legislators are targeted by interest groups. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset constructed from legally mandated records of lobbying meetings, we test theoretical implications predominantly derived from the US context within a different presidential democracy. The focus is on the legislative targets of business and labor groups. The results reveal a marked preference for lobbying allies, aligning with recent theories of information transmission and legislative subsidies. This pattern holds true for both business and labor groups and highlights the significance of ideological alignment for legislative lobbying in Chile. Additionally, the study finds that legislators with influential positions, such as those on key committees or centrally located in the bill collaboration network, are more frequently targeted. This research provides key insights into the dynamics of legislative lobbying in a non-US context, underscoring the generalizability of established theoretical frameworks.

When submitted to popular ratification, new constitutions tend to be approved. Chilean voters, however, rejected the proposal put forward by the country’s Constitutional Council in 2023. This article examines the reasons for this outcome. Leveraging an original conjoint experiment exploring voter preferences across four policy areas, we demonstrate that most voters disfavored a proposed clause protecting unborn life, which would have likely restricted access to abortion. Despite general support for other provisions in the draft, opposition to the abortion clause proved pivotal. Our analysis underscores the risks of partisan constitutional proposals dependent on the median voter for approval and highlights the importance of abortion as a mobilizing issue in contemporary democracies. The study also suggests that right-wing drafters miscalculated voter support, even as moderate members attempted to amend the controversial clause, showcasing the limitations of compromise-inducing rules when one ideological bloc controls the drafting process.

This article examines the effect of female bill authorship on bill approval. The analysis focuses on the Turkish Parliament between 2002 and 2015. During this time, the Islamic Justice and Development Party controlled the country’s government and a parliamentary majority, and gender issues became central to political discourse. Using a novel data set of content-coded private members’ bills, we evaluate whether gender affected bill approval. The analysis sheds light on gender discrimination, and the impact women MPs have on the corpus of laws that govern the country. The results reveal that bills initiated by women did not receive a similar treatment to those initiated by men. All else equal, these bills were less likely to become law.

This article examines the effects of committee specialization and district characteristics on speech participation by topic and congressional forum. It argues that committee specialization should increase speech participation during legislative debates, while district characteristics should affect the likelihood of speech participation in non-lawmaking forums. To examine these expectations, we analyze over 100,000 speeches delivered in the Chilean Chamber of Deputies between 1990 and 2018. To carry out our topic classification task, we utilize the recently developed state-of-the-art multilingual Transformer model XLM-RoBERTa. Consistent with informational theories, we find that committee specialization is a significant predictor of speech participation in legislative debates. In addition, consistent with theories purporting that legislative speech serves as a vehicle for the electoral connection, we find that district characteristics have a significant effect on speech participation in non-lawmaking forums.

¿Qué factores afectan la productividad de los legisladores? En este artículo, argumentamos que la productividad legislativa depende no solo de la afiliación partidaria, la experiencia, el género y otras consideraciones contextuales (por ejemplo, la alineación con el ejecutivo), como han demostrado estudios anteriores, sino también de las conexiones entre los legisladores. Nuestro principal argumento es que la productividad de los diputados depende de su centralidad en la red de cofirmantes de propuestas legislativas. A diferencia de estudios previos acerca de legislaturas latinoamericanas que, generalmente, consideran los proyectos de ley como la unidad de análisis, nos enfocamos en los legisladores y consideramos la productividad individual como la cantidad de proyectos de autoría propia aprobados por la cámara, por congreso. Para testear nuestra hipótesis utilizamos datos de la Cámara de Diputados de Argentina entre 1983 y 2019.

According to conventional wisdom, closed-list proportional representation (CLPR) electoral systems create incentives for legislators to favor the party line over their voters’ positions. However, electoral incentives may induce party leaders to tolerate “shirking” by some legislators, even under CLPR. This study argues that in considering whose deviations from the party line should be tolerated, party leaders exploit differences in voters’ relative electoral influence resulting from malapportionment. We expect defections in roll call votes to be more likely among legislators elected from overrepresented districts than among those from other districts. We empirically test this claim using data on Argentine legislators’ voting records and a unique dataset of estimates of voters’ and legislators’ placements in a common ideological space. Our findings suggest that even under electoral rules known for promoting unified parties, we should expect strategic defections to please voters, which can be advantageous for the party’s electoral fortunes.

This article examines speech participation under different parliamentary rules: open forums dedicated to bill debates, and closed forums reserved for non-lawmaking speeches. It discusses how electoral incentives influence speechmaking by promoting divergent party norms within those forums. Our empirical analysis focuses on the Chilean Chamber of Deputies. The findings lend support to the view that, in forums dedicated to non-lawmaking speeches, participation is greater among more institutionally disadvantaged members (backbenchers, women, and members from more distant districts), while in those that are dedicated to lawmaking debates, participation is greater among more senior members and members of the opposition.

This article examines the choices made by revising chambers in bicameral congresses. It analyses how bill characteristics, chamber congruence, impatience and institutional context influence the decisions made by revising chambers regarding executive bills sent by the chamber of origin. The analysis focuses on the case of Chile, a presidential country in which the executive has substantial proposal power. The findings show that the probability of a bill passing with amendments is higher when it receives a presidential urgency and when the revising chamber is the Senate. Executive bills coming out of the Finance Committee are more likely than others to pass unamended. However, those bills are more likely to die in committee when the revising chamber is the Senate (i.e. the chamber whose membership has a longer time horizon).