Legislative Effectiveness in Multiparty Systems: Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies

• In Event: Legislative Effectiveness and Policy Outcomes

Abstract

What explains legislative effectiveness in multiparty presidential systems? While little work has examined legislative effectiveness in a comparative context, previous work on the US Congress suggests majority party status, seniority, experience and institutional position are primary factors that help explain variation in a legislator’s effectiveness However, in many legislatures, there is no majority party and committee chairs are shared across multiple parties. Moreover, outside the United States, legislative careers are often short. Thus, from a comparative perspective, it is unclear to what extent previous explanatory factors regarding legislative effectiveness travel to other contexts.
We address these gaps in the literature through an in-depth examination of the lawmaking process in Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies to better understand the partisan determinants of legislative effectiveness. Mexico is an excellent case to address legislative effectiveness in a comparative context. First, during the period we cover here, 1997-2018, no party held a majority. As a result, multiple parties chair different committees. Second, consecutive reelection of deputies is banned allowing us to more closely examine the effects of prior legislative experience on effectiveness, but also providing an opportunity to examine the effects of other background characteristics likely to influence effectiveness in a Chamber where the large majority of deputies have little prior legislative experience.
By using a dataset the comprises biographical, institutional and behavior data of Mexican federal legislators, and based on the Legislative Effectiveness Score (LES) used by Volden &Wiseman (2018) we present a methodology of our own to address the effectiveness of federal deputies in the non-majoritarian period of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies (1997-2018).

Authors

• Sergio A. Bárcena, Tec de Monterrey

• Yann Kerevel, Louisiana State University