The Logic of Senatorial Lawmaking Under Federalism

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  In Virtual Poster Session: Legislative Politics Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

Why does the upper chamber engage in amending or blocking bills which has approved by the lower chamber? Do senators intervene the legislative process more actively when the Senate works as an originating chamber rather than as a revising chamber? Even though students of legislative politics have extensively analyzed bicameralism as well as the impacts of electoral incentives on legislative behavior, we are not sure how the sequence of the legislative process influences legislative behavior. I will remedy such an oversight in the literature focusing on the cases of the Argentine and Brazilian Senates.

On the one hand, the students of bicameralism have focused on bicameral incongruence. For example, in their seminal work, Tsebelis and Money (1997) stressed the importance of factors that influence bicameral bargaining such as bicameral incongruence and symmetry of the two chambers. Studying the case of Brazil, Hiroi (2008) added that time-variant variables such as presidential bicameral majorities and presidential elections raise the chances of a bill’s approval. On the other hand, students of Argentine and Brazilian Congresses argued that political careers of national legislators are built at the subnational level in some federal countries, and that governors are able to control legislators’ actions (Jones and Hwang 2005; Cheibub, FIgueiredo, and Limongi 2009). However, these works does not necessarily explain the fact that the upper chamber sometimes amend or block bills as a revising chamber.

What are the determinants of senatorial behavior under federalism? Do senators change their behavior when they act as a member of the revising chamber? I will answer these questions using the cases of the Argentine and Brazilian Senates. Taking advantage of my original dataset on presidential bills and the profiles of Argentine and Brazilian senators, I will test my hypothesis that legislators strategically choose their actions taking into account the degree of their dependence of political careers on governors as well as their institutional positions through the legislative process. Preliminary statistical tests support this argument.

Author

• Hirokazu Kikuchi, Institute of Developing Economies, JETRO