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Electoral Accountability and Particularistic Legislation: Evidence from an Electoral Reform in Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2020

LUCIA MOTOLINIA Open the ORCID record for LUCIA MOTOLINIA [Opens in a new window]
LUCIA MOTOLINIA*
Affiliation:
New York University
*
Lucia Motolinia Ph.D. Candidate, Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University, lucia.motolinia@nyu.edu.
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Abstract

Being able to hold politicians accountable is the hallmark of democracy, and central to this is the notion that politicians can run for reelection. Most research on reelection incentives compare politicians who are term-limited with those who are not. These studies concentrate mostly on relatively senior politicians in candidate-centered electoral systems. This article leverages a quasi-natural experiment posed by the staggered implementation of the 2014 Mexican Electoral Reform, which lifted an eighty-year-old ban on reelection. The author conducts a difference-in-differences analysis of the hypothesis that reelection encourages legislators to focus more on policies with the highest “electoral yield”—namely, particularistic legislation. Applying a correlated topic model to a new collection of transcripts from 6,890 legislative sessions in 20 Mexican states between 2012 and 2018, this article presents compelling evidence that it does, that the effect is synchronized with the electoral cycle, and that it is larger when the legislators’ political horizons are longer.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 115 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 97 - 113
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

For valuable feedback and excellent comments, I am very grateful to Amy Catalinac, Pablo Querubin, Arthur Spirling, Alistair Smith, Peter Rosendorff, Hye Young You, Julia Payson, Dimitri Landa, David Stasavage, Antonella Bandiera, William Godel, Jose Maria Rodriguez-Valadez, Tine Paulsen, Taylor Mattia, Arturas Rozenas, Jessica Preece, Nikolas Schoell, Scott Abramson, and Horacio Larreguy. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for useful feedback and participants at the 115th APSA Meeting, the Comparative seminar at New York University, the Quantitative Text Analysis Workshop in Dublin, and PolMeth XXXVI. Carlos Villaseñor provided superb research assistance. The author declares no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NOMC0H.

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