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.

In many developing countries, national legislative seats are considered less valuable than (subnational) executive positions. Even then, ambitious politicians may seek a legislative seat either (a) as a window of opportunity for jumping to an executive office; or (b) as a consolation prize when no better option is available. Using a regression discontinuity design adapted to a pr setting, we examine these possibilities in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies between 1983 and 2011. In line with the consolation prize story, we find that marginal candidates from the Peronist party—which controls most provincial governorships—are more likely to be renominated and serve an additional term in the legislature, but not necessarily to jump to an executive office. The effect is stronger in small provinces.

Does social background affect legislators’ behavior in office? Do individuals with specific social ties tend to be mainly concerned with representing their group of reference, beyond partisanship? This article deals with these questions by analyzing bill-drafting patterns by representatives in the Argentine Congress who belong to an understudied group: workers. The wide presence of a broad, populist party (Peronism) that historically incorporated organized labor, along with other groups, provides consistent variation for empirical assessment. Evidence demonstrates that only labor-based representatives in general, regardless of party membership, tend to use legislative resources to target workers, while every other member of the populist party does not consider labor issues at all in their legislative tasks. Such findings open new directions for analysis of representation, legislative performance, and strategies developed by dissimilar groups in broad political organizations.

Evaluating the fairness of electoral reforms is a critical requirement for electoral accountability in any democracy. There is, however, no research measuring the expected seat benefit for incumbent reformers in newly democratized countries. Much of this delay is due to the technical difficulties of generalizing previous seat-vote models to multiparty races, a problem that has limited both subnational and cross-national comparisons of electoral regime change. Using a multilevel Bayesian model we solve this analytical problem and produce comparable estimates of partisan bias and majoritarian bias across the Argentine provinces. Our model estimates the effect of reforms across many electoral regimes and can be applied to comparative analyses of electoral reforms within and across countries. In the particular case of Argentina, we show large seat premiums for incumbent parties initiating electoral reforms.