Governors and party discipline at the National Congress: Cristina Kirchner and Mauricio Macri administrations in comparative perspective
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Abstract
In the field of the Executive-Legislative Power relations, the issue of party discipline is a focus of great interest. In the case of Argentina, 2001 formalized a crisis of representativeness that has its correlate in Legislative Power. In this sense, especially in Argentina, lately, the study of the role of a previously silenced actor was installed in the specialists’ agenda: the Governor.
The controversial and failed initiative to transform Resolution 125 into law, back in 2008, when despite having a majority in both Chambers the project was rejected, showed that the indiscipline of some governors had its correlation in the both of both ruling, allied and opponent legislators, thus starting a time series that comes to present day, going through three presidential periods.
All this raises new and interesting questions: Has the disciplinary behavior of governors under Cristina Kichner’s leadership been different from that of Mauricio Macri? Does legislative party discipline vary depending on whether the ruling party has parliamentary majority or not? How disciplined are the ruling party deputies and senators and how much opponents? How disciplined is Peronism/Kirchnerism (and all its neologies) when it is in power? And more intriguing: How disciplined is when they are not in power?
The following article aims to answer these questions using roll-call votes of those projects where the governors’ position could be rescued for the period 2007-2019, using the Independence-Territoriality (IT) Index (Coronel & Zamichiei, 2012.)
The results allow us to reinforce some hypothesis and dismiss other claims in existing literature about the role of governor and the legislators in party discipline, while showing the similarities and differences occurred during the presidencies of Cristina Kirchner and Mauricio Macri.
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