Experts, aliens and everyone in between. Agriculture committee assignments and sector embeddedness in the Argentine Congress

Abstract

Agriculture is one of the most important sectors in Argentina's economy. Although most of the time congressional committees play a secondary role regarding agricultural policy, they become crucial in certain situations. In this article, we analyze the political economy of agriculture committee assignments in the Argentine Congress and the embeddedness of their members in the agricultural sector from 2001 to 2019. Conventional wisdom holds that in Argentina—a strongly presidential country with a congress full of amateur legislators and party-oriented career paths—the standing committee's composition reflects party leaders' preferences rather than constituencies' interests or legislators' backgrounds. Through descriptive analysis and a binary logistic regression, we show that many committee members are in fact experts in agriculture and are highly embedded in the sector, whereas others have no bonds whatsoever. Moreover, constituency preferences have some influence on committee appointments. These findings contribute to understanding better the legislative organization of Congress and the overlap between politics and this fundamental economic sector. They further help to expand the theoretical approach for studying economic committee composition in Argentina.