Committee collaboration, competing principals, and partisanship in Argentina

Abstract

When will legislators assigned to the same committee cooperate with each other? In federal presidential regimes, both the President and governors demand policy answers from members of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Legislators’ preferences sometimes coincide with those of the President and the governors of their home states; on other occasions, they only align with the preferences of the President or the state governor; and, finally, at times preferences align with neither. In this paper, I analyse the committee system of a multi-party and multi-level legislature and test the partisan and territorial determinants of committee collaboration. My theory elucidates the inner workings of committee systems with competing principals and multiple parties to explain why we observe more active collaboration among supporters of the President and less active collaboration among those only aligned with the governor or with the opposition. I exemplify with the Argentine House of Representatives (1993–2017).