Governors, Stone Guests in the Executive-Legislative Relationship? Construction of a New Measuring Instrument to Address the Phenomenon

Abstract

The study of executive-legislative relations is not new. However, in the Argentine case, the vote of the project sent by the Executive seeking confirmation of Ministry of Economy Resolution 125 sliding tax on agricultural exports led to a break which staged the role of governors in the legislative vote. This break in the dynamics of parliamentary activity regenerates academic interest on the role of “party cohesion” (“party discipline”) in Congress, introducing an actor very little studied at the time: the governors. The academic literature has not worked in depth the role of governors in executive-legislative relations and its measurement. In this sense, the Rice index is the measurement instrument reference in the field. However, since it is limited in scope under certain conditions, this paper aims to build a new index called the Independence-Territoriality Index (IT) to enable investigate the role of governors, establishing the relationship between party cohesion and territoriality, using a data matrix built on roll call votes of legislators in both Houses. The findings of this research make a contribution to a new theoretical and methodological approach on the subject, leaving to future studies if the observed is a particular phenomenon of Argentina or if it is replicable to other federal latinamerican republics.