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The Journal of Legislative Studies
ISSN: 1357-2334 (Print) 1743-9337 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjls20
Experience Counts: Mixed Member Elections and
Mexico's Chamber of Deputies
Antonio Ugues Jr , D. Xavier Medina Vidal & Shaun Bowler
To cite this article: Antonio Ugues Jr , D. Xavier Medina Vidal & Shaun Bowler (2012) Experience
Counts: Mixed Member Elections and Mexico's Chamber of Deputies, The Journal of Legislative
Studies, 18:1, 98-112, DOI: 10.1080/13572334.2012.646711
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13572334.2012.646711
Published online: 15 Feb 2012.
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RESEARCH NOTE
Experience Counts: Mixed Member Elections
and Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies
ANTONIO UGUES, Jr,∗D. XAVIER MEDINA VIDAL
and SHAUN BOWLER
This paper draws on the legislative politics literature to explain the composition of com-
mission assignments in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies. Members are elected to the
chamber via a mixed method electoral system. Grounded in the argument of an ‘electoral
connection’ and based on experiences in the German Bundestag, New Zealand, Japanese
and Scottish parliaments and the Welsh Assembly, the literature to date predicts that the
different routes to the legislature will produce different behaviour once someone is elected
to the chamber. This is not the case for the Mexican Chamber of Deputies. The Mexican
constitutional prohibition of re-election for Mexican federal deputies presents a number of
obstacles for the ‘electoral connection’ to work and, in consequence, there is much weaker
evidence in support of electoral system effects.
Keywords: Mexican politics; legislative politics; committees; electoral systems; electoral
connection.
Mayhew’s (1974) ‘electoral connection’ provides one of the major theoretical
frameworks for understanding how legislators behave. In comparative work
this is seen in a series of studies that examine how different electoral systems
provide different incentives to politicians and so provide different kinds of con-
nections between voters and legislators (Lancaster 1986, Bowler and Farrell
1993, Carey and Shugart 1995, Farrell 2001, Farrell and Scully 2007). Mixed
member systems, such as those used in Germany or New Zealand, are especially
interesting in that members of the same chamber are elected by two different
means. It is therefore possible to compare the effects of electoral systems on
chamber behaviour without the complexities of cross-national comparison.
Mexico provides another example of such a system. Mexico’s Chamber of Depu-
ties is comprised of 500 members, 300 of whom are elected from single member
simple plurality districts, the remaining 200 are elected by proportional represen-
tation (Weldon 2001, Flores 2004). What makes Mexico an especially intriguing
case from the point of view of examining the electoral connection is that term
limits restrict members of Mexico’s Ca
´mara de Diputados. Members can serve
multiple terms but not multiple consecutive terms; they are ‘termed out’ after
The Journal of Legislative Studies, Vol.18, No.1, March 2012, pp.98 –112
ISSN 1357-2334 print/1743-9337 online
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13572334.2012.646711 #2012 Taylor & Francis
just one term. This restriction on consecutive terms interrupts the importance of
the electoral connection in Mexico. We examine just how disruptive that pro-
vision is in terms of behaviour inside the Chamber of Deputies and show that
electoral system effects found in other mixed member systems are largely
absent in the case of Mexico.
The paper is divided into four main sections. The first section reviews the lit-
erature on mixed member electoral systems and its impact on the politics of rep-
resentation. The second section discusses our hypotheses in relation to the
behaviour of deputies inside Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies.
1
In the third
section we discuss our data and results. The fourth section concludes with a dis-
cussion of the broader implications of these patterns and the relevance of the
Mexican case for studying legislative behaviour more broadly.
Mixed Member Electoral Systems and their Consequences for Legislative
Behaviour
The connection between re-election and behaviour inside the legislature has
become a cornerstone of our understanding of legislatures (Mayhew 1974).
Some, and possibly quite a lot, of the behaviour of legislators can be understood
as directed towards re-election. Not all electoral systems are alike and variations
in electoral system can produce variations in this electoral connection. The kinds
of behaviour in which legislators may engage, and the level of effort they devote
to them, may vary by type of electoral system (Cain et al. 1987, Bowler and
Farrell 1993, Carey and Shugart 1995, Milesi-Ferreti et al. 2002, Farrell and
Scully 2007). One of the things that makes it difficult to identify the impact of
this electoral connection is the difficulty of cross-national comparisons because
there will be many differences between both countries and institutions. Differ-
ences in behaviour inside the chamber may be mistakenly attributed to variation
in electoral system. Mixed member electoral systems are especially valuable
because they allow us to look at the impact of electoral systems on legislative
behaviour within a single country, and indeed within a single chamber, without
the confounding effects of cross-national or cross-chamber differences.
There are several different implementations of mixed member electoral
system (Farrell 2001, Shugart and Wattenberg 2001) but the basic idea is
similar to many implementations: a number of members in the chamber are
elected by district (often single member plurality) while other members are
elected by some version of proportional representation. The German case, for
instance, is often noted as the prime example of mixed member electoral
systems from which other implementations derive (Farrell 1997, Klingemann
and Wessels 2001, Scarrow 2001, Shugart and Wattenberg 2001, Stratmann
and Baur 2002). The main consequence of having members elected by two differ-
ent systems is that ‘two legislator types exist simultaneously in Germany’
(Lancaster and Patterson 1990, Stratmann and Baur 2002, p. 506). Stratmann
and Baur (2002) examine how the differences in electoral selection, whether
MEXICO’S CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES 99
through first-past-the-post (FPTP) or proportional representation (PR), affect
committee membership in the German Bundestag. They argue that politicians’
desire to be re-elected, for both ‘legislator types’,
2
results in distinct political pre-
ferences – preferences that are reflected in their committee choices. Stratmann
and Baur (2002, p. 506) find that legislators elected through majoritarian rules
(for example, FPTP) ‘are predominantly on committees where they have influ-
ence over the allocation of benefits to their geographic reelection constituency’.
By contrast, legislators elected through PR rules tend to focus on ‘committees
that have control over funds that benefit party reelection constituencies’
(Stratmann and Baur 2002, p. 506).
Similar differences are found in legislative behaviour in New Zealand,
Scotland and Wales, all of whose legislatures are elected by some version of a
mixed member system. Kite and Crampton (2007), for example, find that the
mode of electoral selection (that is, PR or majoritarian) directly affects a New
Zealand MP’s parliamentary committee choice. MPs elected from single
member districts (SMDs) ‘are significantly more likely to serve on committees
where they are more likely to be able to distribute geographically-based benefits
– pork, broadly construed – whereas list-elected MPs are significantly more
likely to serve on committees where they can target benefits to broad demo-
graphic support groups’ (Kite and Crampton 2007, p. 11). Lundberg (2006)
finds analogous patterns for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. Legis-
lators elected from single member districts tended to focus more time and
resources on their constituents, especially those who have had problems with
governmental agencies. These legislators also sought to redistribute resources
to their respective districts through public spending and business projects. By
contrast, those elected through proportional representation focused heavily on
issues relating to their party such as relations with interest groups (Lundberg
2006, p. 75; see also Bradbury and Mitchell 2007).
3
The examples of studying the effects of mixed member systems in four cases
– Germany, New Zealand, Scotland and Wales – all show consistent differences
in legislator behaviour that relate to the different means by which the legislator
was elected: members elected by districts will be more likely to emphasise con-
stituency service types of behaviour generally understood. Bearing in mind the
experience of other legislatures elected by mixed systems we would expect to
see two ways in which the electoral system effect – should it be present – will
be seen in behaviour inside the Mexican Ca
´mara de Diputados. First, and sim-
plest, because members from the district can stand to gain from a ‘personal
vote’ (Cain et al. 1987, Bowler and Farrell 1993, Carey and Shugart 1995),
members from districts are likely to emphasise constituency service and spend
a good deal of time on it and, therefore, be less active in pursuing broader legis-
lative goals or leadership positions that involve a great deal of effort, the benefi-
ciaries of which may not be voters in the district. Second, and relatedly, given that
members from districts will be more oriented towards constituency service in
100 THE JOURNAL OF LEGISLATIVE STUDIES
committees and so gravitate towards committees that, for example, can help
produce pork barrel projects.
The Electoral Connection in Mexico: La Ca
´mara de Diputados
Up until the year 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) dominance of
the presidency and Congress was complete. Since then, however, control of the
presidency by the National Action Party (PAN) and variation in size of party
groups inside the Chamber – often leading to periods of divided government
– have meant that the Chamber has become a much more important institution
(Ugalde 2000, Casar 2002, Nacif 2002, Be
´jar Algazi 2006). In many ways the
features of legislative politics are familiar from other legislatures. The
Chamber, for example, has a sophisticated and elaborate system of committees.
The committee system in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies is quite complex. It
includes the ordinary, investigative and special committees, and the number of
permanent committees has grown over the years. There were 44 comisiones ordi-
narias or ordinary committees in the Chamber of Deputies’ 60th Legislature (see,
for example, Weldon 1998, Nacif 2000, Ugalde 2000, Ba
´ez Carlos 2009). The
ordinary committees of the Chamber of Deputies are permanent and charged
with the bulk of the constitutionally-mandated work of the lower chamber. Ordin-
ary committees are maintained from legislature to legislature, increasing in
number from 40 in the 58th Legislature (2000–2003). Mexico’s protracted demo-
cratic ‘opening’ has included important reforms to the committee system in the
chamber. A reform to the Ley Orga
´nica del Congreso in 1988 allowed opposition
parties to chair committees and another in 1999 mandated that committee mem-
bership be tied proportionally to each party’s representation in the chamber.
Other measures aimed at eliminating the possibility of a wholesale takeover of
the legislative agenda by the PRI cap committees at 30 members and prohibit
deputies from serving on more than three ordinary committees (Ba
´ez Carlos
2009). Like the committees of the US House of Representatives, the Mexican
ordinary committees are the workhorses of the chamber; they are responsible
for all preparatory work (including drafting and amending legislation) for
debate in the chamber (Nacif 2000, Mora-Donatto 2009). In particular, the ordin-
ary committees are responsible for reviewing bills, collecting information on
those bills, and producing a dictamen or report for the plenary chamber (Ley
Orga
´nica, Article 39-3). Given these responsibilities, the ordinary committees
do have some influence over the legislative process (Weldon 1998). ‘The lack
of a single-party majority in the Chamber has rendered the committee stage
more significant in terms of the end result of the legislative process’ (Nacif
2002, p. 275).
4
The Chamber of Deputies has a well-established internal organisation and
system of committees coupled with competitive elections held using a mixed
member electoral system. In many ways, then, the chamber offers a case that
is directly comparable to that of the other legislatures we have noted. But one
MEXICO’S CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES 101
distinctive feature of Mexican politics is that there are severe term limits restrict-
ing officeholders – including legislators – from pursuing consecutive terms in
office. Legislators can be elected to multiple terms but cannot serve those
terms back to back. Term limits are not unique to Mexico; 15 US state legisla-
tures have term limits of some kind. But the provisions in US states are not
nearly as severe as those in Mexico.
5
The importance of term limits for our
current study is straightforward: such severe term limits are likely to disrupt
the ‘electoral connection’. Because term limits undercut any electoral payoff,
legislators are unlikely to try and pursue the kinds of activities related to the ‘per-
sonal vote’ that we see in the parliaments of Germany, New Zealand, Japan and
Scotland, and in the Welsh Assembly. In fact, given the severity of the term limits
rule in Mexico, it would seem hard for the legislature to find people with suffi-
cient skills to help manage the work of the committee system since ‘institutional
memory’ would seem to be re-set with each election. Considering that term limits
of this kind interrupt the building of expertise, we would expect the legislature to
rely heavily on those with careers that involved previous experience of some
kind. Those deputies who have been in the legislature before, indeed in any leg-
islature, will have an advantage over newcomers and be more likely to be active
in the chamber. What this should lead us to expect is that previous experience
should be a major factor determining activity within the legislature. Furthermore,
these term limits will eliminate the kinds of electoral incentives found elsewhere
and mean that, despite the experience of other legislatures, we are in fact quite
unlikely to see the kinds of patterns found elsewhere in terms of electoral
system effects.
Based on the discussion of other legislatures we have several expectations as
far as Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies is concerned. As in Germany, Japan, New
Zealand, Scotland and Wales, we expect that electoral rules will significantly
influence the ‘day-to-day’ behaviour of legislators in the Mexican Chamber of
Deputies by leading some members to emphasise constituency service. Differ-
ences in electoral selection will lead members elected via first-past-the-post to
be more concerned with dealing with constituents and voter concerns and so
have less time to be able to be active within the chamber in terms of bill sponsor-
ship (H1) and less active in terms of seeking committee chair positions (H2), and
will seek to be on committees where they can direct public funds towards their
respective districts or greater geographic region (H3). The rival expectation is
that Mexico’s term limits will mean that none of these effects will be seen
and, instead, that previous experience will be a main driver for both activity
within the chamber and, also, the seeking of committee chair positions.
6
The data for our statistical analysis of political behaviour in the Mexican
Chamber of Deputies are drawn from the Chamber’s LX Legislature (2006– 09).
Our first dependent variable is whether or not a member is a committee chair
(a 0.1 dummy measure) and our second is the number of bills introduced by the
member into the legislature.
7
Given our hypotheses, the two main independent
variables of interest are how the member was elected (1 ¼SMD, 0 ¼party list)
102 THE JOURNAL OF LEGISLATIVE STUDIES
and whether or not the member had prior political experience. Since experience can
be conceived in several different ways we show several different versions of this
measure in Table 1. As control measures we include measures of party member-
ship, gender and – in the model for measures of activity within the chamber –
fixed effects for the committee membership (since some committees may
involve more effort than others). Table 1 presents the results of this analysis.
Columns 1 to 3 show the results of logit regression models predicting whether
or not a member becomes a committee chair, Columns 4 to 6 show the results
of negative binomial regression models predicting how active a deputy was
during the first year of the LX Legislature. We report several versions of each
model in order to help disentangle the various forms of experience that may be
seen as relevant. Deputies arriving at the Chamber could have had experience in
the different branches of government and/or at different levels of government.
As can be seen from Table 1, the effect of the electoral system is statistically
significant in only one of the six models. While it is in the predicted direction
(deputies elected from districts are less likely to become committee chairs), the
result suggests a fragile relationship at best between the electoral system and be-
haviour inside the chamber and it is one that is in the ‘wrong’ direction: if any-
thing it is deputies elected by the party lists who become committee chairs,
although this result is a fragile one. What we do see, however, is the relevance
of experience even after we control for party affiliation
8
and, in Models 4–6,
we also include fixed effects for committee membership: experience of federal
politics and in the federal legislature materially help deputies become committee
chairs and legislative experience helps deputies be more active in proposing
legislation. While it may or may not benefit a deputy’s constituents, a committee
chair position is a valuable asset to a legislator with higher political aspirations.
With previous legislative experience, deputies are able dedicate more of their
time and effort to serving constituent interests – those of their district constitu-
ents or their party – and less time orienting themselves to the inner workings
of the chamber.
It might be argued that these patterns are not really fair tests of the hypothesis
of an electoral connection. Chairing a committee may be readily measurable but
may not really speak to the kinds of constituency service behaviour that, for
example, seems to drive members of the Bundestag to seek out certain types of
committees, committees that are able to pursue spending or pork barrel projects.
Rather than modelling committee chair positions, then, we will model whether or
not a deputy is a member of a particular committee. The model will be straight-
forward. Membership on a committee will be modelled as a function of the
method of election (1 ¼SMD, 0 ¼party list) as well as their party affiliation,
region and previous experience.
9
With 44 committees in the chamber, any
table reporting all coefficients quickly becomes unreadable. Furthermore, we
are only interested in the effect of the electoral system. In Table 2, therefore,
we only report the list of committees for which the electoral system measure
was significant in predicting membership, and we distinguish between
MEXICO’S CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES 103
Table 1: Predicting Committee Chair Appointment and Floor Activity in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
Dependent Variable ¼Committee Chair Committee Chair Committee Chair Activity Activity Activity
Model ¼Logit Logit Logit Count Count Count
Elected in a district –0.234 –0.386∗–0.251 –0.0226 –0.0188 –0.0625
(0.187) (0.175) (0.182) (0.151) (0.145) (0.146)
Party Affiliation:
Convergencia –0.126 0.0798 0.0495 1.435∗∗ 1.563∗∗ 1.574∗∗
(0.435) (0.421) (0.433) (0.279) (0.272) (0.270)
NVal –0.0146 0.123 0.0471 2.015∗∗ 2.069∗∗ 2.099∗∗
(0.562) (0.569) (0.574) (0.360) (0.349) (0.351)
PRD 0.212 0.150 – 0.00322 0.473∗∗ 0.339 +0.430∗∗
(0.233) (0.237) (0.218) (0.177) (0.176) (0.165)
PRI 0.161 0.126 – 0.119 0.864∗∗ 0.734∗∗ 0.823∗∗
(0.231) (0.230) (0.235) (0.173) (0.162) (0.171)
PT –0.101 –0.202 – 0.194 0.334 0.198 0.278
(0.572) (0.578) (0.582) (0.449) (0.445) (0.445)
PVEM 0.00533 0.0117 –0.0410 1.146∗∗ 1.016∗∗ 1.081∗∗
(0.452) (0.436) (0.455) (0.301) (0.297) (0.295)
PSD – – – 1.327∗1.379∗∗ 1.377∗∗
(0.525) (0.516) (0.515)
Male 0.178 0.178 0.189 0.180 0.181 0.172
(0.206) (0.205) (0.208) (0.163) (0.160) (0.160)
Career Experience of:
Federal Politics 0.436∗∗ 0.102
(0.146) (0.109)
104 THE JOURNAL OF LEGISLATIVE STUDIES
State Politics –0.0412 0.0740
(0.184) (0.135)
Local Politics –0.0416 0.117
(0.131) (0.0953)
Legislature (all levels) 0.181 0.268∗∗
(0.111) (0.0827)
Executive (all levels) 0.0450 –0.0911
(0.118) (0.0891)
Judiciary (all levels) 0.796 0.253
(0.685) (0.557)
Federal Legislature 0.576∗∗ 0.117
(0.185) (0.139)
State Legislature –0.276 0.276
(0.266) (0.178)
Local Council –0.0292 0.408∗∗
(0.192) (0.138)
Fixed effects for
Committee n.a. n.a. n.a. Yes Yes Yes
Constant –1.637∗∗ – 1.523∗∗ – 1.465∗∗ –1.177∗∗ – 1.143∗∗ –1.225∗∗
(0.260) (0.256) (0.234) (0.280) (0.276) (0.267)
Observations 495 495 495 500 500 500
Pseudo R
2
0.052 0.034 0.056 0.119 0.124 0.125
+
p,0.10, ∗p,0.05, ∗∗p,0.01.
Note: Standard errors in parentheses. Convergencia – Convergencia por la Democracia (Convergence Party); NVal – Partido Nueva Alianza (New Alliance Party);
PRD – Partido de la Revolucio
´n Democra
´tica (Party of the Democratic Revolution); PRI – Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party);
PT – Partido del Trabajo (Labor Party); PVEM – Partido Verde Ecologista de Me
´xico (Ecologist Green Party of Mexico); PSD – Partido Socialdemocra
´itca (Social
Democratic Party).
MEXICO’S CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES 105
committees for which SMD was significant as opposed to PR. Of the 44 ordinary
committees in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, we find that electoral rules sig-
nificantly influence membership for only 11 of them. What we would expect to
see – following results from several other legislatures – is that deputies
elected by PR should gravitate towards committees that mostly deal with broad
policy areas, while members elected by SMD should gravitate towards ones
that are more concerned with spending that can be targeted. It is difficult to
make hard and fast categorisations but a brief description of some of these 11
committees suggests that some patterns do conform to expectations.
On committees for which election by PR is significant in predicting member-
ship – the committee on Constitutional Matters (Puntos Constitucionales) for
example – the pattern does seem to work as expected. This committee focuses
on the constitutionality of legislative initiatives that are rarely suited to the geo-
graphic disbursement of ‘pork’. The committee on the Interior (Gobernacio
´n)isa
committee similarly broad in scope, but oriented towards policy concerns. The
committee on the Interior is charged with overseeing federal relations at all
levels of government and takes seriously its role as protector of the legislative
branch (poder legislativo) from the executive and judiciary. Thus, this commit-
tee, too, should attract deputies without particularistic concerns.
The other ‘PR committees’, those on Equality and Gender (Equidad y
Ge
´nero), Urban Development (Desarrollo Metropolitano) and Environment
and Natural Resources (Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales), are similarly
oriented towards broad policy issues rather than particularistic concerns.
10
Com-
mittees for which election by SMD is significant in predicting membership
include the committees on Agriculture and Ranching (Agricultura y Ganaderı
´a),
Communications (Comunicaciones) and Commerce (Economı
´a). These
Table 2: Pattern of Committee Memberships – Committees for which Membership could be
Predicted by Method of Election in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies
Single Member District Proportional Representation
Agriculture and Ranching Urban Development
Communications Equality and Gender
Commerce Interior
Promotion of Cooperatives and Social Economy Environment/Natural Resources
Youth and Sports Constitutional Matters
Citizen Participation
Note: This table reports the committees for which the method of election (
b
1
) was significant in a
model where:
Membership in Committee X ¼
a
+
b
1
∗Method of election (district/list) +
b
2
∗Party dummies+
b
3
∗
Experience +
b
4
.∗Northern region +
b
5
∗Federal district +
e
The results reported are ones that are robust to changes in specification. For example, we cannot
estimate a fixed effects model using state dummy variables (committees have relatively few members)
but did estimate these models using random effects by state. We also estimated models controlling for
state levels of corruption (which may affect a deputy’s preferences for committees).
Source: Ca
´mara de Diputados – LX Legislatura, 2009. Available from: diputados.gob.mx
106 THE JOURNAL OF LEGISLATIVE STUDIES
committees offer perhaps the clearest case of committees concerned with targeted
rather than broad interests. The committee on Agriculture and Ranching,
11
though it is charged with mediating through the broad interests and concerns
of the nation’s agriculture sector, is well-positioned, as is its counterpart execu-
tive agency, to distribute resources to agri-business for the modernisation of the
sector in specific districts. While SMD members may not be focused on deliver-
ables for the sake of a re-election campaign, members most certainly keep an eye
towards their next political office. With its oversight of the important communi-
cations sector, the committee on Communications provides similar incentives.
The committee on Youth and Sports (Juventud y Deporte) has, as part of its
general objective, the ‘[active] promotion of youth participation ... in the exer-
cise of social, political, cultural and economic rights’.
12
This goal entails the
committee’s oversight and engagement with various government departments
(that is, Education, the Military and Health) where the interests of Mexico’s
youth require special consideration. It may be, then, that members of the
Youth and Sports committee – like SMD members in the Scottish Parliament
and Welsh Assembly who address constituents’ complaints about government
agencies (Lundberg 2006) – are likely to address particularistic concerns and
seek redistribution of resources to their districts. The committee on Commerce
meantime has as its stated goal to ‘create, modify and propose economic instru-
ments that strengthen the legal market with certainty, free competition and higher
investment and competitiveness’.
13
As part of its goal, it collects information and
provides analysis that can be used to produce legislation that will aid in the econ-
omic development of the country. Specific areas of emphasis include the devel-
opment and support of small business, industrial development, domestic and
international trade and foreign investment, and improvement of the nation’s
economic competitiveness, especially regional development, as indicated by
the respective sub-committees of this committee.
14
Such a committee can
provide opportunities for legislators to direct spending or at least influence legis-
lation to the benefit of their respective districts, as legislators in other mixed
member electoral systems do as well.
15
Finally, two committees with broader mandates – Promotion of Cooperatives
and Social Economy (Fomento Cooperativo y Economı
´a Social) and Citizen Par-
ticipation (Participacı
´on Ciudadana) – are also positioned to serve particularis-
tic or targeted interests as well. Due to their committees’ roles in interceding
between the legislature and large sectors of civil society, members of the Pro-
motion of Cooperatives and Social Economy committee, whose mandate it is
to serve the interests of Mexico’s non-profit sector,
16
and the committee on
Citizen Participation, which promotes the government’s engagement of civil
society organisations, should be more likely to be interested in targeting specific
interests rather than broad policy areas.
In some ways, then, it is possible to see the pattern of relations in Table 2
making sense when we consider the remit of the committees and the electoral
incentive to pursue targeted benefits as opposed to broader policy concerns.
MEXICO’S CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES 107
The conclusion that the patterns do make sense in terms of differing electoral
incentives, however, does hinge on accepting the interpretation of the commit-
tees’ remit outlined above. Any categorisation of committees into two types
(ones that facilitate pork barrel spending and ones that do not) is plainly
subject to debate. Yet even if there was agreement on such a categorisation,
and on the interpretation we advanced in the preceding paragraphs there is still
only weak evidence of a relationship between committee members and the elec-
toral system. The relationship exists for only about a quarter of the committees of
any kind in the chamber. Regardless of categorisation, then, it would seem that
there are – at best – limited effects of the electoral system on committee mem-
bership. In fact, this seems to be the conclusion we can draw for the evidence of
electoral system effects upon chamber behaviour more broadly for the case of
Mexico. Whether we look at committee membership, committee chair positions
or a more general level of activity, the impact of electoral systems is, at best,
fragile, but more usually, absent. Mexico’s term limits seem to undercut the elec-
toral connection. Instead, and in particular when we consider committee chairs
and legislative activity, it is experience that matters in driving the behaviour of
legislators.
Conclusion: Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies: An Institutionalised Legislature
without ‘Institutionalisation’?
Like all established legislatures Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies has a well-devel-
oped internal structure of committees and legislative processes. Like all legislatures
it also has series of unique practices, some, perhaps many, of which do not rise
above the status of inconsequential quirks. But the rule on term limits is much
more consequential because it undermines a central property of all established leg-
islatures – ‘institutionalisation’ (Polsby 1968). To be sure, Polsby’s concept has
been criticised (for example, Hibbing 1988, Judge 2003), but his insight on the
importance of time and experience to the workings of legislatures remains unchal-
lenged.
17
Even if scholars do not always agree with Polsby’s argument, many
studies of legislatures emphasise the importance of ‘institutional memory’ and
experience, as candidates, once elected, learn how to become legislators and, in
mixed member systems, learn what kind of legislators to become. Term limits inter-
rupt this learning curve. We have illustrated this in the case of Mexico by showing
that patterns of behaviour that are well-established in other cases do not hold in the
case of the Chamber of Deputies. Instead of consistent electoral system effects,
what we find is the importance of previous experience. There are two consequences
of this interruption of experience – one relating to legislative politics in Mexico and
one that concerns the study of legislatures more broadly.
First, in terms of Mexico, previous experience would seem to be something of
a stopgap measure for the electoral connection. We would expect that the real
sources of ‘institutional memory’ do not lie with legislators themselves but
with legislative staffers and the party organisations. Even before the end of
108 THE JOURNAL OF LEGISLATIVE STUDIES
PRI dominance Nacif (1996, see also Nacif 2000) presciently characterised the
prohibition on consecutive re-election as fundamental to the discipline that
grounded the PRI’s decades-long domination of Congress. In the current
period his argument is likely to apply to all the political parties. When legislators
are only there for three years it is easy to see that party organisations can become
repositories for ‘institutional memory’ and use that knowledge to dominate newly
elected deputies. As such, this highlights the qualitative differences between
working previously for the federal government and having actual legislative
experience. The potential for independence from the party organisation is more
easily identifiable in legislators, who are elected officials, than in federal political
employees with political appointments from the executive.
Second, and more broadly, we can return to the question of institutionalisa-
tion and legislative studies more broadly. The Chamber of Deputies provides
an interesting example of a legislature that is in many ways institutionalised. It
has an established and well-developed system of committees, established rules
of procedure, political parties and legislative process. Yet the term limits pro-
vision undercuts many of the mechanisms which inform our theoretical under-
standing of legislatures. The re-election incentive is clearly blunted by
interruption of terms, as is the ability to build up experience over time. In
some ways, then, Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies offers us the case of a demo-
cratic legislature that is not readily explained by extant major theories and so
offers an interesting case for further study.
Note on Authors
Antonio Ugues, Jr∗is a member of the Department of Political Science,
University of California, Riverside, USA, email: auguesjr@gmail.com;
D. Xavier Medina Vidal is a member of the Department of Political Science,
University of California, Riverside, USA, email: dmedi005@ucr.edu; and
Shaun Bowler is a Professor in the Department of Political Science, University
of California, Riverside, USA, email: shaun.bowler@ucr.edu
∗Corresponding author
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank William T. Barndt, Roderic A. Camp, and the
members of the graduate student colloquium in the Department of Political
Science at the University of California, Riverside, for their comments. Any
errors remain the sole responsibility of the authors.
Notes
1. Our discussion of committees and the committee system in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies
concerns the system of ‘comisiones ordinarias’ or ‘ordinary commissions’. This approach is
MEXICO’S CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES 109
consistent with leading comparative research on Mexican legislative committees (Nacif 1996,
2002, Casar 2002, Ugalde 2000).
2. ‘Legislator types’ refers to the way in which officials are elected to the German Bundestag –
either FPTP or PR.
3. See also Pekkanen et al. (2006) for evidence in the case of Japan.
4. On the role of parties inside the chamber see Nacif (2000), Be
´jar Algazi (2006) and more
generally Camp (1980, 2002).
5. For a description of term limits in US state legislatures see http://www.ncsl.org/
LegislaturesElections/LegislatorsLegislativeStaffData/ChartofTermLimitsStates/tabid/14844/
Default.aspx
6. Another set of expectations is that intra-party competition increases the likelihood of bill sponsor-
ship for FPTP deputies in comparison to PR deputies (see Crisp et al. 2004).
7. Data on initiatives introduced in the first year of the LX Legislature (2006-2009) may be found
here http://gaceta.diputados.gob.mx/gp_iniciativas.html. Our measure is a count of the initiatives
introduced by deputy.
8. Party affiliation is a control due to reforms mandating proportional distribution of committee chair
positions.
9. Since it could be the case that committee membership has a lot to do with opportunities for side
payments in some specifications we also included state level measures of corruption. This did not
affect the results.
10. For details see http://www3.diputados.gob.mx/Ca
´mara/001_diputados/008_comisioneslx/001_
ordinarias/015_equidad_y_genero/003a_programa_de_trabajo; http://www3.diputados.gob.mx/
Ca
´mara/001_diputados/008_comisioneslx/001_ordinarias/008_desarrollo_metropolitano; http://
www3.diputados.gob.mx/Ca
´mara/001_diputados/008_comisioneslx/001_ordinarias/025_medio_
ambiente/004_plan_de_trabajo
11. Committee on Agriculture and Ranching (http://www3.diputados.gob.mx/Ca
´mara/001_
diputados/008_comisioneslx/001_ordinarias/001_agricultura_y_ganaderia/002_presentacion).
12. Comisio
´n de Juventud y Deporte Plan de Trabajo 2009 (http://www3.diputados.gob.mx/Ca
´mara/
content/download/233652/636603/file/Plan_de_Trabajo.pdf).
13. Ca
´mara de Diputados, Comisiones Ordinarias, Economia – Plan de Trabajo 2006 –09.
14. Ca
´mara de Diputados, Comisiones Ordinarias, Economia – Plan de Trabajo 2006 –09.
15. For a discussion of the objectives and duties of each ordinary committee see the following
website: http://sitl.diputados.gob.mx/listado_de_comisiones.php?tct=1
16. Marco de Referencia y Marco Jurı
´dico (2006– 09) (http://www3.diputados.gob.mx/Ca
´mara/001_
diputados/003_comisiones/001_ordinarias/fomento_cooperativo_y_economia_social/plan_de_
trabajo).
17. Alternatively, it might be that legislators have a limited capacity for learning, such that their
accumulation of knowledge may reach a plateau at a certain point.
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