Where’s the Party? Examining Legislative Behavior through Roll-Call Analysis in the Buenos Aires City’s Legislature.

The legislature of the City of Buenos Aires is built up by 60 deputies who are elected by closed-list PR, with no-threshold. Historically, the permissiveness of the electoral rules has facilitated deep fragmentation in this body. As an addition, coalitions have not usually followed clear-cutting party lines. Thus, this legislature has frequently shown intensive party switching and internal party creation. According to the literature, the probabilities of finding disciplined political parties or clear patterns of partisan voting should be very low in such a scenario. However, no scientific piece has dealt with that theoretical expectation in this case. We will try to fill the gap by analyzing individual roll-call votes for the period 1997-2007 in the City of Buenos Aires’ legislature. We will evaluate whether original coalition membership is a good predictor of legislative behavior, better than ideology or national party attachment. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]