The Federal State-Building Bargain: Legislative and Executive Malapportionment

• In Event: New Perspectives on the Origins of State Building

Abstract

Existing research suggests that legislative malapportionment is the result of a credible commitment between elites from peripheral (smaller, rural) regions and elites from core (larger, urban) regions that over-represents the former. This type of agreement is usually instigated at critical junctures, such as the birth of federations and constitutional conventions. An agreement that increases the influence of smaller regions can allay fears that they will become politically irrelevant and also prevent the country's alignment with economic policies preferred by urban elites, thus reducing the incentives of peripheral regions to break away or challenge the center. However, little attention has been paid to whether this agreement may influence the composition of the cabinet. Does legislative over-representation of rural regions extend into executive over-representation, such that they are complements? Or are legislative malapportionment and cabinet malapportionment substitutes instead, such that the under-representation of urban regions in the legislature is compensated by their over-representation in the executive? We argue that they are substitutes whenever the core region is an economic and demographic hegemon. We evaluate this argument leveraging a novel biographical dataset of all Argentinian ministers and legislators from its foundation in 1854 until 2015.

Using this data, we first confirm that malapportionment favoring the over-representation of rural, small provinces in the legislature has been a constant of Argentina's institutional design since the initial federal pact. Second, we show that existing literature on the origins and endurance of the federation has missed the other half of the story: cabinet malapportionment. We find that Buenos Aires, the urban economic hegemon, has been vastly over-represented in the cabinet throughout Argentina's history, counteracting its under-representation in the legislative branch. Our findings illuminate the informal dynamics of compensation mechanisms among regional elites that enable the emergence of federations and their maintenance over time.

Authors

• Victoria Paniagua, London School of Economics

• Joan Ricart-Huguet, Loyola University Maryland