In scores of countries, the adoption of gender quotas has boosted the numbers of women elected to national legislatures. How does the growing presence of women affect legislative behavior regarding women's rights? Using an original dataset of all the bills submitted to the Argentine Congress between 1983 and 2007, we analyze the relationship between women's presence in Congress and the introduction and approval of bills related to women's rights. Our dataset allows us to compare three periods with varying levels of women's presence in both legislative chambers (the first without quotas, the second with a quota in one chamber, and the third with full quota implementation in both chambers). Our results confirm the necessity of distinguishing between the process of legislative behavior and its outcome. We show that many more women's rights bills were introduced when women held a greater share of seats in both chambers. However, the approval rates of these bills actually declined. Despite their greater presence, women continue to be marginalized in the legislature and to suffer reduced political efficacy.

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How does political ambition affect strategies of cooperation in Congress? What activities do legislators develop with their peers to maximize their career goals? One of the main collaborative activities in a legislature, cosponsorship, has been widely analyzed in the literature as a position taking device. However, most findings have been restricted to environments where ambition is static (i.e., legislators pursuing permanent reelection), which restricts de facto the variety of causes and implications of legislative cooperation. I analyze patterns of cosponsorship as a function of ambition in a multilevel setting where legislators praise subnational executive positions more than a seat in the House. Through the analysis of about 48,000 bills introduced in the Argentine Congress between 1983 and 2007 and the development of a map of political careers, I follow a social networks approach to unfold different patterns of legislative cooperation. Findings show that patterns of cooperation among prospective gubernatorial candidates are strongly positive, while similar effects are not observed at the municipal level.

Evaluating the fairness of electoral reforms is a critical requirement for electoral accountability in any democracy. There is, however, no research measuring the expected seat benefit for incumbent reformers in newly democratized countries. Much of this delay is due to the technical difficulties of generalizing previous seat-vote models to multiparty races, a problem that has limited both subnational and cross-national comparisons of electoral regime change. Using a multilevel Bayesian model we solve this analytical problem and produce comparable estimates of partisan bias and majoritarian bias across the Argentine provinces. Our model estimates the effect of reforms across many electoral regimes and can be applied to comparative analyses of electoral reforms within and across countries. In the particular case of Argentina, we show large seat premiums for incumbent parties initiating electoral reforms.

How do legislators develop reputations to further their individual goals in environments with limited space for personalization? In this article, we evaluate congressional behavior by legislators with gubernatorial expectations in a unitary environment where parties control political activities and institutions hinder individualization. By analyzing the process of drafting bills in Uruguay, we demonstrate that deputies with subnational executive ambition tend to bias legislation towards their districts, especially those from small and peripheral units. Findings reinforce the importance of incorporating ambition to legislative studies and open a new direction towards the analysis of multiple career patterns within a specific case.