"How Nationalized Is the Local Politics in Argentina? An Analysis of the Electoral Performance in the Municipalities of the Buenos Aires Province"

JULIETA SUÁREZ CAO; MARÍA LAURA TAGINA; MARÍA CELESTE RATTO

Chicago

Conferencia; 68th MPSA Annual National Conference (Midwest Political Science Association); 2010

Midwest Political Science Association

Party and electoral integration across different levels of government is part of a growing research agenda. Vertical and horizontal integration are also believed to be relevant to a number of desirable political and economic outcomes, yet are they always the norm? Coattail effects, coordination among parties and voters, and institutional contagion, among other features, impact on the way in which party competition is nested across territory. This paper argues that in Argentina the increasing denationalization of politics is also witnessed the local level. Even in the most unlikely scenario of the province in which municipal governments are the least autonomous –the Buenos Aires Province, we find evidence of an important decoupling between local and provincial, and local and national arenas. We use ordinary regression and multinomial logit models, with electoral data from 1983 to 2009, to assess to what extent the local competition is becoming more localized. In order to evaluate this, we test several institutional and socioeconomic variables. Among additional findings, we uncover opposite dynamics taking place in urban and rural municipalities that are consistent with the extant literature on informal practices and institutions.