Reelection can Increase Legislative Cohesion: Evidence from Clientelistic Parties in Mexico

About this event

It is often argued that when legislators have electoral incentives to cultivate personal votes, parties are less cohesive. This is because legislators have an alternative principal with whom they must build bonds of accountability: their voters. I offer a theory for why this will not always be the case. I posit that when parties control access to the resources candidates need to cultivate a personal vote, the introduction of personal vote-seeking incentives can increase party cohesion, not decrease it. It can do so, because party leaders can condition a legislator's access to the resources they need to cultivate a personal vote on loyalty to the party's agenda. To test this theory, I turn to the case of Mexico, where an electoral reform in 2014 introduced the possibility of reelection for state legislators. I estimate the ideological placement of Mexican state legislators by applying correspondence analysis to a new dataset of over half a million speeches in 20 states from 2012 to 2018. Leveraging the staggered implementation of the reform, I conduct a difference-in-difference analysis of its effects on intra-party cohesion. Results accord with the theory and have broad ramifications for work on personal vote-seeking, for Mexican politics, and for countries introducing personal vote-oriented electoral reforms.