The 2010 Reelection Bid: Addressing the Effect of Legislative Effectiveness

Previous works about legislative behavior emphasize looking for reelection as one of the main motivations. Nonetheless, in contexts like the Colombian where reelection is not an obvious choice it is necessary to look for the motivations for continuing having a seat in Congress. It is proposed that policy-seeking could be one of them. This goal in itself is believed to be a motivation for looking for reelection, but it would also have an instrumental value under certain circumstances. To test this argument, it is used a dataset comprising the bills proposed between 2006 and 2010 in the Colombian Chamber of Representatives. This data is used to evaluate whether the effectiveness to promote new legislation had any effect in aiming for reelection during the 2010 legislative elections.