Replication Data for: When Reelection Increases Party Unity: Evidence from Parties in Mexico

It is often argued that when legislators have personal vote-seeking incentives, parties are less unified because legislators need to build bonds of accountability with their voters. I argue that these effects depend on a legislator's ability to cultivate a personal vote. When parties control access to the ballot and the resources candidates need to cultivate personal votes, they can condition a legislator's access to these resources on loyalty to the party's agenda. I test this theory by conducting a difference-in-differences analysis that leverages the staggered implementation of the 2014 Mexican Electoral Reform. This reform introduced the possibility of consecutive reelection for state legislators, increasing their incentives to cultivate personal votes. I study unity in position-taking and voting behavior of Mexican state legislators from 2012 to 2018. To analyze position-taking, I apply correspondence analysis to a new dataset of over half a million legislative speeches in 20 states. To study voting, I analyze over 14,500 roll-call votes in 14 states during the same period. Results show that reelection incentives increased intra-party unity, which has broad implications for countries introducing electoral reforms aiming to personalize politics. The analysis in the paper is based on votes and speech patterns. *Votes -Please see dofile replication_votes -Lines 13 to 3668 provide the code to calculate the proportion that a legislator votes with their party leader each month. These are calculated from the csv files in folders csv_01 and csv_02 (these correspond to the first and second legislature in the analysis for each state) -votes_m is the working file that stores the proportions -Running this produces the analysis file votes_clean.dta (also provided) -Main Paper Analysis uses votes_clean.dta and begins in line 3670 of replication_votes.do -Appendix Analysis begins in line 3828 -allvotesraw.dta is necessary to perform robustness check in Supp. Appendix Section A6 *Speeches -Please see dofile replication_speeches -File correspondance.dta contains the results from the correspondance analysis from raw text. Please note that the speech files occupy significant space, if you want them please contact me at luciam@wustl and we can arrange a data transfer. -Main Paper Analysis uses and begins in line 41 of replication_speeches.do -Appendix Analysis begins in line 230 -speak.dta is necessary to perform robustness check in Supp. Appendix Section A12.1 -leg_covariates.dta is necessary to perform robustness check in Supp. Appendix Section A10 -state_corr_mc.dta is necessary to perform robustness check in Supp. Appendix Section A7