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Institutions constrain the strategies legislators adopt to achieve career goals, and they also shape legislators’ identities about their job. The institutional milieu of a country’s politics should draw certain types of people into politics. Katznelson and Weingast (2005, 10) argue that “individuals often have preferences by virtue of being in an institutional and political environment with determinate characteristics. . . . Indeed, members without these preferences soon would cease to be members.” Institutions constrain Honduran deputies, but there is still room for choice about how they will do their job, and legislators are unlikely to be a homogeneous group.1 Roles or identities are the product 1. By exploring their patterns of party switching, Desposato (2006b) demonstrates that Brazilian legislators are not homogeneous. He finds that deputies “use parties for electoral, ideological and distributive ends, but not for institutional advancement,” and that “the roles parties play for politicians are not static within a political system but can vary with electorate preferences. More simply, legislators with different kinds of constituents use parties to very different ends” (77). Hagopian (2001, 11) surveyed legislators in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil (in 1997, 1998, and 1999/2001, respectively) to find out how “they view their roles as elected representatives” and which role they prioritize. She asked legislators to select and rank order three roles from a list of six: “fulfilling party program; representing those without voice in the political system; working to realize the objectives of social groups; securing resources for the district; resolving pragmatically people’s problems; and promoting policy or legislation according to public opinion” (13). In Argentina, the most commonly selected role was promoting policy or legislation according to public opinion, and second was pragmatically solving people’s problems. In Chile, these were again the two most common choices, but their order was reversed. In Brazil, the most common role was promoting policy according to public opinion, and the second most common was securing resources for the district (13). She argues that this “observed variation in role definition,” as well as the differences she finds in how legislators allocate their time and staff resources, indicate that while electoral laws constrain legislators (by giving voters or party leaders power over their career futures), such a simple, rationalchoice -based explanation for behavior is theoretically incomplete because institutions do not create a single national pattern of political representation (2). She calls for research into the nature of legislators’ constituencies as a possible explanation for the different roles legislators adopt, and to explain why the opinions and behaviors of legislators differ from what would be expected from a purely rational choice analysis of the constraints legislators face from electoral and nomination institutions (35). SIX institutions, incentives, and roles: legislators’ identities about their job of the institutional milieu that over time helps “establish the identities and categories of actors and their range of possibilities” (ibid., 4; see also Hall and Taylor 1996, 939). This chapter adds a historical institutionalist perspective to what so far has been a largely rational choice type of examination of institutions and incentives. Both approaches “acknowledge that a good deal of behaviour is goal-oriented or strategic but that the range of options canvassed by a strategic actor is likely to be circumscribed by a culturally-specific sense of appropriate action” (Hall and Taylor 1996, 956). Chapter 5 assessed the capacity of poor and rich people in Honduras to monitor government officials, and used the theory about institutions and incentives to assess both their capacity to sanction as well as the strategy a deputy needs to adopt in order to build a political career. This chapter and chapter 7 examine micro-level observable implications of the theory of incentives to represent poor people—in other words, the roles deputies adopt within the constraints created by institutions. Deputies decide how they will do their job, whether that includes focusing on legislation, party work, or constituency service. Politicians bring their own identities and preferences to their job in the Congress, though the range of preferences is influenced by the institutional milieu of the country, and those preferences then influence whether a deputy will benefit from representing poor people—and if so, how a deputy will work for poor constituents. The first step to studying this micro-level observable implication of the theory is to conduct a role analysis of a group of elected officials to determine their identities—the ways they see their job opportunities within a set of institutional constraints. This is the subject of this...

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