Experience Counts: Mixed Member Elections and Mexico's Chamber of Deputies

Abstract

This paper draws on the legislative politics literature to explain the composition of commission assignments in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies. Members are elected to the chamber via a mixed method electoral system. Grounded in the argument of an ‘electoral connection’ and based on experiences in the German Bundestag, New Zealand, Japanese and Scottish parliaments and the Welsh Assembly, the literature to date predicts that the different routes to the legislature will produce different behaviour once someone is elected to the chamber. This is not the case for the Mexican Chamber of Deputies. The Mexican constitutional prohibition of re-election for Mexican federal deputies presents a number of obstacles for the ‘electoral connection’ to work and, in consequence, there is much weaker evidence in support of electoral system effects.