Legislating Fiscal Imbalance: Using Tax Policy to Protect Fiscal Decentralization in the Argentine Congress

Why do common-pool problems persist over time in federations? The literature shows that macro institutional, economic, and political incentives facilitate bailouts through intergovernmental transfers and debt management. Little research, however, explores the legislative mechanisms that prevent common-pool problems from being effectively addressed. This article focuses on a most central mechanism: tax lawmaking. We argue that lawmakers, whose careers rest in the hands of provincial constituencies, administer the legislative process to promote bills that protect the federal transfers that finance vertical fiscal imbalances and to amend proposals that seek to change them. Using an expert-coded dataset designed to assess the direction and magnitude of tax policy change, as described by the amendments proposed by legislators to the full set of tax bills proposed to the Argentine Congress since 1983, we document the legislative dynamics underpinning the common-pool problems of decentralized fiscal federal arrangements.