This article analyzes tendencies regarding the way parliamentary commissions work at the lower House levels in four Southern Cone countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. Our point of departure is a framework that considers three types of variables: structural, procedural and those related specifically to the power that the commissions themselves hold. We have attempted to verify what types of incentives have been generated by each country´s rules of legislative organization: for clientelist actions guided by electoral logical, as advocated by the distributive model; for specialization, as the information model advocates, or for the fulfillment of party interests, as the political party model proposes. We have concluded that all the houses provide some space for all three types of behavior, thus indicating that these models are not mutually exclusive and that legislature dynamics are influenced by other variables among which patterns of Executive-Legislative relationships figure prominently.
commissions; incentives; institutional rules; political behavior; models of legislative organization
