The System of Couplings as an Institutional Mechanism for the Territorialization of the Electoral Contest

The Case of the Province of Tucumán

Abstract

The selection and implementation of electoral systems, regardless of their type or character, is not exempt from an underlying political motivation. It is from this perspective that the modification of the electoral system in force in the province of Tucumán is observed until its modification in 2006 and the consecration of the socalled «coupling system» in the provincial Magna Carta. The fundamental intuition of this work is that the selection and regulation of the aforementioned system implied a deliberate search for territorialization of popular representation and, therefore, the generation and consolidation of local leadership over provincial leadership, which can be verified in the reduction of party concentration indicators and, consequently, the increase in fragmentation rates and the effective number of parties. At the same time, this work sets out the initial lines for addressing a second desired consequence of the reform of the electoral system: the definition of a mechanism that would allow the resolution of internal political disputes that arose within the governing party in the provincial electoral arena, establishing objective criteria for their resolution.