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Legal Inequality and Federalism: Domestic Violence Laws in the Argentine Provinces

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Catalina Smulovitz
Catalina Smulovitz*
Affiliation:
Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. [email protected]
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Abstract

This article shows that the institutional design of Argentine federalism allows for differences in the protective scope of the provincial domestic violence laws. It holds that the broad legislative capacities of subnational districts enable the working of political and social local factors, which, in turn, determine heterogeneity in these laws’ protective scope. It analyzes, compares, and measures 37 laws on domestic violence sanctioned between 1992 and 2009. It advances a methodology to measure their differences and it evaluates the impact local factors have on legal variations across jurisdictions. The article shows that the protective scope of these laws is determined by the intensity of the local electoral competition and by the strength of women's organizational capacity. Results also show that time matters insofar as it allows for the diffusion of more protective laws.

Type
Research
Information
Latin American Politics and Society , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , Fall 2015 , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 2015

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