Transparency, Party Unity, Votes, and Accountability

This book asks, Who are the political actors in a position to place demands on lawmakers and, given the mix of pressures, what kind of legislative accountability can we expect? The focus throughout is on legislators' votes. Whatever other important representative and policymaking activities transpire in assemblies, votes remain the core blocks on which legislative decisions are built. I concentrate on whether votes can be easily monitored by those outside the legislature – their visibility – and, in those legislatures where votes are recorded and available for analysis, on patterns of voting among parties.

These two elements of legislative voting, transparency and party unity, are key components of two distinct types of legislative accountability: individual and collective. When the votes of individual legislators are not visible, it is difficult for those outside the legislature to know whether a representative has acted in accordance with their preferences. Some measure of voting unity within groups is necessary for collective accountability as well, because, if its members do not vote together regularly, a group cannot be regarded as shaping legislative outcomes.

Transparency and voting unity are matters of degree, not absolutes, and much of the book is an effort to document and then to explain how much of each we see across various legislatures. The first task is primarily one of mapping – of visiting legislatures, personally and virtually, in order to discover what information about votes is available.