Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 TO WHOM ARE LEGISLATORS ACCOUNTABLE?
- 2 COLLECTIVE ACCOUNTABILITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
- 3 THE SUPPLY OF VISIBLE VOTES
- 4 DEMAND FOR VISIBLE VOTES
- 5 COUNTING VOTES
- 6 EXPLAINING VOTING UNITY
- 7 THE INDIVIDUAL-COLLECTIVE BALANCE
- Appendix: Interview Subjects by Country
- References
- Index
- Titles in the series
3 - THE SUPPLY OF VISIBLE VOTES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 TO WHOM ARE LEGISLATORS ACCOUNTABLE?
- 2 COLLECTIVE ACCOUNTABILITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
- 3 THE SUPPLY OF VISIBLE VOTES
- 4 DEMAND FOR VISIBLE VOTES
- 5 COUNTING VOTES
- 6 EXPLAINING VOTING UNITY
- 7 THE INDIVIDUAL-COLLECTIVE BALANCE
- Appendix: Interview Subjects by Country
- References
- Index
- Titles in the series
Summary
Let us make public the names of those who voted in favor, so our children will know whom they should curse.
Russian legislator Yuli Rybakov, on a proposal to accept nuclear waste from other countries in exchange for cash (National Public Radio 2001)Visible Votes and Accountability
Questions about Visible Votes
Whatever else voters in the United States know or do not know, they can count on being alerted as to whom they should curse for any decision Congress makes. Interest groups publish widely cited “report cards” based on legislative voting records, challengers comb through their incumbent opponents' records, and incumbents whose voting records are out of sync with their districts' interests pay an electoral price (Canes-Wrone, Brady, and Cogan 2002). It is sometimes held that elected representatives generally operate according to a calculus familiar to U.S. legislators. In her cross-national study of corruption, for example, Susan Rose-Ackerman (1999:127) offers as axiomatic that, “If politicians vote against the interests of their constituents, they can expect to suffer at the polls.” But is this true? In many legislatures, who voted for and against a given proposal is almost never revealed, and proposals to record votes at all are contentious.
The conditions that foster, or undermine, political accountability are increasingly central to students of comparative democracies (Adserá, Boix, and Payne 2003; Cleary and Stokes 2006; Johnson and Crisp 2003; Stokes 2001). The broad question motivating this chapter, and the next, is whether the information necessary to make individual accountability possible is available from legislatures.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Legislative Voting and Accountability , pp. 43 - 67Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008