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.