- 2 Accountability through Transparency
In light of this, it is worth considering the extent to which legislatures do, in
practice, serve as public forums of decision-making. That is, to what extent are the
essential components of legislative decisions visible to outside observers? As a
common currency of decisions across legislatures, I suggestXoor votes. Legislators
may provide actual public justiWcations for their votes in speeches and debates in
committee or on theXoor, but the amount of attention and energy required to
monitor such activities systematically is well beyond what can be reasonably
expected from citizens. Instead, the bottom line of each legislator’s support for
any policy proposal is her or hisXoor vote. Floor votes are where statutes, budgets,
treaties, veto overrides, and constitutional amendments are ultimately approved or
rejected, and the availability of vote records indicates how much hard information
citizens have about the most consequential actions of their representatives (Smith
1989 ). The vast bulk of legislativeXoor voting is, technically, public, insofar as votes
cast by secret ballot are rare, but in many legislatures the votes of individual
representatives are, eVectively, not public because no records beyond aggregate
outcomes (e.g. 200 aye, 100 nay) are published.
Table 22. 1 presents data on the mean annual number ofXoor votes for which the
position (aye, nay, abstain, non-vote, absent) of each representative is recorded
and published for twenty-four legislative chambers across sixteen presidential
democracies in the Americas during the 1990 s and/or early 2000 s. The overall
variance in the amount of information about legislative voting available to those
outside the chambers, however, is striking, particularly in contrast to the United
States, where full disclosure ofXoor voting records is an essential part of legislative
politics, of campaign discourse, and of academic studies of Congress and (increas-
ingly) the state legislatures. Although systematic data on recorded votes from parts
of the world beyond the Americas are not yet available, it is clear that availability is
spotty. Variability in transparency exists across parliamentary as well as presidential
systems, and information about votes is plentiful in some environments and absent
in others (Noury 2005 ; Vote World 2005 ).
In every case, members may request recorded votes. The procedural barriers to
such requests vary. In Table 22. 1 , the cases are grouped according to the procedural
barriers to recording—whether recording is the default procedure or must be
requested, and whether an electronic voting system is used. The connection between
the procedural obstacles to recording votes and the amount of such information
available is not surprising, but it is striking nonetheless. The experiences of individ-
ual countries that have adopted electronic voting suggest that once systems are in
place, demands grow to alter rules of procedure to facilitate recorded voting, and
where these demands are successful, the numbers of recorded votes skyrocket (Carey
2005 b). The bottom line here is that what time-series information is available
supports the clear pattern in the cross-national data: electronic voting and
legislative organization 439