political science

minimizing procedural barriers to recorded voting boost the amount of information
available to those outside the legislature about legislative decision-making.
Party leaders and the members of dominant coalitions sometimes prefer not to

make voting records public even when they are kept, and not to use electronic voting
systems even when they are in place. By virtue of their physical location and resources,

party and coalition leaders are institutionally advantaged in their ability to monitor
voting, even when formal records are not systematically produced and published.

Non-public voting thus produces an asymmetry of information between legislative
insiders and citizens, that insiders can exploit in pressuring legislators on votes.

Public voting, by contrast, empowers citizens to monitor their representatives, and
empowers many legislators themselves to resist pressure to approve policies that
might attract public opprobrium (Brennan and Pettit 1990 ; Snyder and Ting 2003 ).

With remarkable frequency, however, the basic conditions necessary for votes to be
public—recording and publication—are not met. Further study of both the causes

and eVects of legislative transparency will help clarify the conditions under which
legislatures realize their potential as public forums of deliberation.

4 Information
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The policy decisions legislators are called upon to make are frequently complex. They

may depend on technical information that can be marshaled and deciphered only
by experts, or entail trade-oVs among competing demands that interact in non-

obvious ways. Where politics is suYciently professionalized that representatives can

Table 22.1 Mean number of recorded votes per year across twenty-four

legislatures in the Americas

Procedure:

Record by... Technology Votes Legislatures (chamber, if bicameral)

Default Electronic 459 Chile (both), Nicaragua, Peru

Manual 350 US (upper)

Request Electronic 154 Argentina (lower), Brazil (both),

Mexico (both), US (lower), Venezuela

Manual 4 Argentina (upper), Bolivia (both),

Colombia (both), Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador,

Guatemala, Panama, Uruguay (both)

440 john m. carey