Discipline, Accountability, and Legislative Voting in Latin America

Accountability in legislative representation implies that candidates communicate to voters what they will do if elected, that information about actions once in office is available to constituents, that representatives are responsive to the preferences and demands of constituents, and that they are punished for lack of responsiveness. There is an inherent tension between party discipline and responsiveness by individual legislators to their constituents. A number of recent institutional reforms in Latin America have sought to increase individual responsiveness and accountability of legislators, even at the expense of party discipline. The most important of these are reforms that put in place mixed electoral systems combining single-member districts with proportional representation, and the adoption of public voting in legislatures. This paper draws on interviews with legislators and staff in Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Venezuela, as well as surveys of legislators in the first three countries and secondary sources, to examine the effects of recent reforms on legislative accountability. Washington University Department of Political Science Working Paper #419 Thanks to Brian Crisp, Kent Eaton, Jeff Staton, and Susan Stokes for comments on an earlier draft. Support for field research provided by National Science Foundation Grant # SES-9986219 is gratefully acknowledged. Discipline, Accountability, and Legislative Voting in Latin America What information do citizens have about what goes on inside legislatures and what difference does it make to the sort of representation provided? The question is increasingly important as students of comparative politics evaluate the performance of institutions established in new, or renewed, democracies during the last decades of the 20 Century. In Latin America, where the capacity of the legislative branch relative to the executive is of perennial concern to political reformers and academics alike, there is substantial interest in the relationships between parties, legislators, the executive, and citizens. This essay examines the internal dynamics of parties across a number of Latin American legislatures, assessing the responsiveness of legislators to competing pressures from party leaders and other actors. The Latin American cases illustrate the frequent tension between partisan and individual accountability among legislators, but this tension is manifest to varying degrees within legislatures generally. By accountability, I mean the following things: • that representatives communicate to voters what they will do if elected, • that information about actions once in office is available to constituents, • that representatives are responsive to the preferences and demands of constituents, and • that they are punished for lack of responsiveness. Two recent studies concerned primarily with accountability of executives and parties as the embodiments of national government – by Manin, Prezeworski, and Stokes (2000), and Stokes (2001) – articulate a related notion of accountability, but one that focuses mainly on the first and last elements of my definition: campaign promises and electoral punishment. My conception of accountability encompasses transparency and responsiveness as well, in order to direct attention to the perspective of legislators, who are often subject to competing demands from national parties and more narrow electoral constituencies, and whose individual roles in the policymaking process are often obscured from public scrutiny. I suggest that changes on both these fronts, in