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Almost all legislators are subordinate to party leadership within their assemblies. Institutional factors shape whether, and to what degree, legislators are also subject to pressure from other principals whose demands may conflict with those of party leaders. This article presents a set of hypotheses on the nature of competing pressures driven by formal political institutions and tests the hypotheses against a new dataset of legislative votes from across 19 different countries. Voting unity is lower where legislators are elected under rules that provide for intraparty competition than where party lists are closed, marginally lower in federal than unitary systems, and the effects on party unity of being in government differ in parliamentary versus presidential systems. In the former, governing parties are more unified than the opposition, win more, and suffer fewer losses due to disunity. In systems with elected presidents, governing parties experience no such boosts in floor unity, and their legislative losses are more apt to result from cross-voting.

Legislatures are the core representative institutions in modern democracies. Citizens want legislatures to be decisive, and they want accountability, but they are frequently disillusioned with the representation legislators deliver. Political parties can provide decisiveness in legislatures, and they may provide collective accountability, but citizens and political reformers frequently demand another type of accountability from legislators – at the individual level. Can legislatures provide both kinds of accountability? This book considers what collective and individual accountability require and provides the most extensive cross-national analysis of legislative voting undertaken to date. It illustrates the balance between individualistic and collective representation in democracies, and how party unity in legislative voting shapes that balance. In addition to quantitative analysis of voting patterns, the book draws on extensive field and archival research to provide an extensive assessment of legislative transparency throughout the Americas.

An Ideal Electoral System?I t is widely argued by social scientists of electoral systems that there is no such thing as the ideal electoral system. Although many scholars harbor strong preferences for one type of system over another, in published work and in the teaching of electoral systems it is standard practice to acknowledge the inevitability of trade-offs. If a country wants a highly representative parliament, where the assembly is a microcosm of the pluralism of opinions in society, a proportional representation (PR) system is best. Alternatively, if a country wants the party that wins the most votes in an election to form a stable single-party government, a majoritarian system is best. You have to choose which you care about most: representation or accountable government. You cannot have both, so the mantra goes.A glance at the electoral systems of new democracies, or reforms to electoral systems in established democracies, suggests that electoral engineers regularly John M. Carey is Professor of Government, HB6108, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755 (john.carey@dartmouth.edu). Simon Hix is Professor of European and Comparative Politics, Room CON.H307, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK (S.Hix@lse.ac.uk).The authors would like to thank Joshua Kernoff and Marcus Wagner for research assistance, and seminar participants at the University of Michigan, University of Salamanca, University of Virginia, Trinity University, MIT, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, University of Essex, LSE, and Dartmouth College for valuable feedback.1 All data used in this study, including coding and data sources, as well as descriptive statistics, information on countries and electoral systems, and supplementary analyses, are available in the Supplementary Information online: http://www.dartmouth .edu/∼jcarey/Data%20Archive.html. seek to soften the representation-accountability trade-off and achieve both objectives. For example, some electoral systems have small multimember districts, others have high legal thresholds below which parties cannot win seats, while others have "parallel" mixed-member systems, where the PR seats do not compensate for disproportional outcomes in the single-member seats. These types of systems sacrifice pure proportionality for the specific purpose of increasing accountability.To what extent can these efforts to provide both representation and accountability be realized, and by what sorts of electoral rules? To answer these questions we do the following. In the next section, we discuss three common approaches electoral system designers employ to shape the representation versus accountability trade-off, focusing our attention primarily on the number of seats available in each electoral district (or district magnitude). We then introduce our dataset of 609 election outcomes in 81 countries and present some descriptive statistics to illustrate the trade-off at stake.

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Term limits on legislators were adopted in 21 states during the early 1990s. Beginning in 1996, the limits legally barred incumbents from reelection in 11 states, and they will do so in four more by 2010. In 2002, we conducted the only survey of legislators in all 50 states aimed at assessing the impact of term limits on state legislative representation. We found that term limits have virtually no effect on the types of people elected to office—whether measured by a range of demographic characteristics or by ideological predisposition—but they do have measurable impact on certain behaviors and priorities reported by legislators in the survey, and on the balance of power among various institutional actors in the arena of state politics. We characterize the biggest impact on behavior and priorities as a “Burkean shift,” whereby term-limited legislators become less beholden to the constituents in their geographical districts and more attentive to other concerns. The reform also increases the power of the executive branch (governors and the bureaucracy) over legislative outcomes and weakens the influence of majority party leaders and committee chairs, albeit for different reasons

We build on work estimating and explaining the incumbency advantage in state legislative elections. Our work makes advances in three ways. First, our model measures the effect of incumbency on the probability of reelection, rather than on candidate vote share or margin of victory. Second, we accommodate both multimember district (MMD) elections that are excluded from most previous studies and uncontested and partially contested (MMD) races. Third, we use an improved method of controlling for the underlying partisan makeup of districts. We calculate incumbency advantage using data from elections in 96 legislative chambers across 49 states in the 1992-1994 electoral cycle. We then model relative incumbency advantage across the states as a function of institutional characteristics. We find that district type, term length, and electoral formula have substantial effects on incumbent safety; incumbents in multimember post and free-for-all districts are more vulnerable than those in traditional SMDs, as are those with four-year, rather than two-year, terms. Professionalization also affects incumbency safety, and salary rather than other resources best accounts for incumbency advantage.How much does incumbency improve electoral prospects for state legislators, and why? In the last 10 years, following earlier work on U.S. congressional elections, students of state legislatures have made substantial progress in estimating and explaining the extent to which incumbency augments the vote shares of state legislators who run for reelection. In this paper, we build on these advances in three important ways. First, we offer a model to estimate and explain the effect of incumbency on the probability of reelection, rather than on

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