The Strategic Use of Legislative Voting Procedures

Abstract

Legislative votes can be taken by roll call—noting the position of each individual member—or by some form of indication (sitting or standing, shouting yea or nay, etc.)—noting only an aggregate outcome. Cameral rules define one method of voting as the standard operating procedure and how to invoke any alternative voting methods. We develop a series of hypotheses related to position taking to explain why, when procedures would typically lead to a vote taken by indication, legislators choose to vote by roll call—a means that makes it much easier for actors outside the chamber to observe the positions taken by individual legislators and partisan blocs. With data from Argentina and Mexico, we test these hypotheses regarding the strategic choice of vote procedures and their relationship to observed party unity.

Candidate Selection Methods, Cooperation and Legislative Effectiveness

“…Furthermore, when they do cooperate, they do so first with members from other parties and only as a last resort with those from their own party. This finding accords with previous studies demonstrating that intra-party cooperation is influenced by representatives' perceptions about different values for different issues and the internal distribution of power within the party (Pedersen 2010;Crisp & Driscoll 2012). However, in daily parliamentary life representatives do use various cooperative strategies depending on the interests they want to advance (Tam-Cho & Fowler 2010;Marangoni & Tronconi 2011).…”

“…When cooperation is a demand of party unity or the majority party (Cox & McCubbins 2005;Martin & Vanberg 2008;Crisp & Driscoll 2012), representatives will comply with the demand. Cox and McCubbins (2005) claimed that the "cartelization" of the majority party makes strategic use of cameral procedures and the distribution of resources to ensure that those bills that reach a vote for final passage will not divide the government coalition and will preserve the image of the ruling party for the good of its members.…”

“…Cox and McCubbins (2005) claimed that the "cartelization" of the majority party makes strategic use of cameral procedures and the distribution of resources to ensure that those bills that reach a vote for final passage will not divide the government coalition and will preserve the image of the ruling party for the good of its members. Crisp and Driscoll (2012) examined the strategic choice of voting procedures and their relationship to maintaining party unity. Representatives choose their strategies based on the reasoning that some items have different value than others.…”

Parliamentary Voting Procedures in Comparison

“…As these voting procedures vary considerably across parliamentary chambers (see for instance Carey 2009;Carrubba et al 2008;Crisp and Driscoll 2012;Hug 2010;Inter-Parliamentary Union 1986;Saalfeld 1995), the datagenerating process that leads to roll call data inevitably varies. Nevertheless, scholars have relied on roll call data from different contexts without taking these differences into account (see for instance Carey 2007a;Coman 2012;Depauw and Martin 2009;Hix and Noury 2007).…”

“…While the Inter-Parliamentary Union (1986) (see also Union Interparlementaire 1966), Saalfeld (1995), Carey (2009) and Crisp and Driscoll (2012) provided such information, it is either dated (first two sources) or offers only partial coverage (the latter three sources). Consequently, in this paper we wish to address two important questions, one descriptive and the other explanatory.…”