EXPLAINING THE VOTE - CONSTITUENCY CONSTRAINTS ON SOPHISTICATED VOTING

It is well documented that legislators' voting decisions are affected by the need to justify these decisions to home constituents. However, exactly how this need influences legislative decision making is as yet unclear. In this paper, a model of legislative vote and explanation is developed to explore the issue. All agents in the model are presumed to be purely policy outcome-oriented, so legislators seek reelection to pursue policy outcomes. The district and the legislator have different information regarding the legislator's preferences, however, and it is this feature that drives the analysis. The principal finding is that the need to explain votes improves the district's payoffs relative to the case of no explanation. This occurs in two ways, depending on the penalties for legislators being discovered not to have told the truth when justifying their legislative behavior to constituents. When the penalty is low, legislators whose preferences exactly reflect those of (the majority of) their constituents vote sincerely more often than otherwise to signal their preferences to the district. And when the penalty is sufficiently severe, such legislators vote sophisticatedly all the time and are capable of fully justifying any decision to constituents after the fact.