Explaining the vote: Claiming credit and managing blame in the United States Senate

Members of the United States Senate have choices about how to convey their Washington activities to their constituents. This study examines one of those choices: whether or not to explain a significant roll call vote. This study goes to the archival record to determine how members explain these votes in press releases, in newspaper coverage, in mass mailings, and on the floor of the Senate. Through analysis of three bills before the 106 th Congress, the study shows that there are key factors which affect the propensity for members to explain.; This study uses content analysis to look at senators' explanations of their votes on the 1999 Juvenile Justice Act, the 1999 Bankruptcy Reform Act, and the U.S.-China Relations Act of 2000. It examines both the explanations that members give for their own votes as well as the statements that they issue regarding the behavior of the Senate as a whole. Further, the study argues that members give explanations with two goals in mind: claiming credit and managing blame. The importance of the bill to the member's constituency, the member's electoral concerns, and other characteristics such as the member's position in the chamber are shown to affect the propensity for senators to offer these explanations.; The study discussed here makes three main contributions to the existing literature. First, it refocuses the examinations of political accounts toward the antecedents of these explanations. It demonstrates that not only how members vote, but how they explain these votes are important parts of the representation process. Second, the study also refocuses attention to explanations given both for positive and negative behavior. Finally, the study demonstrates a gulf between how senators wish to convey their representation (through their press releases) and how this representation is actually conveyed to the public (through news coverage). This work sets the stage for other studies of explanations in a political context.