This paper argues that vote explanations provide opportunities for German legislators to either criticize the party line or to signal to geographic constituents to seek personal votes. We envision these behavioral strategies to depict two “unofficial” faces of party disunity that supplement the “official” face of deviant choices in roll call votes. The paper furthermore argues that legislators use explanations in strategic ways contingent upon their goals and context. Specifically, we hypothesize that frustrations in office seeking efforts results in greater criticism towards one’s own party. Furthermore, we hypothesize that success in personal vote seeking results in greater signaling behavior towards geographic constituents. The paper empirically test these hypotheses on the basis of a text-based quantitative analysis of vote explanations in the 17th Bundestag. Our analysis allows to not only gauge the extent to which parties function as unitary actors in greater depth but also to better understand the electoral sources of legislative party unity vis-à-vis party organizational sources.
