Societal Accountability in Latin America

SMULOVITZ CATALINA, PERUZZOTTI ENRIQUE

JOURNAL OF DEMOCRACY

The Johns Hopkins University Press,

Año: 2000 vol. 11 p. 147 - 158

1045-5736

Citizens actions aimed at overseeing political authorities are becoming an established aspect of political life and are rapidly redefining traditional links between the represented and their representatives. The emergence of rights-oriented discourses and politics, of media scandals exposing governmental wrongdoing and of social movements organized around the demand of due process are only a few examples of the ways in which this politics of accountability is taking place. It is our contention that the nature of the new democratic regimes and the scope of citizen’s rights are being defined in this succession of conflicts and struggles.       By focusing on the workings of traditional mechanisms of accountability, such as elections or the division of powers and the existence of an effective system of checks and balance among them,  recent evaluations of the institutional performance of Latin American democracies ignore one of the most distinctive features of the recent wave of democratization in Latin America: the development of societal mechanisms of accountability . This article analyzes the operation of these non traditional forms of control and their contribution to the development of more accountable governments: