populism and accountabilty

CARLOS DE LA TORRE Y ENRIQUE PERUZZOTTI

guadalajara

Conferencia; El populismo como categoría conceptual y como práctica política: alcances y límites.; 2022

ITESO

Is populism actually hostile to any notion of accountability as its liberal critics contend? Or is there a specific populist understanding of the concept? The links between populism and accountability have not been sufficiently explored, in part because of the major challenge that populism as a governmental exercise poses to liberal mechanisms of governmental accountability. At the same time, those processes of institutional reform are made in the name of democratic accountability. What is the meaning that populism assigns to the concept of accountability? The chapter seeks to address that question by contrasting liberal and populist approaches to accountability. The first section reconstructs the liberal model of accountability by focusing on the widely popular conceptual framework of horizontal/vertical mechanisms proposed by Guillermo O´Donnell. The second section resorts to O´Donnell´s categories to present the main tenets of the populist notion of accountability. The third section concludes with some reflections on the limitations of both approaches