Social Accountability Revisited

ENRIQUE PERUZZOTTI

Kyoto

Conferencia; International Symposium on Latin American Politics and Society; 2017

Accountability ?a concept that until the return to democracy had been foreign to the political vocabulary of Latin America? became the buzzword of democratization studies, generating a vast quantity of studies that called attention on the alleged accountability deficits of the newly institutionalized democracies. Accountability deficits were considered a main impediment to the full institutionalization of liberal democracy and consequently there were many calls for addressing them as the way to democratic betterment. This paper revisits accountability debates in Latin America by focusing of the developments of one specific dimension of the concept: vertical social accountability. The argument that guides the analysis is that the original emphasis on accountability deficits have shifted from a liberal conception of accountability as limited government to a democratic concern about governmental responsiveness. Such developments pose important challenges to the conceptualization of the original conceptualization of accountability in general as well as for the most specific notion of social accountability. The article seeks to describe those developments and proposes a revision of the initial formulation of the social accountability argument and of the broader concept of delegative democracy in which the former had been situated.The article divides into three sections. Section 1 presents the initial accountability framework that inspired the debate on delegative democracy, deficits of horizontal accountability. Section 2 focuses on the original formulation of the social accountability argument. Section 3 revisits the social accountability argument in light of ulterior developments in that area. Section 4 returns to the broader debate on accountability arguing for the need to shift from the narrow understanding of accountability as limited government to a properly democratic notion of the term, which without relinquishing the former´s concern for governmental controls, emphasizes the relevance of structures of political mediation in producing governmental responsiveness.