The Various Accountability Deficits of Delegative Democracy

ENRIQUE PERUZZOTTI

Buenos Aires

Conferencia; Guillermo O'Donnell and the Study of Democracy; 2012

Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame

The regional debate on democratic deficits was strongly influenced by the work of Guillermo O’Donnell. His concept of delegative democracy inaugurated a fruitful debate about the peculiar nature of some of the new democracies and the troublesome accountability deficits which that subtype of polyarchy exhibited. Departing from the notion of delegative democracy, the chapter will describe O’Donnell’s arguments about the need to strengthen legal controls on government to improve the overall functioning of the principle of democratic accountability. At the same time, it will argue for a need to address the deficit of political accountability of delegative polyarchies, a deficit that has been largely under-conceptualized in the debate on delegative democracy. Such under-conceptualization is rooted, I argue, in the predominance of a common electoral understanding of political accountability that is shared by delegative and representative models of polyarchy alike. To properly address such deficit, it is necessary to break with the minimalist stress on elections as the quintessential mechanism of accountability to propose a broader notion of democratic accountability that could properly tackle many of the challenges of any project of democratic deepening faces. This is done in the last section, which introduces the concept of ‘mediated politics’ as a theoretical framework for analyzing the practice of democratic representation. The idea of mediated politics conceives democratic representation as the product of a multiplicity of interactions that take place in various ‘partial regimes’ that serve as a point of encounter between a plurality of constituencies and the political system. The goal of this conceptual exercise is to highlight another troublesome (vertical) accountability deficit which was not properly addressed by O’Donnell’s analyses: the hostility of delegative democracies toward mediated politics.