Societal and Horizontal Accountability. Lessons from a Fruitful Relatioship

SMULOVITZ, CATALINA, PERUZZOTTI, ENRIQUE

Institutions, Accountability and Democratic Governance in Latin America

Oxford University Press

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2003; p. 309 - 331

Citizen´s actions aimed at overseeing political authorities are becoming an established aspect of political life and are rapidly redifinig traditional links between the represented and their representatives. The emergence of a politics of rights-oriented discourses, of media scandals exposing governmental wrongdoing and of social movements organized around the demand of due process are only a few examples of the way in which this politics of accountability is taking place. In spite of the scope of the phenomenon, recent evaluations of the institutional performance of Latin American democracies hace belittled the significance of theses societal mechanisms of accountability. Current debates on the nature of theses regimes tend to view the weakness or inadequacy of traditional accountability mechanisms as the defining characteristic of theses democracies. 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 balances among them, theses diagnoses tend to ignore the growth of alternative forms of political control that rely on citizens´ actions and organizations. By focusing on traditional mechanisms, the literature is overlooking the fact that societal mechanisms of accountability are not only distinctive features of the recent wave of democratization in Latin America, but also that they are critical for the activation of horizontal mechanisms. In this article is analized the ways in which theses different mechanisms of accountability interact. We consider some conceptual aspects of this relationship and analyse its actual operation through two specific cases.