Accountability Deficits of Delegative Democracies

ENRIQUE PERUZZOTTI

Reflections on Uneven Democracies. The Legacy of Guillermo O´Donnell

John Hopkins University Press

Lugar: Baltimore; Año: 2014; p. 270 - 284

The post-consolidation debate in Latin America revolves around questions of institutional betterment and democratic deepening that drives us to rethink to what extent are inherited notions of democracy useful for framing such an agenda. Once the attention focuses on democratic deficits and the need to democratize existing democracies, the minimalist approach to democracy that influenced the literature on transitions and consolidation loses its conceptual appeal. If the minimalist notion of democracy ?understood as a regime based on regular, free, and competitive elections and of a set of constitutional freedoms that make them possible?was useful as a minimum criteria for determining the end of a transition from authoritarianism (the holding of free and competitive elections) as well as the success of the process of regime consolidation (the regular holding of free and competitive elections), itis of limited value when the issue at stake is how to deepen existing democracies. Democratic minimalism establishes too low of a benchmark for evaluating the kind of political and institutional reforms that are the concern of a period that requires a stronger notion of accountability. 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 minimalist models of democracy 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,whichintroduces 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.