Political Accountability

Antonino Palumbo, Richard Bellamy, Richard Bellamy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351910422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Political accountability forms a cornerstone of modern democracy: it directs the political system towards the public interest and allows the exercise of the principles of autonomy and self-determination that lie at the core of democratic politics. Sadly, existing democracies, with their large, centralized bureaucracies, have evolved in ways that progressively undermine the ability of citizens to keep their representatives accountable and political regimes responsive. Far from reversing this trend, the neoliberal reforms introduced since the 1980s have increased that accountability gap. Globalization and the alleged passage from 'government' to 'governance' have aggravated the problem further. The notion of accountability that survives these changes is a problematic form of auditing carried out by a constellation of quangos, autonomous agencies and NGOs whose own accountability is problematic. This volume collects the main contributions to current debates on political accountability. It explores the challenges traditional conventions of accountability face today at the domestic, trans- and international levels and indicates the distinctive solutions those challenges require.

Part I
Political Accountability and Representative Democracy

[1]
The Authority of Democracy^*

THOMAS CHRISTIANO
Philosophy; University of Arizona

DEMOCRATIC decision-making has two very different evaluative aspects that sometimes collide and usually complement each other to some degree. On the one hand, we judge democratic decisions from the point of view of the quality of the outcomes. We concern ourselves with whether the outcomes are just or whether they are efficient or protect liberty and promote the common good. This is sometimes called the substantive or outcome dimension of assessment of democratic procedures. On the other hand, we evaluate the decisions from the point of view of how they are made or the quality of the procedure. We are concerned to make the decision in a way that includes everyone who by right ought to be included and that is fair to all the participants. Here we may think that the method by which the decisions are made should be intrinsically fair.

In my view these two dimensions of assessment are irreducible. But this is not the way everyone sees it. Some, whom I shall call monists, think that there is only one form of assessment and that other assessments are reducible to it. For example, instrumentalists or best results theorists like Philippe Van Parijs think that the way in which democratic decisions ought to be made is entirely a matter of what will produce the best outcomes.¹ On their view, the only question to be asked in evaluating democratic procedures regards the quality of the outcomes of these procedures. Pure proceduralists, on the other hand, see outcomes as essentially evaluable solely in terms of the procedure that brought them about. There are two versions of this kind of view. One version of the view is attributed to some American legal theorists who wish to justify a rather strong form of judicial restraint with regard to the decisions of the American Congress. They argue that the Supreme Court of the United States ought to defer to virtually all the decisions that Congress makes except in the most obvious cases of violation of the literal words or specific intentions of the framers of the Constitution.² Some theorists of deliberative democracy, for quite different reasons, appear to hold to a kind of pure procedural view as well. They think that if a process is one that is genuinely deliberative and democratic, then it justifies the outcome, or the fact that the outcome results from the procedure constitutes its justice.³

Monistic views entail relatively straightforward accounts of the authority of democracy. On their accounts, there is only one dimension of assessment for political decision-making institutions. For pure proceduralism if a process is genuinely democratic then it has authority. That is, justice demands that individuals comply with the decision-making process. The demand is straightforwardly pre-emptive of other considerations because, by hypothesis, there are no other considerations that have any weight. The demand is content independent: compliance is required regardless of the content of the democratic decision or the collectively authorized decision as the case may be.⁴

Instrumentalism is a bit more complex; it disaggregates authority in two ways. First, the focus of an instrumentalist justification of authority must ultimately be on each subject over whom authority is wielded. For an instrumentalist, the best outcomes may be promoted if some citizens take the decision-maker’s decisions as authoritative while others take a more critical approach to the question of compliance. To be sure, the instrumentalist can argue that all citizens have the same duties to comply, but this will depend on a showing that each citizen has duties that are the same as everyone else’s. Second, an instrumentalist justification of authority allows that individual citizens can treat some types of decisions as authoritative while treating others critically. A citizen’s critically assessing certain types of decisions while treating others as authoritative may lead to better outcomes than if the citizen does not so discriminate between decisions given by the alleged authority. As a consequence, the authority possessed by a decision-maker is entirely piecemeal on this type of justification. Whether a decision is authoritative will depend on the subject and the class of decisions. A decision-making process with respect to a class of decisions is authoritative for a subject when the subject’s treating its decisions as entailing content-independent and pre-emptive requirements tends to promote better outcomes than if the subject treats each decision in a critical way.⁵

By contrast, a proceduralist justification of authority is essentially holistic in nature. The procedurally defined authority is grounded in a property of the decision-maker and binds all persons who come under the jurisdiction of the decision-maker. Citizens are not able to say that some are subject to the authority and others not; nor are they able to say that the authoritativeness of the decision-maker over an individual varies according to the class of decisions. To be sure, that a decision-maker has holistic authority does not entail that there are no limits on the authority. It merely implies that the nature of a decision-maker’s authority does not depend on facts about the particular citizens over whom authority is exercised.

I wish to defend an account of the authority of democracy that is holistic but that is not monistic. I shall call it a form of evaluative dualism with regard to the assessment of democratic institutions. It is dualistic because it regards democratic institutions as evaluable from two distinct and irreducible points of view that may sometimes conflict. Evaluative dualism raises the question of whether and when democratic decisions have authority. If the results of democratic decision-making are unjust, we might ask, what reason do we have for going along with the decision? And if there is a reason to go along with democratic decisions, how is one to balance that reason with the reason associated with the injustice of actions required by the democratic assembly? A conception of democratic authority must show that while decisions can be evaluated from an independent standpoint, the fact that the democratic assembly has made the decision gives each person a pre-emptive and content-independent reason for complying.

In this article, I set out to complete three tasks: in Part I, I defend a particular kind of dualism. I will do this by defending an account of democracy that requires both dimensions. In Part II, I argue that though there are two evaluative stances in the assessment of democracy, the procedural typically has authority when there is conflict with the substantive. I do this by evaluating some main accounts of authority and providing a new one that shows that democracy has legitimate authority. And finally, I show that there are limits to the authority of the procedural over the substantive and these limits are founded on the same principle as that which grounds the authority of democracy. In brief, I want to defend the authority of democracy and define its limits.

I. A Dualistic Account of Democracy

There are two dimensions of evaluation for democracy. And the reasons associated with these dimensions can give conflicting recommendations. On the one hand we clearly do think that political institutions are important because of the ends they serve. We value political institutions because they make justice in society possible, because they advance the common good. And citizens within the democratic process argue in favor or against proposals on the grounds that certain policies and laws are just or desirable and others are not. Pure proceduralism is completely false to the practice of democratic citizenship. Furthermore, it embodies an arbitrary distinction between the normative force of procedures and the normative force of the outcomes of the procedures. There is no good reason for thinking that matters of distributive justice, individual rights and the common good are less normatively important than democratic principles.

A. Democracy and the Equal Advancement of Interests

On the other hand, I argue that the democratic process has an intrinsic fairness. Here, I lay out the basic conception of justice, which is the principle of the public realization of equal advancement of interests. Second, I articulate and defend principles of respect for judgment and publicity on the basis of this principle. Thus, justice demands the public realization of equal advancement of interests. Third, I argue that democracy is required by justice understood as the public realization of equal advancement of interests. These theses will permit us to answer the questions about the dual nature of the evaluation of democracy and about its authority and the limits of its authority pursued in Part II.

The basic principle of justice from which my argument proceeds is the principle of equal advancement of interests. It has two parts. First, it is a welfarist principle. It states that justice is concerned with the advancement of the interests of persons. Interests are understood as parts of what is good overall for a person. Second, justice strikes an appropriate balance between the interests of individuals when they conflict. It gives each person a claim to his or her share in that appropriate balance of conflicting interests.⁶ The appropriate balance between these conflicting interests is given by the idea of equality. The interests of individuals are to be advanced equally by the society. This equality proceeds from the importance of interests as well as the separateness of persons. No one’s good is more important than anyone else’s. No one’s interests matter more than anyone else’s. Each person has a life to live and the interests of each person are combined into a special unity within that life. Thus the principle of equal advancement of interests requires that the interests of individuals be equally advanced in terms of lifetime prospects. But I cannot provide further defense of this principle in this article.⁷

B. Social Justice as a Weakly Public Principle

Since social justice concerns the kinds of claims people can make against each other in determining the appropriate balance of wellbeing, justice is essentially a weakly public principle. It is not enough that justice is done; it must be seen to be done. So the principle that requires that the basic institutions of society equally advance the interests of the members of the society must do so in a way that is compatible with this inevitable requirement. It must be given an interpretation that satisfies publicity.

The weak notion of publicity demands that the principles of justice be ones that people can in principle see to be in effect or not. The notion of “in principle possibility” here is to be specified relative to facts about the limitations on human cognitive abilities. To be sure, publicity does not require that each person actually see that he or she is being treated justly. It requires only that each person can see that he or she is being treated justly given a reasonable effort on his part. So a principle that requires that we go beyond our ordinary cognitive limitations to determine whether it has been realized or not is not a public principle of justice. But a principle that a person can, given normal cognitive faculties, see to be realized if he makes a reasonable effort, is a public principle even if the person does not in fact see it to be realized on account of not having made a reasonable effort. In this respect the principle of weak publicity is like the legal principle that law must be publicly promulgated.⁸

An example may help to illustrate and lend plausibility to this idea. Imagine the case of a person who has borrowed money from another. When the agreed upon due date arises, the other person asks for her money. The debtor then truthfully says that he has paid the creditor already. But the creditor has no recollection of this. Now the debtor explains that he has put the money somehow directly into the creditor’s bank account. The creditor, let us say, cannot determine this because there are too many transactions going in and out of her account. She simply cannot verify the deposit. And the debtor was quite aware of this when he deposited the money. Contrast this case with one in which the debtor pays the creditor back by giving her the money personally. Here everything is out in the open. The first case is a case of justice done but not seen to be done while the second case is one of justice being done and being seen to be done. What I want to say is that the first case is defective with regard to justice while the second is not. The first payback is not worthless nor is it completely unjust, but there is a defect in its justice compared to the second case.

Publicity is not itself an independent good or requirement. Indifferent actions that are done publicly do not thereby become just. Nor do injustices become more just if they are public. Publicity is a dimension of those requirements associated with social justice. It is not a separable component of social justice. Publicity is a dimension on which one can do better or worse. There is justice in actions that have little publicity. In our example of the debtor who has paid back the creditor in a way that she cannot see, there is justice in his action, it is simply a defective justice. A lesser publicity makes an action less just or defective with regard to justice. A greater publicity makes an action more just or more complete with regard to justice.

Finally, weak publicity requires only that the recipient be able to see that she is treated in accordance with what are in fact the correct principles of justice. This does not require that her views about justice are correct. In our example above, the creditor may, for some reason, believe that she is entitled to more than the agreed amount of money. So even if she is fully aware that the debtor paid his debt to her as their agreement specified, she may think that he has not acted justly because she has a (let us say) false conception of justice that requires debtors to pay back even more than what the agreement specified. In this case, the principle of weak publicity is still satisfied under the assumption that what the debtor did was in fact just and what he did was publicly accessible to the creditor.

C. The Arguments for the Principle of Publicity

There are two types of arguments for the principle of weak publicity: the formal argument and the substantive arguments. First, social justice concerns the kinds of claims people can make against each other in determining the appropriate balance of benefits and burdens. That is, principles of justice must spell out ideals that people can appeal to in criticizing their relations with each other, and social justice must be able to provide, at least in principle, concrete guidance as to how to legitimate their relations. A principle that cannot be seen by individuals to be implemented or one that does not permit individuals to be able to see that it is not implemented is not able to provide the guidance justice provides. It is not enough that justice is done; it must be seen to be done.

Now I shall provide a substantive argument for publicity. I argue that each citizen has fundamental interests in being able to see that he is being treated as an equal in a society where there is significant disagreement about justice and wherein each citizen can acknowledge fallibility in their capacities for thinking about their interests and about justice.

The background conditions of these fundamental interests are the facts of pervasive disagreement and fallibility. The fallibility of moral judgment is pervasive, even when confined to the parameters set by a principle of equality. The principle of equality requires one to compare and weigh the interests of persons who are quite different from oneself and ...