Civil Society and Political Accountability

            For an effective and strong democracy checks and equalitary power between institutions are fundamental. And for this to happen more dynamically, people participation in politics is paramount. So support for NGOs, dwellers' associations, online and offline activism and independent media are essential. But all of this will be unsuccessful and frustrating if the elections is unethical and fraudulent. This post is a summary of the essay with the incomplete title above, published in 2000 at   https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0989/0d82a6f69b4cafaf0f38f759912db4bd063c.pdf

        How do civil society contribute to the construction and empowerment of institutional checks and balances? Civil society clearly matters, but when, how, and what degree? This paper attempts to identify some of the determinants varied patterns of civil society impact on accountable governance. This paper draws on the analytical distinction between vertical and horizontal dimensions of political accountability. The former refers to power relation between the state and its citizens, while the latter refers to institutional oversight, checks and balances within the state. This distinction locates civil society efforts to encourage accountable governance along the vertical dimension, as a counterpart to the electoral process. Indeed, electoral competition has been ackonwledge to be unsufficient for accountability. Civil society demands for state accountability matter most when they empower the state's own checks and balances. By exposing abuses of power, raising standards and public expectations of state performance, and bringing political pressure to bear, they can encourage oversight institutions to act, as well as to target and weaken opponents of accountability. However, we still lack analytical frameworks that can account for the conditions under which civil society manage to bolster institutions of horizontal accountability. In brief, civil society influence horizontal accountability in two ways: directly, by encouraging the creation and empowerment of institutional checks and balances, and indirectly, by strengthening the institutions of vertical accountability that underpin them, such as electoral democracy and an independent media. The causal arrow also points in the other direction, however. Weak institutions of horizontal accountability can also undermine vertical accountability, which in turn weakens civil society. For example, inadequate election oversight bodies can permit less-than-democratic elections, (frauds) and innefective official human rights defenders can fail to stop frequent violations of basic political freedom. Without adequate checks and balances, the minimum conditions for political democracy can remain weak or incomplete. Therefore, one explore the dynamic interaction between accountability's horizontal and vertical dimensions to identify civil society impacts. How do we account for the variation in the degree to which pro-accountability institutions actually manage to limit political power and to sanction its abuse? Empirically, whether or not democratic processes produce accountable governance outcomes varies widely. Persistent human rights violations with impunity under elected regimes are only the most obvious example, as in the cases of agrarian protest in Brazil and Mexico. Legislature  are seen as more permeable and responsive than executives to organized citizens. This pro-accountability potential counterweight depends on the specific institutional characteristics. In the case of legislature in which weak parties with shallow roots in society control, vertical accountability potential is weak. Civil society and opposition political parties have somewhat divergent interests in terms of the empowerment of legislatures as counterweights. Both have a stake in monitoring the government in power and empowering legislative oversight is one of the most important means. For most opposition parties, however, this interest is primarily instrumental. Their leaders do not necessarily want to institutionalize such checks and balances, in case they come to power someday. Moreover, they have an interest in bolstering legislative autonomy not only from the executive, but from voters as well. Decentralization is widely assumed to bring government closer to the people, and therefore to encourage vertical accountability. However, subnational executive authorities often lack their own checks and balances at the provincial or municipal level. In addition, some subnational governments may fall short of the minimum conditions for political democracy. Policies that promote decentralization of resources to subnational governments may well stregthen authoritarian local elites. Even where local governments are not overly authoritarian, powerful institutional incentives may encourage exclusion of constituencies they are supposed to represent. Citizenship is supposed to combine a balance of rights and duties. Sometimes, however, state actors gain the upper hand by holding citizens unduly accountable for certain behaviors, such as political dissent or culturally proscribed activities. Clientelism, for example, refers to relationships of political subordination exchange for material rewards. Authoritarian clientelism obliges citizens to abstain from participating in organizations that will be accountable to them, weakening civil society. Furthermore, regimes that use the allocation of public resources systematically to reward and punish citizens create a form of "reverse vertical accountability" requiring clients dependent on such resources for their survival to be accountable to state patrons. These authoritarian relationships are rarely visible on election day, since the bargain is usually subtle and takes places in advance. Most discussions of political accountability stress the importance of civil society monitoring policy process. The information costs required for effective vertical accountability are very high. Once civil society actors are armed with reliable information about state behavior, however, they can act strategically to bolster agencies of horizontal accountability within the state. Policy monitoring is critical to identify not only abuses of power, but also possible opportunities for civil society leverage. Civil society impact is as much about targeting and weakning the forces of impunity as it is about bolstering pro-accountability institutions. To be effective, civill society require reliable information about where precisely to target advocacy campaigns. This essay's main theme is that civil society role both frames and is framed by the interaction between the vertical and horizontal dimensions of accountability. Weaknesses in electoral democracy can undermine horizontal oversight institutions, and vice versa. Conversely, strong oversight institutions can empówer mechanisms of vertical accountability. This is the dynamic context within which actors that favor accountability come together in efforts to strengthen checks and balances. Schedler has identified four main sources of pro-accountability reform: "governments (reform from above) civil society (reform from below); staff members (reform from within) and international actors (reform from outside) Pro-accountability initiatives most likely encounter resistance both within and between states and society, but the ways in which such conflicts unfold are not predetermined by a static initial distribution of power resources. The analytical challenge, then, is to develop a framework that can capture the process of interaction in which weak actors gain leverageleverage. The failure of accountability efforts can actually bolster the forces of impunity. What makes the difference? Under what conditions can pro-accountability actors set off "virtuous circles" of mutual empowerment? An interactive approach also requires rejecting the still widely held assumption that state and society are engaged in a 'zero-sum balance of power'. Pro-accountability actors within both state institutions and civil society need to find mutual reinforcing coalition strategies that bridge state and society, to make the whole stronger than the sum of the parts. In the interative virtuous circles that bolster accountability, civil society and state actors manage to empower one another and then embed reforms into the state. These institutional levers, such as transparency and oversight bodies, then further empower pro-accountability actors within both state and society, contributing to successive rounds of change. In conclusion, the question of which inter-institutional relationships most effectively promote horizontal accountability may involve more art than science, with the most promising institutional configurations depending on particular actors, times and places. Perhaps the challenge can be understood as a kind of political Feng Shui, the ancient art of placing things in balanced relationships to one another.

The Importance of Human Capital for Economic Growth

             This post is a summary of one report and one abstract. The first with the title above was published https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Florian_Schuett/publication/241076795_The_Importance_of_Human_Capital_for_Economic_Growth/links/554d19e10cf21ed2135f5d97/The-Importance-of-Human-Capital-for-Economic-Growth.pdf?origin=publication_detail. The second was published at  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10887-017-9141-3

               Recent theoretical contributions to the growth literature emphasize the role of human capital in the process of economic growth. The idea that human capital plays an important role in explaining income differences has been present in economists' thinking for a long time. By some accounts, it can even be traced to the work of Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, although it was not until the middle of the 20th century that was developed a theory of human capital. This theory, according to which a person's level of education and experiences determine his or her income, was originally envisage in a microeconmic context, but has subsenquently been applied to macroeconomics. It seems appropriate to discuss some terminological aspects before proceeding. Human capital is a complex theoretical concept that is not defined in a uniform manner. In its most general form, it refers to the resources in people. It has been defined bt the OECD as "the knowledge skills, competences and other attributes embodied in individuals that are relevant to economic activity. This is a broad definition because it is not restricted to education but encompasses all investments in human which are made to improve their skills. Human capital matters for growth. The channels through which it may affect output growth include direct productivity effects and more indirect effects due to externalities, facilitated technological adoption, or enhanced productivity of R&D. The last section has made an attempt to evaluate the empirical literature and identify the most plausible results it has generated, On balance, the evidence seems to indicate that educational expansion does contribute to output growth, and that the estimated magnitude of the social returns to schooling is consistent with the evidence on private returns from labor economics. There also appear to be grounds for thinking that human capital has a substantial impact on technological catch-up, possibly through imrpoving a country's capacity to adopt new technologies. Finally, for all the discussion about education's role in growth, it should not go unmentioned that investment in education does not need to be justified by economic benefits. It is well-known that education is associated with a number of wider benefits to individuals and society. To give some examples, better educated people tend to be healthier and show more active asocial and political participation. education may also reduce crime, and produce more efficient consumers.Nonetheless, understanding the economic benefits of education, and human capital in general, is undoubtedly of significance, not least because human capital accumulation is one area in which government policy can truly make a difference. In order to be more useful to policy makers, economic research will have to go beyond the simple question of whether human capital matters for growth, and address issues as how to efficiently allocate resources and improve the quality of schooling. 

             The effect of human capital on growth involves multiple channels. On the one hand, an increase in human capital directly affects economic growth by enhancing labor productivity in production. On the other hand, human capital is an important input into R&D and therefore increases labor productivity indirectly by accelerating technological change. In addition, different types of human capital such as basic and higher education or training-on-the-job might play different roles in both production and innovation activities. We merge individual data on valuable patents granted in Prussia in the late nineteenth-century with county-level data on literacy, craftsmanship, secondary schooling, and income tax revenues to explore the complex relationship between various types of human capital, innovation, and income. We find that the Second Industrial Revolution can be seen as a transition period when it comes to the role of human capital. As in the preceding First Industrial Revolution, “useful knowledge” embodied in master craftsmen was related to innovation, especially of independent inventors. As in the subsequent twentieth century, the quality of basic education was associated with both workers’ productivity and firms’ R&D processes. In a final step, we show that literacy had also a negative effect on fertility which increased with innovation. In general, our findings support the notion that the accumulation of basic human capital was crucial for the transition to modern economic growth.

330th Birthday of Montesquieu

          A little more than two weeks ago, precisely on 18th January, the French philosopher and writer Montesquieu would complete 330 year old, so this post is a tribute to him. His writings helped to advance humanity in the right direction towards democracy, justice and freedom. He fought against the cowardice of the powerful to the ordinary man. The unjustified oppression of the state. This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published at   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montesquieu.  The second was published at   http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/Montesquieu_final.pdf. The third was published at   /plato.stanford.edu/entries/montesquieu/#2

          Montesquieu (1689-1755) was a French judge, writer and political philosopher. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions. His father died in 1713 and he became a ward of his uncle, the Baron de Montesquieu. He became a counselor of the Bordeaux Parliament in 1714. The next year he married Jeanne de Lartigue, who bore him three children. While addressing French readers of his General Theory , John Keynes described Montesquieu as "the French equivalent of Adam Smith". 

         Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu was born at the chateau of La Brede, near Bordeaux, on 18 January of 1689. He studied law at the University of Bordeaux. In 1735, he explicitly began his work on "The Spirit of the Laws" which fill the rest of his life. In 1748, his book was published in Geneva, again anonymously. In 1752, the book was placed on the Catholic Church's index of forbidden books. In considering the context of his work, one powerful influence was a tension between the estate-owning aristocrat and the world of commerce. The tension of his upbringing in Gascony were made all the stronger by his life's experience. One of the most important of these was the changing political and social world of France over his lifetime. He grew up in the hierarchical, all-encompassing, world of the ancien regime, where politics and religion were joined and control was paramount. Followed a period of relative freedom and openness, France was still a modified ancien regime. Montesquieu could read about alternative more open systems and his interest in early Greek and Roman civilization gave him models. Yet what he needed in order to prove that an open and free world was indeed possible, was a large scale living example. This example was provided by his visit to England. Montesquieu arrived in England in 1729. He stayed for nearly two years and closely studied the political and social systems. It was in England that the ideas to be developed in both these masterpieces, (Considerations and Spirit of the Laws), took a definite form, in England that they found stimulus and inspiration. Montesquieu's ultimate aim was to understand the cause or causes of things; why some societies suffered from despotism, why northern Europe was growing richer, why the world's population seemed to have declined in the middle age. Durkheim believed that Montesquieu's implicit use of the comparative method was central feature of his work. Montesquieu made comparison the central problem of political sociology and thus directed the forms of inquiry away from Europe to all societies known. This is the task which is fundamental to anthropology as well. It also has the effect of putting one's own society into doubt: 'Montesquieu argued that we can understand political and social phenomena only when we can stipulate alternative to that in question.' There are several strands to his work which are historical and two can be mentioned here. Although his treatment of Rome has been criticized, Roman history allowed Montesquieu to do was to watch the process of historical change over a long period of time. Rome collapsed through corruption, and because the balance of power at the centre became skewed. His second interest was in the origin of modern France, which took him into many years of work on the historical sources. A third important part of his vision is what we might call 'structural' or 'relational' approach to history and society. Montesquieu's central concerns was how to maintain liberty and avoid despotism. He was aware from his own experiences that liberty was very fragile. The 'long abuse of power' was a recognition of Acton's maxim that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." This was connected to his idea of balance. Something which started as good, balanced and conducive to liberty could easily be perverted and swing to a dangerous extreme. For example, if there was no equality between people, democracy was impossible. Without vigilance, tyranny might one day govern. The reason for this is relatively simple. The most people in his time were governed by despotism. because any other form of government necessitates careful management and planning, with the most through balancing and regulating of political power. The 'fury of war' brings another danger, which Montesquieu showed historically in his account of the way in which incessant warfare had been the root of the collapse of liberty in ancient Rome, and also in the ruin caused by Louis XIV's endless wars. Montesquieu managed to speak out against cruelty, slavery and absolutism, despite the dangers he faced. More importantly, he kept his regard for liberty, his freedom of spirit alive despite the pressures of the French state and the Inquisition. Through his integrity and support for liberty Montesquieu provided a model which would later inspire the two greatest revolutionary movements towards liberty of modern times. He was constantly cited and quoted by figures in both American and French revolutions. 

             In a democracy, the people are sovereign. They may govern through ministers, senators, etc. But they must have the power of choosing their representatives for themselves. The principle of democracy is political virtue, by which Montesquieu means "love of the laws and of our country" including its constitution. The form of a democratic government makes the laws governing suffrage and voting fundamental. The need to protect its principle imposes far more extensive requirements. A democracy must educate its citizens to identify their interests with the interests of their country, and should have censors to preserve its mores. To provide citizens with liberty, a government must have certain features. First, since "constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it... it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power. This is achieved through the separation of the executive, legislative and judicial power of government.