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.