Accountability and Abuses of Power

                 This post is a summary of the article with the incomplete title above published at   https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/rkeohane/files/apsr_abuses.pdf

                 The interdependence of states, globalization. expansion of the scope of multilateral organizations, and rapid increases in the number of NGOs have heightened concerns about the way power is used and abused. A crucial feature of representative democracy is that those who govern are held accountable to the governed. Mechanisms for appropriate accountability need to be institutionalized. We seek to suggest pragmatic improvements in accountability mechanisms. Our analysis considers accountability as only one of several ways in which power can be constrained and scrutinizes the analogy between global and domestic power structures in order to specify the nature of the problem of accountability in global politics more clearly. Accountability mechanisms always operate after the fact: exposing actions to view, judging and sanctioning them. Of course, though they always operate ex post, accountability mechanisms can exert effects ex ante, since the anticipation of sanctions may deter the powerful from abusing their position in the first place. At a minimum, institutions of governance should limit and constrain the potential for abuse of power. The problem of abuse of power is serious in world politics, because even the minimal types of constraints found in domestic governments are absent on the global level. Not only there is not global democracy, but there is not even an effective constitutional system that constrains power in an institutionalized applicable rules. Thus, our focus in this article is on the role of accountability mechanisms in world politics. What kinds of accountability mechanisms are likely to be effective in constraining international organizations? How can understanding accountability at the level of the nation-state clarify the problem of accountability at the global level?  High levels of participation in politics and in governing institutions are considered highly desirable and serve as a direct accountability mechanism. Representatives and officeholders need to be called to account by the governed, who can have some control over the decisions that affect their lives through political participation. Democratic elections are examples of both accountability through participation and accountability through judging the performance of one. Thus the process of democratic elections can be endorsed readily as an effective mechanism for accountability. This convergence, however, convenient in the context of democracies, does not apply in contemporary world politics. In order for a global public to function politically, there would need to be some political structure that would help to define who was entitled to participate, and on what issues. In addition, many more people would have to identify transnationally and be willing to participate as members of a global public. Another way of making this point would be to say that world politics to day lacks a public in two distinct senses. In democratic nations, the existence of a clearly defined public provides the responses to the fundamental questions about accountability. The public is entitled to hold power-wielders accountable in a democratic nation for abuses of power. On the global level, there is not public that can function in this way, to provide answers to the fundamental questions about accountability. This is the crucial difference between problems of accountability globally and domestically. Increased domestic democracy can be an important form of participation in global politics. Of course, domestic democracy can improve accountability to citizen and, at the same time, work against policies beyond states borders. It follows that power-wielders may be held accountable to standards of conduct articulated in transnational civil society, even though their power does not derive from authority delegated to them. In international law, those entities that are neither states nor international organizations are subject to the laws of the states possessing jurisdiction. Human rights treaties constitute obvious examples: states and their leaders can be held accountable for violations. The standards of legitimacy against which power-wielders can be held accountable derive primarily from three sets of informal norms. First, legitimacy derives from conformity to human rights norms that are widely shared by the public of the most powerful states in the global political system. Second, there has been increased agreement that many normative principles inherent in democracy are applicable at the global level. Third, there has been intense normative pressure on the patterns of extreme economic inequality that permeate the contemporary global political economy. The question,  "Who is entitled to hold power-wielders accountable for abuses?" receives a variety of answers in the practice of global politics. We have identified seven accountability mechanisms that actually operate in world politics on the basis of which improved practices of accountability could be built. Some operate most effectively when standards of legitimacy are formally encoded in law. Others enforce less formal norms. Four of these mechanisms rely heavily on delegation: hierarchical, supervisory, fiscal, and legal accountability. The remaining three: market, peer, and reputational accountability, involve forms of participation, although the participants in each of these forms of accountability are different. Hierarchical accountability is a characteristic of bureaucracies, as we use the term applies to relationships within organizations, including multilateral organizations such as United Nations or the World Bank. Supervisory accountability refers to relations between organizations where one acts as principal with respect to specified agents. Fiscal accountability describes mechanisms through which funding agencies can demand reports from, and ultimatelysanction, agencies that are recipients of funding. This form of accountability was fundamental to the emergence of parliamentary power in England during the seventeenth century and is particularly important for international organizations, which rely on governments to fund substantial parts of their activities. Legal accountability refers to the requirement that agents abide by formal rules and be prepared to justify their actions in those terms, in courts or quasijudicial arenas. Public officials, like anyone else, can be "held accountable" for their actions both through administrative and criminal law. Legal accountability has long been important in democracies and has become increasingly important during recent years. Market accountability is a less familiar category, but an important one. We want to emphasize that this form of accountability is not to an abstract force, but to investors and consumers, whose influence is exercised in whole or in part through markets. Investors may stop investing in countries. Consumers may refuse to buy products from companies with bad reputation. Peer accountability arises as the result of mutual evaluation of organizations by their counterparts. NGOs for example, organizations that are poorly rated by their peers are likely to have difficult in persuading them to cooperate, and therefore to have trouble achieving their own purposes. Public reputational accountability is pervasive because reputation is involved in all the other forms of accountability. Reputation is a form of "soft power," defined as "the ability to shape the preferences of others." This category applies to situation in which reputation, widely and publicly known, provides a mechanism for accountability even in the absence of other mechanisms as well as in conjunction with them.