Civil society and political accountability : propositions for discussion

How do civil society actors contribute to the construction and empowerment of institutional checks and balances? Civil society clearly matters, but when, how and to what degree? This paper attempts to identify some of the determinants of the extremely varied patterns of civil society impact on accountable governance. In the process, this essay explores the challenge of public accountability as it applies not only to the governance of elected regimes, but also to civil society actors themselves. This paper draws on the analytical distinction between vertical and horizontal dimensions of political accountability. The former refers to power relations between the state and its citizens, while the latter refers to institutional oversight, checks and balances within the state (O’Donnell, 1999). 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 acknowledged to be insufficient for accountability since the origins of constitutional democracy. Until recently, however, the role of civil society actors in promoting electoral democracy has received much more attention than their role in promoting institutional checks and balances (Schedler, 1999b: 340).