Accountability and Democracy: The Pitfalls and Promise of Popular Control

Accountability and Democracy: The Pitfalls and Promise of Popular
Control
Craig T. Borowiak
Print publication date: 2011

Print ISBN-13: 9780199778256
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: Jan-12
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199778256.001.0001
Introduction
Craig T. Borowiak
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199778256.003.0000
Governance without accountability is tyranny. Few principles are as central

to democracy as this. It is an idea that runs throughout the history of
democratic thought as a way to differentiate democracy from rival regime
forms: In democracy, governors are supposed to be accountable to the
governed.
In many respects, democratic accountability has come to symbolize both
the democratic aspirations and the democratic dysfunctions of our times.
On one hand, democratic accountability has never been so widely accepted
as a standard of political legitimacy. The expectation that governments
will be answerable to citizens is a virtual sine qua non of international
recognition. The language of democratic accountability seduces with its
intonations of participation and democratic self-determination. It charms
with its promise of justice and retribution. It sets one dreaming of an end
to abusive power and of incentive structures that channel public energies
toward the public good. On the other hand, democratic unaccountability has
become an important measure of democratic dysfunction. Thus, we hear of
democratic deficits when bureaucracies become too removed from channels
of political answerability, when international institutions become too distant
from citizens and stakeholders, or when legacies of authoritarianism and
corruption distort electoral accountability.
Despite its normative importance in contemporary politics, democratic
accountability has not been well developed conceptually. Mainstream news
media may be filled with sound bites of political adversaries smearing one
Page 1 of 27
Introduction
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another with accusations of unaccountability, but the conditions for realizing

democratic accountability are seldom specified beyond partisan exhortations
to vote one way or another. In academic scholarship, references to
democratic accountability recur throughout the canon of democratic theory,
yet the concept has rarely been the subject matter of sustained theorizing.
When discussed, it has more often than not been relegated to a supporting
role behind other key terms such as representation, inclusion, and
participation. This has begun to change. Studies of democratic accountability
are now emerging in (p. 4 ) diverse fields ranging from democratization and
development to security and international organizations. What was once
a managerial concept reserved for studies of bureaucracy is now entering
philosophical and social science debates. This book is a critical intervention
into that emerging conversation. I draw from contemporary democratic
theory to illustrate different ways the concept is applied today. I also analyze
older democratic traditions and contexts to recuperate dimensions of the
concept that are often lost in contemporary discourse.
As it is conventionally deployed, democratic accountability rests upon three
conceptual pillars. First is the notion of a sovereign demos: democratic
accountability is interpreted as an expression of the ultimate authority
of a bounded political community of citizens. It is thereby seen as a
realization of the republican principle of self-governance. Second is the
belief that democratic accountabilitys primary function is to exercise
control: democratic accountability is construed as a way for a sovereign
demos to exert discipline and control over governing bodies. Third is the
presumption that democratic accountability operates through formal
institutions of government: realizing democratic accountability is thought
to depend upon the design of formal accountability mechanisms. Putting
these three pillars together, a paradigmatic narrative might look something
like the following: Democratic accountability begins with a sovereign
national community of citizens who delegate governing authority to public
officials. As an expression of their ultimate authority, these citizens then
hold those officials to account for how well they have carried out their
governing responsibilities. This they typically do by casting votes in formal
elections. Exacting this accountability helps citizens control government
officials to ensure they serve the public interest. Within such a narrative,
political legitimacy within democratic regimes is thought to depend upon
the prospect that no governance functions are entirely divorced from such
accountability to the people. When that is not the case, there is a democratic
accountability deficit. If we follow the conventional understanding, the way
to solve such deficits is to (re)assert the sovereign authority of citizens and
Page 2 of 27
Introduction
to (re)construct formal institutions that enable citizens to exert better control

over a fuller range of governance. From this perspective, accountability is
conceived primarily as a way to bring governing power under the control
of a preconstituted sovereign public. This book takes a different approach.
Democratic accountability, I contend, is best seen not only as a way to
control power but also as a way to generate political community and to
disrupt institutional hierarchies. Furthermore, contrary to conventional
understandings, I argue for an antifoundationalist vision of democratic
accountability that decouples the concept from popular sovereignty. Instead
of anchoring democratic accountability to the prefigured finaland thereby
unaccountableauthority of a bounded (p. 5 ) political community, I argue
that the boundaries and authority of the demos are often the very substance
of democratic accountability practice. Democratic accountability practices
can provide a basis for challenging existing political communities and for
generating new solidarities across citizenship boundaries.
I develop this interpretation of accountability through an engagement with
six theoretical contexts or frameworks: (1) the republican frameworks
presented during the ratification debates over the U.S. constitution; (2)
the principalagent framework for conceiving accountability; (3) the
participatory democracy of ancient Athens; (4) deliberative democratic
models of accountability; (5) competitive markets as an alternative
framework for accountability; and (6) liberal institutionalist and cosmopolitan
approaches to global governance. I mine these different traditions for
a richer understanding of democratic accountabilitys potentials and
challenges. Although my selection of cases may appear eclectic, it is not
arbitrary. Ive chosen these contexts for the way each illuminates different
functions and obstacles of democratic accountability. I use them both to
illustrate how democratic accountability has commonly been understood
and to recuperate alternative meanings and applications from the history
of democratic thought. With this, I do not aim to be comprehensive with my
analysisthe history of democratic thought is too textured with alternatives
for that. I do intend to add theoretical and historical depth to contemporary
discussions. While there are surely other important authors and contexts I
might have drawn on for this study, these are the ones that resonate most
with my project and thinking on the matter. It is a testament to the richness
and openness of these democratic traditions that they have been returned
to again and again by different theorists, each time through a different optic.
I reread them as part of a critical interrogation of the presenta present
for which accountability and democracy are both in need of re-imagination.
Taken alone, no one perspective captures all relevant features of democratic
Page 3 of 27
Introduction
accountability. Taken together, they paint a rich and multidimensional

picture of what is often taken to be a rather simple concept. They also
directly challenge the mainstream view about what is required for political
legitimacy. Before I elaborate upon these arguments, it will be helpful to
provide some basic definitions.
Accountability: The Anatomy of a Concept

The concept accountability has an ambit much broader than democratic
contexts alone. It is used in contexts ranging from health care and education
reform to public administration, economic development, and transitional
(p. 6 ) justice. At its most basic, to be accountable is to be liable to be called
to account, or to answer for responsibilities, positions, and conduct. There
are a few general features of the concept that underlie this seemingly
straightforward definition.
A first thing to note is that accountability is a relational concept. It is
organized around the relationship between an accountability holder and an
accountability holdee. This relationship is inherently asymmetrical, but it
neednt imply institutional hierarchies in a more general sense. The holders
in one instance can be holdees in another. Indeed, I will argue that it is
both possible and desirable to generate relations of mutual accountability
as part of democratic practice. The fact that accountability is a relational
concept also means that it has no bearing upon situations in which the gaps
between holders and holdees are fully collapsed or where one or the other
is absent. Just such a collapsing of gaps is what results, I argue, when claims
are made to final authority. To render an authority final is to locate it outside
of the relationships and gaps necessary for the accountability dynamic.
A final authority, regardless of whether it is the people or the king, is by
definition an unaccountable authority. It is tyranny. Rather than establishing
an identity between ruler and ruled, democratic accountability assumes their
continued separation.
In addition to relationality, the concept also has connotations of both
calculation and moral reasoning. Here the etymology of the word is
significant. Accountability is derived from the Old French word acont, which
connotes both computation and narration, both counting and telling.1 Taken
literally, to be accountable is to be liable to be called to give a telling/
counting to another. There is, however, an important difference between
giving a calculation and giving a telling. One can, for example, give an
account in the modern sense of a financial audit in which the accounting
Page 4 of 27
Introduction
books are opened and debts and credits are tabulated. Here, the balance
sheet serves (figuratively if not actually) as the central accounting device. On
its face, calculations are made visible, debts and credits are revealed, and
performance is exposed for scrutiny and judgment according to objective
criteria with the aim of correcting imbalances. Alternatively, one can give
an account in the sense of narrating or justifying a series of events and
behavior. The telling of reasons, albeit often harboring a calculation of its
own, nonetheless suggests something at least potentially more dialogical
in nature. Its metaphors are as much aural and oral as they are visual. The
emphasis is upon answerability and moral reasoning over and above the
totalizing equivalencies implied in numerical calculation. These connotations
in turn receive different shadings within different democratic traditions.
In contemporary democratic theory they are, for example, manifest in
the differing approaches of aggregative (p. 7 ) and deliberative models of
democracy. Whereas the former focuses on the calculation of prefigured
individual preferences and the counting of votes as a way to measure
the gap between an officers performance and the public interest, the
latter centers on dialogue, reason giving, public justification, and social
transformation. As will become clear in the following chapters, I believe the
calculating connotation has become overweighted in contemporary discourse
with the result that accountability is too often seen as a tool for discipline
and efficient management rather than as a way to encourage receptivity,
dialogue, and mutual understanding.
All forms of accountability also rely on a combination of visibility and
punishment. Accountability requires visibility in an epistemic sense; it
requires information and understanding. In order to hold people accountable
for their behavior one must first be able to identify that behavior; one
must first have a line of sight. Accountability discourse is correspondingly
populated by references to transparency, monitoring, whistle-blowing, backroom deals, imperfect and asymmetrical information, disclosure, opaque
supply chains, and so forth. Visibility in this epistemic sense can take the
form of external monitoring. It can also result from discursive processes of
explanation and justification. Some of the most intractable accountability
problems emerge when the effects of power are visible, but the sources
of such effects are diffuse, systemic, or otherwise unidentifiable, such as
we may find with financial crises involving opaque financial instruments,
with sweatshops and the elaborate subcontracting relations in international
commodity chains, or with global warming and other human-caused changes
to the environment.
Page 5 of 27
Introduction
Without transparency, accountability may be blind. But without the

possibility of sanctions, accountability processes are empty. The nature
of public wrongdoing may be known, but unless consequences for that
wrongdoing are applied, truth may merely abet impunity. The association of
accountability with enforcement has a long conceptual history, as evidenced
by the way accountability has frequently been used interchangeably with the
concept of punishability.2 Accountability does not stop at the telling. To be
accountable is also to face judgment and consequences for ones behavior
and its effects. In democratic contexts, sanctions come in many forms. They
might include the removal from office through elections, or the exercise of
social pressures during deliberation in which the force of the better argument
is meant to prevail, or more severe forms of sanctions such as the ostracism
and capital punishment found in ancient Athens.
Taken together, the combination of visibility and punishment can be a potent
recipe for discipline. Exposure, combined with the memory, reality, and
threat of punishment can induce compliance. This is immensely important
in (p. 8 ) democratic contexts where the independence that generally
comes with the delegation of authority also involves the possibility of abuse.
Nonetheless, it is a mistake to think only in disciplinary terms. Certainly,
visibility can be understood as exposure, such as when wrongdoing is
exposed and the targets of sanctioning power are clarified. Yet visibility can
also refer to publicity, such as when something enters the public domain or
when an individual is regarded by others as a member of a common public,
and to discovery, such as in the discovery of the different experiences and
needs of differently situated individuals and groups. Recognizing these
different functions of visibility opens a way to a richer understanding of
democratic accountabilitys potential.
Finally, there is the matter of standards. Accountability differs from simple
coercion and/or pressure in that it appeals to prior standards. It entails an
obligation on the part of the holdee to behave in a certain way. The source
and status of accountability standards are, nonetheless, open to question.
Some approaches emphasize the importance of contractual obligations in
which holdees tacitly or explicitly agree to the standards for which they
are held to account. Requiring the accused to accept the standards held
against them would, however, drain the energy from many accountability
initiatives, including many high-profile ones involving gross violations of
human rights. Other approaches emphasize not the consent of the holdees
but rather some form of social consensus about acceptable accountability
standards. Society can thus hold power wielders to account for violations
Page 6 of 27
Introduction
of socially agreed accountability standards even if the power wielders dont

accept those standards. This frees accountability from the judgment of the
holdee, but it still places high expectations on societal actors to reach some
form of consensus about which standards and which interpretations of those
standards should prevail. This has the effect of privileging dominant groups
and perspectives in a society while downplaying the diversity and dissent
that underlie even the most widely accepted norms. In this book, I adopt
a more relaxed view of accountability standards. Rather than expecting
a consensual determination of accountability standards ex ante, I regard
standards as themselves sites of contestation. The process of figuring
out what exactly it is that power wielders should be held to account for
is, ironically, often something that takes place during the very process
of holding them to account as different groups vie to determine which
standards should be applied. Consequently, the fact that accountability
standards analytically precede accountability practices does not mean they
are necessarily conserving the social status quo.
These general featuresrelationality, calculation and moral reasoning,
visibility and punishment, and varying standardsrecur with differing
emphases throughout the following chapters. They are crucial for my
efforts (p. 9 ) to explain what democratic accountability has meant and
to re-imagine new potentials for the concept. This said, not all forms of
accountability are democratic in character.
Democratic Accountability
To qualify as democratic, the right actors need to be accountable to the
right people for the right reasons and in the right way. Thus, for example, a
bureaucratic organization might have a very elaborate system of supervisory
accountability internal to its operation, but this alone does not mean it
is democratically accountable. Similarly, just because the majority of a
population wishes to remove a corrupt official from office does not mean that
the intervention of a foreign government to depose that official constitutes
democratic accountability: the wrong actors are involved.
It is relatively easy to generate examples such as these of what democratic
accountability is not. It is considerably more difficult to generate precise
criteria for what democratic accountability is. Answers to the questions Who
should be accountable to whom, for what, and how? vary across historical
contexts, democratic paradigms, and political cultures. Because part of
my task in this book is to reconceptualize democratic accountability for
Page 7 of 27
Introduction
contemporary politics while recuperating varied meanings and applications

across different democratic paradigms, I am reluctant to offer a definition
in advance lest it be misleading. Nonetheless, as a working definition, I
understand democratic accountability to refer to the principle that the
governed should have opportunities to sanction and demand answers
from the powers that govern them. Stated slightly differently, democratic
accountability refers to the norm that the sources of governance should be
answerable to and punishable by those who are governed. The standards
applied when exercising such accountability should also reflect a wider set
of democratic values, including especially norms of political equality and
freedom. Other key norms such as reciprocity, participation, inclusion, and
nondomination populate the democratic paradigms I will be examining.
Interpretations of such norms vary significantly across democratic contexts
and traditions. I do not aim to provide a complete list or to adjudicate among
them to decide objective meanings or relative importance. I do, however,
draw provisional attention to them as providing democratic standards
according to which accountability can be exercised and assessed.
A few features are noteworthy about this definition. I do not define
democratic accountability in terms of political institutions and regime
forms per se, but as a democratic norm. For the sake of convenience,
I use expressions such as accountability institutions, accountability
mechanisms, (p. 10 ) and accountability protocols more or less
interchangeably to describe institutional arrangements designed to carry
out accountability. I use the expression accountability practices to refer to
practices and initiatives undertaken to realize accountability, regardless of
whether these take place via formal or informal venues and means. These
institutions and practices are not, however, definitive of the concept. On the
contrary, the democratic accountability norm animates them when they are
working well and provides a basis for critique when they are not. Over the
course of this book, I will present several modes for realizing democratic
accountability. Some, such as competitive elections, are widely known
and accepted. Others, such as the dokimasia of ancient Greece, are more
idiosyncratic. What makes them examples of democratic accountability is
not the fact that they take place within so-called democratic regimes, but the
way they reflect the principle that the governed should be able to demand
answers from those who govern.
Additionally, my definition does not limit the object of democratic
accountability to formal governmental officials. Against categorizations
that would restrict democratic accountability to formal government, I join a
Page 8 of 27
Introduction
smaller set of scholars who recognize a wider set of accountability actors.3

I also follow international relations scholars in adopting the language of
governance instead of government, with governance referring to informal as
well as formal systems of rule.4 Although governments are important sources
of governance, they are not the only ones. Nongovernmental organizations,
transnational social networks, epistemic communities, markets, corporations,
international forums, and citizens themselves also contribute to governance.
Democratic accountability correspondingly has bearing upon these different
actors and the spheres of rule they participate in.
On a simple level, what appears to distinguish democratic accountability is
the demos: Democratic accountability is organized around accountability
to a demos. The meaning of the demos, however, has itself changed over
time. In ancient Athens the demos referred to a people delimited by law,
culture, kinship, and place. This idea later became infused with eighteenthcentury notions of popular sovereignty, social contract, and self-legislation.
A democratic order was considered legitimate to the extent that it consisted
of a self-legislating demos: a delimited political community of citizens
consisting of all those and only those who are full citizens and, thus, both
authors and subjects of the law.5 Today, the principle of self-legislation
itself has been adapted in ways that challenge older forms of the demos.
Cosmopolitan democrats, for example, use the so-called all-affected principle
to challenge existing democratic boundaries. They argue that the demos
should extend to include all people affected by any given policy decision.
This can be parsed many ways. It can be interpreted to mean all who are
actually affected, or all who are potentially affected, or all who (p. 11 ) are
significantly affected. In this book I use the language of being governed as
the basis for inclusion. I do so with full awareness of the ambiguities this
might entail. With cosmopolitans, the governed can be interpreted broadly
to mean all who are affected by policies. It can also be interpreted more
narrowly to mean all who are subject to particular laws. There are many
alternatives between these. For my purposes, the crucial point is that the
legally delimited citizenry does not necessarily (and rarely does) exhaust the
full range of actors governed. Many who are governed remain outside the
circuits of citizenship, whereas many who are inside the circuits of citizenship
find themselves outside the sphere of influence over governance. There is
a difference between the demos understood in factual terms as a legally
delimited community of free and equal citizens, and the demos understood
as an organizing principle of governance. I situate democratic accountability
within the tension between the fact and the norm of citizenship. I accept
that there is no ahistorical viewpoint from which to determine an ultimate
Page 9 of 27
Introduction
criterion for inclusion. What matters most for my argument is that the
boundaries of citizenship remain contested and open for interrogation and
renegotiation. As will become clear, I believe the dynamic between citizen
insiders and noncitizen outsiders is centrally important for democratic
accountability. Initiatives undertaken from outside established channels
of citizenship can introduce new accountability actors and relationships,
new roles, and new standards that challenge existing membership criteria.
Democratic accountability can both interrupt status quos and constitute new
bases for defining what does and does not qualify as a legitimate basis for
inclusion.
Working with these definitions, I make four broad sets of arguments in this
book. Three address democratic accountabilitys functions. I argue that
democratic accountability functions as a means of control, as a means of
solidarity and political community, and as a means of disruption and critique.
My fourth argument is more fundamental. I contend that, as a source of
political legitimacy, democratic accountability needs to be rethought in
ways that break from modern notions of popular sovereignty. Rather than
construing democratic accountability as an expression of a sovereign public,
I argue it should be re-conceived as part of a post-sovereignty politics that
resists all claims to final authority, including claims made by democratic
publics themselves. I will elaborate on each of these arguments.
Accountability as a Mechanism of Control

This book is critical of the way contemporary discussions of democratic
accountability are dominated by a narrow fixation upon discipline and
control. Nonetheless, I also recognize that control is an important aspect of
what (p. 12 ) democratic accountability offers. I consequently draw attention
to the varieties of ways control is exercised in the different democratic
accountability traditions I study throughout the book. One thing that
becomes clear in this study is that institutions mediate the controlling effects
of democratic accountability. Different institutional configurations can have
radically different and at times counterintuitive effects on how control is
exercised and democratic principles are realized.
Consider electoral accountability. Simply institutionalizing elections is not
sufficient to control officials. A tremendous amount depends upon how
elections are configured and used. Nor is it simply a matter of narrowing
the distances between citizens and elected officials. Appearances can be
deceptive and efforts to increase constituents control over representatives
Page 10 of 27
Introduction
can backfire. For example, as I describe in my discussion of the U.S.

ratification debates in chapter 1, shrinking the citizen-representative ratio
and shortening the election cycle may seem like a way to tighten control
over public officials. In some circumstances, however, such measures
can end up undercutting the effectiveness of electoral accountability
and weakening popular control because they create opportunities for
demagoguery and because they rotate officials out of office before their
actions are known and their policies go into effect. By contrast, allowing
for greater distance between representatives and constituents can actually
enhance clarity about officials responsibility for policy, which can improve
accountability. The downside of greater distance, however, is that it
can drain energy from more radical citizen demands while encouraging
complacency between elections.
The challenges of designing accountability institutions that effectively
control public officials have been brought into further relief by analytic
social scientists who cast democratic accountability in economic terms of a
principalagent relationship. As I describe in chapter 2, the principalagent
framework helps illuminate how self-interest and information asymmetries
interfere with citizens efforts to hold their agents to account electorally.
Elections are blunt instruments. Citizens simply dont know enough about
what governing officials are doing. Meanwhile, self-interested politicians have
private incentives to shirk public responsibilities. Consequently, governance
institutions that look like they advance democratic accountability can
actually be riddled with opportunities for officials to exploit information gaps
to pursue private rather than public interests.
In addition to its historical function as a check against governmental abuse,
democratic accountability can have controlling effects upon citizens.
Accountability institutions ostensibly designed to check governmental abuses
of power can actually sap democratic energies, pacify publics, and rein in
(p. 13 ) protest while abetting hierarchy. Long electoral cycles can lead to
political disengagement. Outside of the electoral framework, the practice
of speaking out against powerful actors to demand answers and sanctions
for the violation of democratic rights can be incredibly empowering. It can
also be intensely alienating and dangerous. In more participatory forms of
democracy, the mutual accountability of citizens can be a way for them to
control one another. In addition to controlled government, then, democratic
accountability mechanisms can contribute to a controlled society.6
Page 11 of 27
Introduction
Any compelling account of democratic accountability must address the

issue of control on some level, but too narrow a focus on control can lead
to blindness regarding the wider spectrum of democratic accountability
functions. If controlled government is regarded as the primary objective
of democratic accountability, then direct citizen participation might not
be necessary at all, assuming sufficient control could be exerted through
auxiliary nondemocratic means. Participatory politics might even prove
detrimental to controlled government to the extent that the desire for control
conflicts with the messy, conflictual, fickle, laborious, and at times insurgent
nature of democratic praxis. This point is not lost upon those international
relations scholars who are skeptical about global participatory politics and
who consequently turn to nondemocratic forms of accountability to shore
up the legitimacy of global governance while avoiding the inefficiencies
of democracy. Against such views, I argue that democratic accountability
derives meaning not only from the need for greater control but also from the
need to build and shape community through participation.
Recuperating Alternative Modalities: Mutuality, Community,

Participation
Although discipline and control are undoubtedly important, they are only
part of the story of accountabilitys relation to democracy. Through my
engagement with different democratic traditions and historical contexts I
have been struck by meanings and applications of democratic accountability
that have largely disappeared in contemporary usage or that have been
reduced to a few narrow dimensions centered on popular control over
government. As a second major set of arguments, I resist this flattening
of the concept and, instead, draw attention to democratic accountabilitys
more generative democratic potentials. Among other things, accountability
practices can help constitute and renew political community through public
deliberation, the (re)creation of public spaces, and the circulation of political
responsibility. They can (p. 14 ) engender democratic capabilities and new
forms of solidarity and public consciousness across boundaries of citizenship.
Rather than simply presuming a demos, democratic accountability
can help generate and maintain new forms of political community. In
order to illuminate these alternative dimensions, I introduce the ideal
of mutual accountability as a source of democratic empowerment. With
this ideal, I reject the notion that democratic accountability only takes
place within institutional hierarchies with unidirectional relations of power
and authority. Instead, mutual accountability points to the prospect that
Page 12 of 27
Introduction
democratic community can be formed and strengthened when individuals

are accountable to one another in an equal and reciprocal fashion.
Democratic accountability institutions and practices are invariably embedded
dynamically in wider social and political contexts. On one hand, democratic
accountability reflects underlying conditions. If the political culture is
such that citizens and stakeholders arent accustomed, willing, and able
to step forward to demand answers from power, even the best designed
accountability institutions will be ineffectual. Conversely, a robust democratic
culture and lively public sphere can strengthen accountability mechanisms
where they are weak, and enliven them even more when they are strong.
On the other hand, accountability institutions and practices have effects
upon underlying social conditions and the quality of the demos. They can
strengthen democratic culture by cultivating capabilities of deliberation,
civic involvement, and collective problem solving. While such democratic
capabilities are not outside power and control in an absolute sense,
constructing accountability institutions to foster them involves a different set
of variables than designing institutions to maximize the efficient application
of control. Elections may be useful for periodically sanctioning officials for
poor performance, but other forms of accountability such as public hearings
and citizen audits involve and encourage a thicker set of capabilities.
Building awareness of this into our discussion of democratic accountability
can help sensitize us to how accountability capabilities are distributed across
a society and how such distribution enhances or diminishes democratic
empowerment.
In chapters 3 and 4, I draw from both ancient Athenian democracy and
deliberative democracy to develop these ideas. In the context of ancient
Athens, having to stand and answer before fellow citizens was a central
feature of democratic life. It offered a way to multiply and circulate the sites
of power across the citizenry. So doing, it helped to subvert hierarchies
and to organize public activities around principles of political equality. It
is out of the resulting public space that the polis deliberated and decided
upon the ends of governance and the responsibilities of citizenship. Mutual
accountability practices were part of the process through which citizens
could see themselves (p. 15 ) as equal members of a community with shared
problems and interests. Recognizing such community-constituting potential
today is important for countering narrow visions of democratic accountability
practice.
Page 13 of 27
Introduction
Similar themes can be found in the literature on deliberative democracy. In

deliberative contexts, demanding answers within public spheres can be an
important way to perform citizenship. In such contexts, being accountable
means being compelled to justify ones behavior and rationales, not simply
so that one can be judged and disciplined but also to reaffirm political
community and advance mutual understanding. Democratic accountability
mechanisms are important sources of informationnot just information
about abuses of power that can then be controlled for, but also information
about policies and the needs of a community. When individuals have to
answer before their peers or when government officials have to publicly
justify policies before differently situated members of a community, valuable
communication can take place. The community learns about policies, officials
learn about the experiences and needs of various stakeholders, and different
sectors of society learn about one another. Such justifications are linked to
the creation of intersubjective spaces in which the structures and exercise of
power are recognized as a shared concern. When we do this together, we
are democratically accountable to one another. Rather than merely offering
a way for the public to acquire power over agents of governance, democratic
accountability processes help members of publics acquire the power to
govern together.
These collective benefits notwithstanding, the community-constituting
potential of democratic accountability also harbors certain risks.
Accountability practices can end up creating and reproducing rigid
membership boundaries and club-like mentalities that neglect justice
relations between insiders and outsiders. It is the clublike nature of
communities and their unaccountable assertions of authority that have
enabled democracies to, among other things, disenfranchise along
race, class, and gender lines. Mindful of this, I also explore more critical
dimensions of democratic accountability that can help to open up insular
communities and render them receptive to greater democratization. Doing
so, I break with prevailing norms of popular sovereignty.
Popular Sovereignty and the Problem of Unaccountable

Authority
There is a paradoxical element that haunts the desire for accountable
governance. A framework must be set up to determine which actors, deeds,
effects, standards, and modes should be included in the accountability
equation and (p. 16 ) which should not. That is, there needs to be an
antecedent accounting that determines who counts and who does not.
Page 14 of 27
Introduction
The grounds for making that determination invariably stand outside the
accountability dynamic itself: accountable governance is anchored in
unaccountable assertions of authority. With a twist on the classic question,
Who should guard the guardians? we might thus ask, Who is going to hold
the accountability-makers accountable? It is not possible to fully overcome
the problems of infinite regress that asking such a question invites, but it is
possible to approach this reflexivity in different ways. Democratic discourse
often makes it sound like democracy provides accountable government. To
the form of illegitimacy that stems from the unaccountability of tyranny and
oligarchy, democracy is presented as the solution. Democracy, however,
doesnt so much solve the problem of unaccountability as it does shift
its location. It would replace the unaccountability of the tyrant with the
unaccountability of the demos. If governance without accountability is
tyranny, then democracy harbors its own tyrannical shadow insofar as the
boundaries of the demos are not themselves opened to scrutiny. Modern
notions of popular sovereignty have reinforced this.
The principle of popular sovereignty, developed in eighteenth-century
Europe as a way to divest other sovereignties of their normative and political
authority, is meant to ground the legitimacy of political power. Nevertheless,
as Hobbes and other early theorists of sovereignty observed long ago, the
sovereigns authority is defined by its unaccountability. This applies as
much to popular sovereigns as it does to monarchical ones. Subjects may
be accountable to the sovereign, but the sovereign is accountable to no
one.7 Insofar as political communities ground themselves in totalizing claims
to final authority, they define their authority against rather than through
accountability. Because their authority is considered final, the people are not
accountable for their decisions: if they were subjected to anothers authority,
their authority would cease to be final. The people, however, is not an
unproblematic category. Ironically, if the accountability of political authority
is a sine qua non of political legitimacy, then popular sovereignty stands in
the way of a more legitimate politics.
The desire for a final sovereign democratic subject most often takes as its
referent the bounded communities of city, region, or nation, and determining
who counts and who does not is left to those already included. With nations
rendered as clubs, decisions about membership in political communities
would be the privilege of members. Citizens alone would have the authority
to decide who else should be included and how accountability relations
should be comprised. History has shown, however, that that authority has
as often been a source of abuse as a source of freedom. Large segments
Page 15 of 27
Introduction
of governed populations have been excluded from channels for

demanding answers for the abuses they suffer from government.8 While
judging the past by the standards of the present has its pitfalls, the fact
that institutional accountability arrangements of the past might appear
odious to us now should itself raise questions about todays institutions.
What does one do with the prospect that what one believes to be the best
system of democratic accountability will look different from an historical
distance? Given the instability of judgment across time, how should we
assess assertions that todays accountability institutions are adequate?
The point of these questions is not that authors or practitioners of the past
didnt think like us, but rather that we cannot know how we will be judged
by the future. Time, as Derrida has written, is out of joint.9 In this light, the
challenge of democratically accountable governance is a circular one of
democratically accounting for democratic authority.10Accountability to the
demos needs to be accompanied by accountability of the demos.
(p. 17 )
This is not to reject citizenship or the idea of a demos per se. It is not the
existence of a demos that poses the challenge for accountable governance.
Rather, it is the notion that the demoss authority is final. A reconceived,
post-sovereign notion of democratic accountability would still require
democratic publics, but the structures and decisions of these publics would
no longer be located outside the field of contestation and answerability.
Globalization and PostSovereign Publics

Globalization has materially undermined the integrity of bounded,
democratically accountable national polities. The terms of globalizations
challenges to the sovereignty and democratic autonomy of nationstates are by now quite familiar.11 Technological advances in travel and
communication have given new impetus and capacity to flows across
nation-state boundaries. Financial capital flows, cross-border trade (both
legal and illicit) in goods and services, transnational networking among
nongovernmental actors, the spread of cultural images and the flow of
environmental pollutants across political borders and into ecosystems all
make it increasingly difficult for nation-states to regulate their domestic
affairs in an autonomous fashion. Whats more, the emergence of new
forms of transnational and private authority, ranging from international
human rights regimes to financial rating agencies to transnational civil
society,12 increasingly challenge the notion that sovereign nation-states
are the ultimate authorities in world politics. Citizens might still be able to
hold government officials to account, but many other sources of governance
Page 16 of 27
Introduction
escape their control. Today, the decisions made in one country often (p.
18 ) have governance effects that reach well beyond national borders, and
many sources of governance end up neither authorized by nor accountable
to the people governed or affected by them. Consequently, even though
democratic accountability is normatively indispensable for legitimate
governance, at the national level its conditions of possibility appear to be
slipping away, to the extent that they were ever in place to begin with.
It is important to avoid exaggeration. The early exuberance for globalization
has given way to more tempered reflections about the nationally embedded
nature of global flows,13 about the continuing relevance of state regulation,14
about the historical continuities of globalization,15 and about the ways
the vision of state sovereignty that serves as a foil for globalization hype
is based largely on a fiction: the Westphalian order of sovereign nationstates was never so seamless.16 Moreover, in some ways nation-states
are acquiring more, not less, power and authority as a result of outside
pressures: The threat of transnational terrorism has resulted in heightened
state monitoring and regulation of social life; global environmental pressures
have generated new environmental bureaucracies; global financial crises
have given rise to new forms of economic regulation. Such qualifications
notwithstanding, I believe the basic globalization thesis remains compelling.
The capacity and authority of states to regulate affairs within what has
been considered their territorial and citizenship-defined sovereign space is
being significantly altered by the transformations mentioned earlier. With
more integrated economies and more porous social and political boundaries,
the notion of a bounded and authoritative national citizenry exerting
self-governance has, thus, grown disjointed from the actual exercise of
governing power. This has bearing on the possibility of realizing democratic
accountability.
Insofar as globalization can be characterized in terms of insides that are
being shaped or affected by outsides, it clashes with the desire for an
autonomous, democratically regulated interior. The republican principle
that locates ultimate political authority in the people (the citizenry; the
demos) is sidestepped when transnational bodies and systems exert political
influence over state decisions without being compelled to account, finally,
to the members of the political community. The presence of alternative
sources of influence and authority interrupts the accountability dynamics
that are seemingly indispensable for democratic politics. Quite simply, the
accountability extracted from governments by bodies outside the citizenry
itself and unauthorized by it marks a deviation from forms of democratic
Page 17 of 27
Introduction
legitimacy for which the right to hold government accountable belongs

principally to members of the political community. Democratic theory, with
its models of accountability structured around territorial states, needs to
rethink democratic accountability in (p. 19 ) order to find creative ways to
accommodate the deterritorialization of economic and political power.
The flipside of outsides impacting insides is the impact insides have
on outsides. Globalization technologies have augmented awareness of the
ways that citizens are connected with outsiders. This awareness has in turn
generated new concerns over the ways those others are excluded from
participation in the social, economic, and political decisions that ultimately
affect them. As cosmopolitan theorists have argued, it is an affront to justice
and democratic principles that global structures having great impact on the
life chances and capabilities of various populations should nonetheless afford
those populations little if any opportunity to participate in the shaping of
those structures and few if any venues for demanding answers for abuse. In
this light, interconnectedness comes with a responsibility to seek out ways
to include those on the outside for whom justice demands a hearing. Global
interdependence has thus disrupted the narrative of sovereign democratic
authority, a political imaginary that placed ideological limits upon the bounds
of citizen obligation and solidarity. Sovereign nation-states, once thought to
house democratic accountability, are not adequate to the task.
If democratic accountability has been undermined at the national level, it is
weaker still at the international level, where authority is diffuse, regulatory
control is weak, channels for popular participation are virtually nonexistent,
and a clearly bounded demos does not exist. International organizations
are routinely critiqued for their weak governance capacity and their lack of
answerability to democratic publics. Furthermore, persistent asymmetries
in wealth, power, and influence feed perceptions that the global system is
fundamentally unjust and undemocratic, a perception that has itself been
exacerbated by the unilateralism and seeming impunity of the worlds
only superpower. As these deficits have been revealed, new energies have
formed around the search for alternatives. As I discuss in chapters 5 and 6,
some proposed alternatives are democratic in character, whereas others
are decidedly not. One feature shared by most, however, is skepticism
about global democracy, if by that we mean a form of regime modeled
on democratic nation-states. The idea of fashioning a democratic global
government akin to democratic national governments presents intractable
difficulties of scale and institutional capacity. This skepticism is reflected
in the shifting terminology of world politics, as evidenced by the way
Page 18 of 27
Introduction
governance and democratic accountability have displaced government and

democracy as the preferred terms in studies of globalization. Evidently,
the idea of democratically accountable global governance has a plausibility
that the idea of a global democratic government does not. Normatively
indispensable, yet politically contested, the concept of accountability
appears to straddle (p. 20 ) the anxieties and hopes unleashed by
globalization, promising a way to legitimize governance institutions without
requiring the establishment of a global democracy per se.
Instead of viewing democratic accountability as a second-best option to
democracy per se, I ask if globalization hasnt actually opened new vistas
into the conceit that democracy is accountable government. Globalization
may have undercut the integrity of traditional democratic institutions and
practices, but it has also created an opening to reevaluate democratic
accountabilitys normative and conceptual underpinnings. It has exposed
a need for new communities, not just the re-foundation of old ones. It has
illuminated the importance of deconstructing outmoded governmental
structures, not merely restoring older status quos. Instead of regenerating
democratic accountability as it was thought to exist in nation-states,
we might seek to evaluate the shortcomings of that model. Democratic
accountability understood as accountability to the demos as it exists needs
to be complemented by a more critical understanding of how the boundaries
of the demos can themselves be sources of injustice, and how unjust
exclusion might itself be an object of democratic accountability.
Rather than seeking to reconstitute a condition of a political community
with clear, uncontested legitimacyitself a fictionin this book I seek to
theorize democratic practice in the context of plural, overlapping, and
contested political communities. Interdependence may undermine national
sovereignty, but instead of beginning my analysis with a re-assertion of
sovereign authority, I aim to conceptualize democratic accountability
as a resource for calling even the publics own authority into question.
Democratic accountability, I argue, requires a post-sovereignty politics with
post-sovereign publics.
Critical Accountability and the Politics of Insurgence

In an effort to spell out the implications of such an accountability politics,
I develop a norm of critical accountability as a complement to mainstream
notions of democratic accountability. A critical accountability perspective
would highlight the need for reflexivity, receptivity, and contestation.
Page 19 of 27
Introduction
It would emphasize the importance of disruptive political interventions

coming from outside formal institutions along the boundaries of democratic
inclusion. It would require that we seek to open governance to destabilizing
influences as new and unexpected claims create venues to demand answers
from power. It also requires receptivity to the formation of new publics as
democratic accountability practices expand into new spaces or as existing
practices are deepened. Seen in this way, critical accountability is not a
static characteristic of a (p. 21 ) particular regime. Rather, it participates in
an ongoing critical project of democratization. And the privilege and burden
of democratic legitimation would not rest solely upon existing communities
and formal relationships. It would also depend on the capacity of stakeholder
outsiders to challenge and disrupt authority by demanding answers for their
exclusion.
The challenge is not only to build new institutions capable of exacting
accountability for abuses of power but also to develop reflexive and
receptive ways to identify the accountability failures and illegitimate
exclusions that accompany institutional power and public claims of authority.
Instead of viewing accountability as part and parcel of formal political
order, I aim to decenter formal institutions while emphasizing the key
accountability functions of critique and political disruption. The fact of
the matter is that formal accountability mechanisms often fail. When this
happens, informal practices and social pressures are crucial to ensure that
the principle of democratic accountability is nonetheless put into effect. I
thus aim to reconceive democratic accountability not simply as a way to
reinforce existing democratic regimes, but as a resource for critiquing and
reconstituting the boundaries of existing political orders in the service of
democratization.
Democratic accountability practices have a way of overturning authority
relations. They can challenge and reframe the social standards and
institutions that shape political opportunities and capabilities. They can reenvision the duties and entitlements of citizenship. They can innovate with
new forms of political participation. They can raise new agendas for which
accountability is exacted. Such a democratic politics of disturbance reaches
across any specific regime. Instead of approaching the constitution of a
demos and regime simply as a precondition for democratic accountability, I
argue that critical accountability initiatives contribute to dynamic processes
of democratization whereby democratic legitimation is expanded and
democratic norms are extended to new contexts and populations
Page 20 of 27
Introduction
Chapter Outline
I have divided the book into three parts, loosely organized around the books
core themes. In part I, I focus on the role of democratic accountability as a
source of popular control and on how different institutional configurations
can enhance or thwart accountabilitys controlling effects. I begin in chapter
1 by using the eighteenth-century U.S. ratification debates between the
Federalists and Anti-Federalists to reflect upon competing accountability
tendencies inherent in republican institutions. Both sets of authors conceived
of accountability mechanisms as part of a politics of control designed to
manage the (p. 22 ) various gaps separating representatives from citizens.
They, nevertheless, had different understandings of what such a politics
should entail, and their respective republican appeals to accountability
served conflicting agendas. I draw attention to several pitfalls of institutional
design and to the need to balance the effects accountability institutions
have on government with the effects they have on citizens and democratic
culture.
In chapter 2, I argue that contemporary social-scientific discourse has
become dominated by a narrow, disciplinary model of accountability
typified by the widespread use of the principalagent framework. Within
this model, accountability is treated as involving citizen principals holding
representative agents to account in order to compel the agent to uphold
the principals interests. Despite its considerable utility in selected contexts,
the principalagent framework fails as a general model of democratic
accountability. The model has the benefit of illuminating how conflicting
interests and informational constraints can confound the effects of electoral
accountability. Nonetheless, when it comes to gaining a full picture of what
democratic accountability entails, this approach has several shortcomings.
It is too bound to institutional hierarchies at the expense of horizontal forms
of accountability. It is too focused on disciplining officials according to the
principals preferences, at the expense of accountabilitys role in generating
preferences and new forms of solidarity. It also reflects a conservative bias
that favors formal institutions and that discounts accountability initiatives
coming from outside established institutional structures.
Part II shifts attention away from discipline and control and, instead,
addresses democratic accountability as a source of communal solidarity
and mutual understanding. It also shifts attention away from representative
government and toward deliberative and direct models of democratic
accountability in which reciprocity is given greater priority. Chapter 3
Page 21 of 27
Introduction
uses ancient Athenian democracy to summon alternative possibilities for

realizing democratic accountability in contemporary life. It offers both a
fresh perspective and a basis for critically examining the present. For the
Athenians, accountability was valuable not only for negative, protective
reasons relating to the corruptibility of citizens and the tendency of officials
to subvert the public good. It also played a vital role in the generation of
political community and thereby in the constitution of the public good.
Virtually every male citizen served in public office at some time, and all who
served in public office faced public accountability proceedings before, during,
and after their term in office. Gaps existed between rulers and the ruled
such that public power could be abused, but those gaps were mobilized to
spread both accountability and power among citizens. Entering into public
view and being held publicly (p. 23 ) accountable were part of the process
through which citizens were gathered together and related to one another
as political equals in what Hannah Arendt called a common world. Such
an understanding of democratic accountability as constitutive of community
offers an instructive contrast to shallower treatments of accountability within
recent debates.
Chapter 4 turns to deliberative democracy frameworks to further expand
our understanding of accountability beyond instrumental and disciplinary
approaches and to raise questions about institutional exclusions at local,
national, and transnational levels. For deliberative democrats, accountability
is not only about exerting control; it is also about justifying behavior.
Accountability means answerability. Having to answer in deliberative publics
for the consequences and rationales of ones actions has transformative
potential. It enhances the probability of realizing justice and of finding
common ground. Deliberative accountability also places pressure upon the
boundaries of political communities, including national ones, and demands
that those whose actions affect others be compelled to justify their actions to
all those affected. This all-affected principle provides considerable normative
leverage against exclusive political communities, but it also creates
impossible inclusion demands. It is, on the face of it, impossible to realize
given the vast scale of effects. We are left, I argue, with a contradictory
situation of being normatively obligated to account for our actions yet
being practically unable to adequately do so. Rather than seeing this as
cause for dismissing or restraining the normative demands of democratic
accountability, I argue that this should offer an opening for critical theory, a
prod for innovation, and a lesson about the need for institutional humility.
Page 22 of 27
Introduction
Part III is organized around market globalization and accountability as a

source of disruption, critique, and reflexivity. Chapter 5 engages the threat
to democratic accountability posed by market globalization. It focuses on
the prospect that global markets are supplanting political accountability
dynamics on the domestic level. I acknowledge that accountability to and
within liberal markets can have some socially beneficial and freedomenhancing effects. Liberal markets can be tremendously efficient and
effective at delivering outcomes. Even so, I argue that such markets can
also have deleterious effects on the environment and society for which
they are unable to account adequately. Among these are detrimental
developmental consequences on the capacity of citizens to act politically. By
emphasizing the use of exit, markets inhibit the use of voice, whereas
voice is indispensable for the public sphere. There are, nevertheless,
some countervailing trends. Activist consumers have effectively politicized
marketssuch as through the fair trade and socially responsible investment
movementssuch that some democratic capacities are (p. 24 ) recuperated.
Despite their ambitions, however, I argue that such consumer-citizen
initiatives ultimately cannot substitute for political forms of democratic
accountability because they operate through markets that rely on
asymmetrical power structures of economic inequality.
In chapter 6, I directly engage global governance debates. Focusing on
the writings of liberal cosmopolitan democrats such as David Held and
more skeptical authors such as Robert Keohane, I argue that contemporary
approaches to democratic accountability in world politics overemphasize
control and order and neglect the place of disorderly, insurgent, and
innovative demands and practices that take place outside formal institutions.
They tend to aspire to a seamlessness and finality with their institutional
design, despite the fact that it is often institutional disorientation and
fragmentation (rather than seamlessness) that generate the sort of
sensitivity to injustice and illegitimate exclusion that is so essential for
democratic accountability. They also tend to locate the standards of
constitutional authority and international law outside of accountability
dynamics, thus opening critical questions about the accountability of
accountability frameworks themselves. Against these approaches, I argue
that democratic accountability should be regarded as incompatible with any
claim to final authority, regardless of whether that authority is the state,
the people, or cosmopolitan public law. A critical, interrogative mode of
the democratic accountability project needs to accompany the constructive,
institution-building one. Advancing democratic accountability on the world
stage requires more than the creation of authoritative institutions. It requires
Page 23 of 27
Introduction
opening up governance institutionsboth private and publicto new and

external critique. Practically speaking, this requires creating institutional
openings and sources of reflexivity, such as those provided by ombudsmen,
inspection panels, truth commissions, and citizen audits. It also necessitates
social mobilizations outside of official institutional structures, especially
among the marginalized and excluded in critical global public spheres that
reach across social, cultural, theological, and epistemological divides.
Notes:
(1) . The Old French is derived from the late Latin accomptare, which
combines the shortened version of computare meaning to calculate with
the preposition ac or ad meaning to or toward. There was also clearly
variation in the spelling. The OED lists the following variations: acont, acunt,
acunte, acounte, aconpte, accompte, accompt, acownte. Although the
specific word accountability appears to have originated in eighteenth-century
America in the context of debates over political representation, Mel Dubnick
claims that Middle English terms related to accountability can be traced to
the fourteenth century and to Old French equivalents for comptes rendres.
He goes on to describe accountability as an Anglican concept that is tied
to the political history of modern England. See Melvin J. Dubnick, Clarifying
Accountability: An Ethical Theory Framework, in Public Sector Ethics: Finding
and Implementing Values, ed. Charles Sampford, Noel Preston, and C-A Bois
(New York: Routledge, 1999), 6881.
(2) . See Richard McKeon, The Development and the Significance of the
Concept of Responsibility, in Freedom and History and Other Essays: An
Introduction to the Thought of Richard McKeon, ed. Zahava K. McKeon
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 69.
(3) . See, for example, Catalina Smulovitz and Enrique Peruzzotti, Societal
and Horizontal Controls: Two Cases of a Fruitful Relationship, in Democratic
Accountability in Latin America, ed. Scott Mainwaring and Christopher Welna
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 30932; Guillermo ODonnell,
Horizontal Accountability and New Polyarchies, in The Self-Restraining
State: Power and Accountability in New Democracies, ed. Andreas Schedler,
Larry Diamond, and Marc F. Plattner (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 29
52.
(4) . See Gerry Stoker, Governance as Theory: Five Propositions,
International Social Science Journal 155 (1998): 1728; James N. Rosenau,
Page 24 of 27
Introduction
Governance in the Twenty-first Century, Global Governance 1, no.

1 (1995): 1314; and Klaus Dingwerth and Philipp Pattberg, Global
Governance as a Perspective on World Politics, Global Governance 12
(2006): 183203.
(5) . James Bohman, Democracy across Borders. From Dmos to Dmoi
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 29.
(6) . For a discussion from an anthropological perspective of some of the
undesirable aspects of accountability-based discipline, see Marilyn Strathern,
ed., Audit Cultures. Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the
Academy (New York: Routledge, 2000). See also R. Munro and J. Mouritsen,
eds., Accountability: Power, Ethos and the Technologies of Managing
(London: International Thomson Business Press, 1996).
(7) . In Hobbes characterization,
The office of the sovereign, be it a monarch or an assembly,
consisteth in the end, for which he was trusted with the
sovereign power, namely the procuration of the safety of the
people; to which he is obliged by the law of nature, and to
render an account thereof to God, the author of that law, and
to none but him.
As the final authority, the sovereign is that body to whom all others within its
domain are accountable, and as the final authority he himself is accountable
to no one within his domain. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1962), 247.
(8) . Given the ruling ideologies of their times, such unaccountable
exclusions may not have been a problem for citizens of the past (though
long histories of democratic debate about inclusion and exclusion would
seem to suggest otherwise), but they certainly were problems for many of
those on the other sides of those exclusions. They are also problems for
us insofar as we recognize that injustice is not limited to that which takes
place among the included. Injustice takes place across borders as well as
within them. The right to self-determination, while a powerful principle, does
not entail a right to neglect the effects of ones determinations on others.
Lest a societys sovereign right to set its own borders be made to double as
the sovereign right to inflict damages upon those who fall outside of those
borders, a rethinking of both sovereignty and accountability is in order.
Page 25 of 27
Introduction
(9) . Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work
of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York:
Routledge, 1994).
(10) . Even if one maintains that the ends of accountability should be
determined not by democratic publics but by reference to abstract principles,
as liberal theorists generally do with their appeal to rights, the determination
of those principles also presumes an unaccountable authoritative claim: Who
has the authority to
determine which principles are universal and which rights are to be actively
protected? Reason does not speak on its own, and rights have long been
shown to be heavily contested.
(11) . See, for example, David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and
Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
(12) . See Rodney Bruce Hall and Thomas J. Biersteker, eds., The Emergence
of Private Authority in Global Governance (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2002).
(13) . Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
(14) . Michael Mann, Has Globalization Ended the Rise and the Rise of the
Nation-State? Review of International Political Economy 4, no. 3 (1997):
47296; Geoffrey Garrett, Global Markets and National Politics: Collision
Course or Virtuous Circle? International Organization 52, no. 4, (1998); 787
824.
(15) . Paul Hirst and Graham Thompson. Globalization in Question: The
International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance, 2nd ed. (Malden,
MA: Polity Press; 1999).
(16) . Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999).
Page 26 of 27
Introduction
Page 27 of 27
Introduction

Accountability and Democracy: The Pitfalls and Promise of Popular Control

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Accountability and Democracy: The Pitfalls and Promise of Popular Control

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Accountability and Democracy: The Pitfalls and Promise of Popular

Print publication date: 2011

Governance without accountability is tyranny. Few principles are as central

another with accusations of unaccountability, but the conditions for realizing

to (re)construct formal institutions that enable citizens to exert better control

accountability. Taken together, they paint a rich and multidimensional

Accountability: The Anatomy of a Concept

Without transparency, accountability may be blind. But without the

of socially agreed accountability standards even if the power wielders dont

contemporary politics while recuperating varied meanings and applications

smaller set of scholars who recognize a wider set of accountability actors.3

Accountability as a Mechanism of Control

can backfire. For example, as I describe in my discussion of the U.S.

Any compelling account of democratic accountability must address the

Recuperating Alternative Modalities: Mutuality, Community,

democratic community can be formed and strengthened when individuals

Similar themes can be found in the literature on deliberative democracy. In

Popular Sovereignty and the Problem of Unaccountable

of governed populations have been excluded from channels for

Globalization and PostSovereign Publics

legitimacy for which the right to hold government accountable belongs

governance and democratic accountability have displaced government and

Critical Accountability and the Politics of Insurgence

It would emphasize the importance of disruptive political interventions

uses ancient Athenian democracy to summon alternative possibilities for

Part III is organized around market globalization and accountability as a

opening up governance institutionsboth private and publicto new and

Governance in the Twenty-first Century, Global Governance 1, no.

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