the fallacy of electoral accountability

7/29/2019 The Fallacy of Electoral Accountability

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The Fallacy of Electoral Accountability

J.S. Maloy

Assoc. Prof., Dept. of Political Science

Oklahoma State Univ.

(Feb. 2012)

Abstract: The proposition that regular competitive elections are mechanisms of democratic

accountability still forms the basis of much empirical and theoretical research in political science,

despite sporadic attacks of skepticism in recent decades. These attacks have been diffuse but well

founded. This paper surveys and claries the empirical failures and theoretical weaknesses of electoral

accountability in order to defend a radical form of skepticism: elections are suitable for purposes of

selection only, not of accountability.

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The idea of electoral accountability is one of the most deeply entrenched aspects of political discourse

in the late-modern world, and regular competitive elections are usually the institutional center-piece of

thought and action on behalf of democratic progress. Theoretical as well as empirical literatures in

political science emphasize the electoral connection (e.g. Mayhew 2004) between voters and

representatives: the former are supposed to control the latter by rewarding them with reselection or

punishing with deselection. Scholarly efforts at improving or deepening democracy often revolve

around electoral institutions (e.g. Streb 2008, Gerken 2009). Even attempts to reconceive political

accountability in non-electoral terms continue to pay homage to the conventional wisdom that repeated

elections remain, nonetheless, accountabilitys primary vehicle (e.g. Grant & Keohane 2005, 41;

Borowiak 2007, 1003; Rubenstein 2007, 618-19).

At the same time, its well known in academic circles that various considerations qualify the

force of electoral accountability, and recent research has shown signs of skepticism about both its

theory and practice. Studies in the history of ideas have established that elections were understood in

the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries to perplex rather than to promote popular power,

and that other, non-electoral procedures of accountability have traditionally been preferred by

democrats (Manin 1997, Maloy 2008, McCormick 2011). Studies of the empirical realities of modern

elections suggest that the conditions under which they could be interpreted as vehicles of

accountability are rarely present, leading to a perceived need to substitute specialized accountability

agencies (Przeworski et al. 1999, 24, 50-1) or horizontal accountability (Schedler et al. 1999, 2-3, 23-5).

It was over a decade ago that an edited volume entitledDemocracy, Accountability, and

Representation (hereafter abbreviated asDAR and cited as Przeworski et al. 1999) forced the

accountability decits of electoral democracy on our attention, yet the assumed absence of these decits

has continued to form a conceptual starting-point for much academic research on electoral processes

and democratic regimes. There may be two reasons for the muted impact of electoral skepticism up to

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now. First, there may be genuine disagreement over exactly how far its defects should lead us to qualify

or modify the idea of electoral accountability, with the result that some researchers feel licensed to

regard electoral skepticism as merely tentative or suggestive (and therefore negligible for the time

being). Second, there may be genuine cases of cognitive dissonance, so that some researchers simply

prefer to continue the inertia of long-established research agendas despite the possibility that they

might now be practically futile or theoretically obsolete. What weve not seen at all, however, is either a

convincing refutation or a systematic deepening of the electoral skepticism ofDAR. Either of these

things could be the next step in the debate, and either could benet from a capsule survey of the

precise grounds of electoral skepticism before moving forward.

My purpose below is to provide this sort of prompt forward. First, I attempt to clarify the

grounds of skepticism about electoral accountability by collecting its most important features from

various sources in order to offer something new to the debate: a clear and concise statement of the

various reasons for doubting that elections are instruments of democratic accountability. I distinguish

two categories of considerations that contribute to electoral skepticism, empirical and analytical. There

are empirical considerations that lead us to qualify the idea of electoral accountability by recognizing

parameters that limit its practical feasibility, and there are analytical considerations that lead us to

doubt the coherence of the idea itself.

Second, I argue for a deepening of rather than a retreat from DAR. Electoral skepticism is

defensible and compelling in more radical terms than have so far been proposed: elections arent good

for accountability at all but only for selection. One contributor toDAR has already formulated a similar

thesis based on the distinction between selection and sanction (Fearon 1999), but I now elaborate it in a

form that directly contradicts one of the volumes main ndings: that the presence of high-quality

information among voters would redeem the accountability decits of elections (Przeworski et al. 1999,

23-4, 42-4). In other words, the very idea of electoral accountability is a fallacy. What I present below, to

be more precise, is an outline of this radical form of electoral skepticism rather than a fully edged

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defense against possible objections. While this may not amount to a convincing proof of radical

skepticism, it could take cognitive dissonance off the table as a viable response to the debate. That

would be a step forward, at least.

Regardless of whether we accept a qualied, modied version of the idea of electoral

accountability on the basis of the empirical failures brought to light by electoral skepticism, or a more

radical form of skepticism which rejects the very coherence of the idea, the debate over electoral

accountability has the potential to transform democratic theory in important ways. In conclusion I

suggest how the terms of my analysis, irrespective of which conclusions are thought to follow, illuminate

basic defects in two schools of academic political theory which have recently attempted to respond to

some sort of electoral skepticism: minimalism and deliberationism.

Empirical Failures

In its simplest, strongest form, the idea of electoral accountability rests on the proposition that voters

use elections to hold representatives accountable. In empirical research, this proposition serves

sometimes as a testable hypothesis and sometimes as an untested assumption. The latter role is

illustrated by studies that use the assumption of electoral accountability to tell causal stories about why

states that hold regular elections rarely go to war with one another (e.g. Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999,

Reiter & Tillman 2002) or tend to exhibit low levels of political corruption (e.g. Adsera et al. 2003, Tavits

2007), for example. A plausible causal story isnt a good one, however, unless the crucial assumption can

itself be veried as generally true when treated as a testable hypothesis.

For much of its modern history, academic political science has tended to treat electoral

accountability as a generally reliable fact about the world. Broadly speaking, there have been two ways

of nding empirical support for this assumption. First, studies of retrospective and especially economic

voting have found that various measures of material well-being in various times and places have exerted

a systematic inuence over the electoral fortunes of parties and candidates; here the causal story rests

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on the assumption that voters deliberately reward or punish politicians economic performance at the

ballot-box. Second, studies of the relative ideological or policy positions of voters and parties (or

candidates) have found that elections tend to enforce congruence between them; here the causal story

assumes that voters preferences are exerting control over politicians preferences, not vice versa.

In response,DAR couldnt be accused of a radical form of electoral skepticism: the editors

found mixed empirical results on electoral accountability and acknowledged that these were a

signicant let-down on conventional expectations (Przeworski et al. 1999, 22-4). But the volume as a

whole does offer, through a combination of empirical and conceptual analysis, considerations that tend

to undermine the proofs of electoral accountability associated with both economic voting and

ideological congruence. Ill now address the former while reserving consideration of the latter for the

analytical or conceptual section of this paper.

The center-piece of the volumes empirical skepticism is an analysis of economic voting in all

democracies between 1950 and 1990 (Cheibub & Przeworski 1999). Using the probability of survival of a

government as the dependent variable, this analysis found that a wide range of economic variables had

no signicant effect. Only one variable, measuring growth in the labor force, had a modest positive

effect on the likelihood of re-election. On the whole, then, plenty of governments with bad economic

records survived while plenty with good records did not. A previous study was replicated which had

found that clarity of responsibility (secure majority control over government, party unity, and so on)

determined whether voters were able to reward and punish economic performance in systematic ways

(Powell & Whitten 1993), thereby explaining away the cases for which economic-voting studies had

yielded negative results. But Cheibub and Przeworski found with their expanded dataset that results

didnt improve even when distinguishing disciplined parliamentary regimes with high clarity of

responsibility.

In empirical studies that have subsequently appeared to vindicate electoral accountability, the

key dependent variable has tended to be casually conceptualized and variously operationalized. The

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probability of re-election of individual candidates, not whole governments, has been used as the

dependent variable in a study of parliamentary elections in Poland (Zielinski et al. 2005), and the actual

failure of re-election has been used in a study of Italian parliamentary elections focussed on

representatives involved in corruption trials (Chang et al. 2010), with the conditional nding that

electoral accountability may work in the presence of intense media coverage. Other studies with positive

accountability results have measured their dependent variable in terms of changes in incumbents vote-

share (Bovitz & Carson 2006), changes in incumbents approval ratings in opinion polls (Kelly 2003),

survey responses about the self-reported candidate choices of voters (Jones 2011), and changes in

incumbents behavior presumably intended to appeal to voters before election day (Huber & Gordon

2004). Typically these studies fail to examine the conceptual stipulations or untested assumptions that

allow their causal stories to include electoral accountability as essential to the interpretation of their

quantitative results. They ignore, in particular, the unifying but largely implicit theme ofDAR: political

elites control the institutions that are supposed to enable citizens control over political elites. In

Maravalls words, an agent who has shirked, i.e. been a bad government, may also be rewarded if he is

a good politician (Maravall 1999, 193). Key institutions that are prone to strategic manipulation

include mechanisms for creating districts and selecting candidates; processes of voting and vote-

counting; and, above all in the eyes of the volumes editors, channels of information.

A key weakness in studies tending toward electoral skepticism up to now, however, is the lack of

a capsule overview of those facts about the political world which give cause for doubt about the

operations of electoral accountability. In order to see what classes of phenomena are relevant, lets

stipulate that electoral accountability involves a process of translation: from (a) some popular will or

judgment by which a government is meant to be controlled, to (b) some mechanism of control, viz. the

reward of reselection or the punishment of deselection. There are at least eight general types of

empirical failure which thwart electoral accountability in one of these two phases, popular will or

effective sanction.

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1. Electoral Fraud. The ease and variety of methods of manipulating electoral results, particularly in mass

elections involving thousands or millions of voters, pose an empirical problem for the democratic

character of electoral sanctions. The basic types of fraud include voting by ineligible persons, over-

voting by eligible persons, denial of voting by eligible persons, and changing the value of eligible voters

votes. Though the academic literature on electoral fraud is relatively thin (Lehoucq 2003, 236-7), well

known techniques include registering ctitious, deceased, or otherwise ineligible voters; using

repeaters to vote more than once; imprisoning eligible voters and releasing them after the polls are

closed; physically blocking eligible voters from leaving home or entering a polling station;

administratively purging eligibile voters from voting lists; bribing or intimidating eligible voters before

they cast their ballots; and tampering with ballots or otherwise miscounting them after theyre cast.

Such techniques are amply attested in the nineteenth-century U.S.A. (Argersinger 1985), but

their empirical presence is both chronologically and geographically broader in scope. Naturally the

most recent cases are of most interest, and Putins Russia springs immediately to mind. Even the

limited academic literature has found cases of fraud in states as various as Great Britain, Mexico,

Germany, Taiwan, Spain, and Argentina (Lehoucq 2003, 237-45). More celebrated cases have appeared in

relatively newer democracies like Ukraine, where in the 1990s Pres. Leonid Kuchma used his power

over the careers of regional leaders to obtain fraudulent but favorable reporting of electoral results (Arel

2001). Even in the U.S.A. today, the 2000 presidential vote in the state of Florida famously failed to meet

basic international standards of free and fair elections such that fraud could be ruled out (Bjornlund

2004, 3-6).

Measures of the frequency of such cases are difcult to conjure (Lehoucq 2003, 246-9), but

theres reason to think that social scientists tend to under-estimate them: even in uncompetitive polls

where the identities of the eventual victors arent in doubt, for instance, fraud is frequently used to

increase margins of victory (Simpser n.d.). In so far as reliable electoral results are essential to

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interpreting the popular will behind the voting, the difculties of obtaining them make for difculties in

interpreting elections as vehicles of accountability.

2. Electoral Technique. Equally important is the fact that problems of electoral fraud, and even of

unintentional inaccuracies in electoral results, have no denitive technical solutions. Though its well

known that certain types of ballot yield lower rates of voter error than others, e.g. optical-scan vs.

punch-card ballots (Saltman 2006, 189), techniques for counting ballots are as important as for marking

them. Computer technology, for instance, can reduce marking errors to two or three percent of all

ballots cast (Herrnson et al. 2008, ch. 4), but theres no consensus about whether it offers counting

procedures that are secure from fraudulent activity (pp. 111-12). As long ago as the early 1970s, when

computers were rst used to tabulate results from elections in southern California, a team of computer

scientists demonstrated that the voting results could be systematically skewed by technical

manipulation (Saltman 2006, 166-7); the trick has recently been repeated with reference to

computerized touch-screen voting machines (201-4). Even as administrative practices are rened to

respond to such technical challenges, the basic problem remains that computer-processed results arent

amenable to a genuine recount: as electoral technology becomes more sophisticated, the number of

persons capable of certifying the results (i.e. qualied software engineers) shrinks. Attempts to make

computerized voting machines generate auditable paper-trails have had the side-effect of increasing

voter error (Herrnson et al. 2008, ch. 6). Unlike a twelve-member jury or a 500-member assembly, a mass

electorate makes it very slow and costly to conduct a publicly veriable recount.

In short, if human nature ensures the permanence of the motives for electoral fraud, the

logistics of mass elections ensure the permanence of the opportunities. At present, these rst two

empirical failures have the look of ironclad constraints on electoral accountability rather than

remediable decits. In operational terms, researchers who use parties or candidates vote-share, or

probability of re-election, or actual re-election, as their dependent variable in quantitative analyses

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designed to prove the existence of electoral accountability are making themselves hostages to the

possibility of fraud and to the inevitable imperfections of electoral technique on which fraud thrives.

3. Poor Information. Even if electoral results could always be certied as accurate, their effects on

accountability would depend on the informed will of the electors. Nearly all writers who address the

topic of electoral accountability regard good information as essential to voters cognitive processes. But

here the empirical problem of widespread voter ignorance about public policy, even in relatively

afuent and educated societies (Hardin 2000), stands as one of the most visible obstacles. One attempt

to study American voters information from the supply side, the news media, concluded that local

newspapers ordinarily dont provide enough relevant information to allow voters to deliberately

reward or punish their representatives in Congress and that there are signicant inequalities between

residents of rich and poor media environments (Arnold 2004, 251-3). Another study of electoral

accountability in local contexts in the U.S.A. concluded that voters were able to reward or punish

incumbents based on their performance in years when local media gave intense scrutiny to relevant

issues, but not in years when the media didnt (Berry & Howell 2007). Against the theory that only a

well-informed elite of citizens is necessary to enable accountability, since their opinions lter down to

less attentive citizens (see e.g. Hutchings 2003), Arnold found that in much of the country the few

citizens with a high demand for political information never nd a reliable supply of it (Arnold 2004, 7-

10).

To a considerable extent, then, the failures of the modern news media translate into failures of

electoral accountability. Researchers who nd a correspondence between voters preferences and voting

behavior or electoral results must be careful about using opinion data from opt-in surveys, which tend

to have a selection bias toward better informed members of society (see e.g. Jones 2011), as evidence for

a broad phenomenon of electoral accountability throughout a political system.

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4. Weak Parties. Political scientists have often looked to parties to supply coherent ideological cues when

the fund of information is too limited to allow intelligent policy judgments. Yet theyve equally often

lamented the failure of parties to play this role in various contexts. One of the signal cases of such

lamentation, at the conclusion of an otherwise sanguine account of the analytical possibilities of

retrospective voting as an avenue of electoral control, held that collective responsibility has leaked

out of the system as a result of parties lack of organizational and ideological coherence in the U.S.A.

(Fiorina 1981, 202-10). A more recent version of the same empirical point nds that a lack of partisan

unity obscures the clarity of responsibility which voters need in order to use their ballots as tools of

accountability (Powell 2000, ch. 3; see also Carey 2009). In some contexts, then, weak parties make

electoral accountability unrealizable.

5. Strong Parties. But there are other inhibiting conditions on electoral accountability to be found on the

other side of the spectrum of party capacity. One respect in which political parties around the world

tend to remain quite powerful is the preselection of candidates for ofce. If Bachrach and Baratz (1962)

were right that agenda-setting is an important kind of political power, and if partisan nominations

amount to setting the agenda for voters to mark their ballots, then electoral results could be said to

reect elite rather than popular judgments as partisan organizations become stronger and more

coherent.

In the U.S.A., moreover, partisan control of the boundaries of electoral districts also inject elite

judgments into electoral results. The marked decline of the number of competitive or marginal

Congressional districts in recent decades (see McDonald & Samples 2006) has been attributed in part to

partisan redistricting (Ansolabehere & Snyder 2002). Theres a serious debate, to be sure, over whether

high rates of re-election for incumbents do in fact count as an accountability decit, since it could be

the case that incumbents rarely lose because they tend to jump before theyre pushed by an angry

electorate (Cox & Katz 2002). But the more general proposition that close, competitive districts are

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better for electoral accountability (a.k.a. the marginality hypothesis), which underlies the specic

worry about incumbency advantage, seems secure (Grifn 2006). If voters cant effectively sanction a

representative who faces no challengers, or no viable ones, the empirical fact of partisan control over

electoral districts could be a signicant hindrance to the operation of electoral accountability.

6. Constitutional Structures. The strength or weakness of political parties is involved in interactive effects

with the basic electoral processes and constitutional structures of a given state. The most common view

of this interaction among political scientists is that a system of plurality voting within single-member

districts (a.k.a. SMD) is ill suited to the collective accountability of each party, whereas a system of

party-list voting with allocation of seats in proportion to a partys percentage of votes (a.k.a. PR) is ill

suited to the individual accountability of representatives (Powell 2000, 66-8, 86-7; Kunicova & Rose-

Ackerman 2005; Hellwig & Samuels 2008). PR systems, on the other hand, end up exhibiting a higher

rate of legislative turnover, suggesting that its easier for voters to deselect their incumbent

representatives through elections (Matland & Studlar 2004). PR systems are also typically favored by

other measures of quality of democracy, such as ideological congruence between government and

electorate (McDonald et al. 2004, Powell 2006). Which of these measures are more and which less

essential to democracy is a matter of analytic and normative dispute, but either way a number of

established democracies face signicant accountability decits that are built into their constitutional

structures.

At the same time, nearly all such democracies are structured as mixed regimes with

multicameral legislatures, multiple veto-points, and checks and balances among various governmental

agencies; many of them are also federal systems with multiple layers of elected authority, from the

national down to the regional and local. Such complex webs of power, of course, exacerbate problems of

information and clarity of responsibility, as a long line of observers from Thomas Paine down to the

present day has noticed (Paine 2003, 8, 249-50; Arnold 2004, 5).

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7. Weak Incentives. The electoral connection depends on the motivation of incumbents to retain their

seats on election day, but the incentives for staying in power are sometimes too weak to confer deterrent

power on voters. In local governments in rural China, for example, ofcial salaries are meager and

elected ofcers therefore little fearful of the consequences of performing below their constituents

expectations (Tsai 2007, 254-5). In other countries, of course, the problem doesnt take this form: in the

U.S.A., senators and representatives salaries exceed the median citizens earnings by a factor of four or

ve. But non-monetary aspects of elected ofce can also corrode the motivation to win re-election, and

therefore the decision not to face the voters again at the next poll cant always be construed as an

evasion of likely defeat by an otherwise motivated ofce-seeker (cf. Cox & Katz 2002).

8. Financial Inuence. Even healthy levels of ofcial compensation might be overwhelmed by monetary

inducements from unofcial sources. In theory all democracies must respect the rule of one person,

one vote, but none of them enforces a similarly egalitarian distribution of economic resources. This

nancial inequality leads, at least in states where campaigns are funded by private citizens and

corporations, to a presumptive inequality of inuence over elected ofcers i.e. to elite rather than

popular control of public affairs after election day. One attempt to analyze this control in terms of an

investment theory of American electoral politics has found evidence that parties and candidates

switch policies after elections in response to the interests of campaign donors (Ferguson 1995): the

deterrent power of votes, in other words, might be matched or exceeded by that of dollars. It also makes

strategic sense for elected ofcers to anticipate the reactions to their policies of not only their own

donors but also their opponents (Ball 1999).

Interactive effects have been observed between economic inequality and other empirical

failures of electoral accountability. The poor diet of information offered to American voters by local

media has been found to improve only when a well-funded candidate challenges an incumbent member

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of Congress (Arnold 2004, 253). But the difculty of challengers in gathering funds against an

entrenched incumbent, in turn, has been identied as one of the principal causes of the decline in

competitive elections for Congress (Abramowitz et al. 2006), and the weakness of state-level campaign-

funding regulations (which are usually meant to reduce funding inequalities) has been found to play a

similarly anti-competitive role in sub-national elections (Hogan 2004). If good information and electoral

competition are among the premises of electoral accountability, funding inequalities are a prime cause

of their violation.

In some contexts the interference of pecuniary inuence with the electoral connection is even

more direct. In the 1990s Peru had the typical institutional accoutrements of electoral democracy:

periodic and competitive elections, an independent judiciary, and privately owned media. But between

elections it operated as a one-party state, thanks to the elaborate scheme of bribery of Vladimiro

Montesinos, Pres. Alberto Fujimoris intelligence chief. The monthly cost of a deputy from another party

was about $20,000; of a non-partisan judge, $10,000; of the owner of a television network, $60,000

(McMillan & Zoido 2004). Under these cirumstances the notion that voters inuence policy, much less

have any idea how policy is really made, was problematic, but so too was the notion that replacing one

ofcer with another could amount to accountability. When the cash nexus dominates politics, the

incentive of re-election and the likelihood that the electoral winner will govern differently from the

loser are both reduced.

The man atop this whole scheme was still subject to re-election, of course. The broader account

of Fujimoris reign in Peru by Stokes (2001) is one of the most thorough empirical case-studies available

of the troubled relations between elections and accountability. Fujimori ran for the presidency in 1990

as an opponent of neo-liberal economic reforms that would impose scal austerity, shrink the welfare

state, and introduce foreign investment on easy terms. Yet after his electoral victory he implemented the

very reforms hed campaigned against. Despite this betrayal of his mandate, he successfully cultivated

the image of a leader whose hands had, unfortunately, been tied. He also launched two initiatives that

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proved more popular: a counter-insurgency campaign against the Shining Path militia and, less than a

year before the next election, a public-works program that reduced unemployment among the lower

classes (Stokes 2001, 142-8, 152-3). Fujimoris re-election in 1995 bears an important lesson about

electoral accountability: as Stokes sums it up, through intensive and politically targetted

expenditures ... a politician may mislead voters to win ofce, abandon his mandate, and be re-elected

even without persuading people in any lasting way that the unmandated course was the right one (153).

Analytical Doubts

The case of Fujimori in Peru happens to illustrate some of the most important empirical realities of the

world of politics which have a signicant bearing on the idea of electoral accountability. Since this case

has even been cited as proof of electoral accountability by way of economic voting (Kelly 2003), it also

illustrates the timeless nostrum that empirical data alone dont reveal the truth about politics. How data

are interpreted depends on conceptual stipulations and analytical assumptions, as well as

complementary empirical assumptions.

One of the great revelations of theDAR volume is that, in terms of careful and deliberate

theoretical treatment, electoral skepticism has no robust anti-skeptical position to argue against. Some

of the volumes most notable contributions (i.e. Fearon 1999, Ferejohn 1999) spell out the various ways

in which the theory of electoral accountability has already been limited and qualied by what some

political scientists might presume is the most friendly methodological approach to the subject:

principal-agent theory within a rational-choice framework. Indeed, when we turn to conceptual or

analytical foundations, we nd that key elements of skepticism have long been recognized in some of

the classic treatments of the concept of electoral accountability in American political science.

KeysRetrospective Voting in American National Elections (1966) is famous for its claims that the

fear of loss of popular support powerfully disciplines the actions of governments and that the only

really effective weapon of popular control in a democratic regime is the capacity of the electorate to

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throw a party from power (Key 1966, 10, 76). But these claims were in fact severely qualied, if not

defeated entirely, by the conceptual framework in which Key suggested that his results should be

interpreted. His opening chapter revolved around an echo-chamber metaphor for electoral politics:

parties rst put noise into the chamber, and voters then return the echo in the form of electoral results;

the contours of the chamber, as it were, change over time according to circumstances. Remarkably, Key

was convinced that social science itself had a role to play in the messages put into the chamber in the

rst instance, since parties and candidates would alter their pitch according to their operative theories

of voters behavior one of the domains, of course, of psychologists and political scientists. Social-

scientic theories affect political operatives perceptions of voters, Key suggested, and in turn those

perceptions determine the nature of the voice of the people, for they determine the character of the

input into the echo-chamber (7). This strikingly constructivist account of public opinion calls into

question, in a fundamental way, the meaning of electoral accountability: in a sense it becomes the

accountability of political elites to their own rhetorical constructions. And this conceptual framing may

explain why, by contrast with his famous statements to the contrary, Key also hinted that the function of

voters in elections wasnt so much control as inuence (77).

Nonetheless, Keys nding that several American presidential elections in the middle twentieth

century were decided by voters deliberate changes of mind about policy was hailed as a vindication of

the rationality of the American electorate (Key 1966, vii-xv). Barro (1973) is often credited with having

planted a more analytically rigorous seed for the rational choice theory of electoral accountability, but

hes less often given credit for the way, like Key, he qualied the strength of the theory: the basic

conclusion here is that, even with a competitive supply of potential ofce-holders, electoral control is

only partially effective as a mechanism for inducing the ofce-holder to advance the interest of his

constituents (19-20, emphasis added). In addition to the assumption of competitive elections, Barro

kept his theoretic model simple by assuming that incumbents have no control over the electoral process

itself (26) and are unafliated with political parties (41). Ferejohn (1986) noticed two other basic

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assumptions of Barros and deliberately modied them by introducing (a) asymmetric information as

between voters and incumbents and (b) diversity of evaluative standards among voters themselves (10).

Ferejohns conclusion was that these new assumptions would allow incumbents (a) to exploit their

superior information by masking their real failings and (b) to play off the voters against one another in

order to maximize chances of re-election (see also Ferejohn 1999, 132-4). The result, in other words,

vastly reduc[ed] the level of electoral control unless citizens could undertake sociotropic voting by

abandoning their self-regarding motives in favor of some unitary criterion of public welfare (20-2).

In other words, as the rational-choice model of electoral accountability became more realistic,

expected levels of popular control got weaker. Not only did Barro interpret the results of his mathematic

model as showing relatively weak electoral control; subsequent research (as we saw above) has turned

up good empirical reasons to weaken Barros ve key assumptions competitive elections, independent

electoral structures (such as the drawing of districts), symmetric information between voters and

candidates, unitary evaluative standards among voters, and the absence of political parties. Only the last

of these assumptions could be revised in accord with empirical reality in such a way as to strengthen

rather than weaken electoral control, but even here scholarly opinion is mixed about actually existing

parties net effects on accountability.

These qualications of the conceptual force of electoral accountability can be extended into the

realm of radical skepticism. If Pettit (2008) is correct to identify an analytic distinction between

institutional control and causal inuence which reects the language of Keys retreat from

control to inuence we might use these terms to explore how far either type of power can be

realized through electoral accountability. Analyses of the conceptual dimensions of democratic

accountability typically distinguish two phases, a process of scrutiny and judgment (or will-formation)

and a subsequent process of sanction. The analytic assumption that I now wish to defend is that

accountabilityas a function of human relations is distinct fromselection; how we conceptualize processes

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of sanction is essential to making this distinction. Ill also suggest that several important propositions

follow from this distinction.

FIG. 1 INFORMATION JUDGMENT ACTION SIGNIFICANCE

SELECTION personal character,past conduct,future pledges

comparative,dichotomous; oneyes, others no

choice consent:authorization

ACCOUNTABILITY past conduct individualized,continuous (poor,fair, good, etc.)

sanction control: incentivesto act in targettedways

The basic similarity between selection and accountability involves the element of scrutiny and

judgment which is common to both; the difference involves what happens next, as between choice and

sanction. To be an object of choice is to be grouped with other alternatives, to be judged not necessarily

on ones own account but primarily in comparison with others, and then to be either selected or passed

over. To be an object of sanction, by contrast, is necessarily to be judged in isolation and then either

rewarded or punished. Both retrospective and prospective considerations, affecting what kinds of

information are brought to bear on judgment, may be part of scrutiny in either case, but the action-

phases of selection and accountability are what make a clean distinction between the two. The action-

phase of choice is to confer authority, or to grant license toward future conduct, i.e. prospectively; of

sanction, to reward or to punish for past conduct, i.e. retrospectively. To speak somewhat more grandly,

selection is a power whose normative moorings lie in consent; accountability, in control.

Of course theres some conceptual overlap between selection and accountability, or else

categories like the electoral connection would never have gained currency in the rst place. Selection

often appears to involve control as well as consent: in other words, the moment of choice does at times

look equivalent to a moment of sanction. These presumptions supply the foundation for the argument

that periodic elections are a vehicle of accountability. Authorizing one actor in preference to another

often does have some causal effect over which actions ultimately ensue the choice makes a

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difference, so to speak. But Pettits (2008) distinction between causal inuence and institutional control

is relevant here: whatever makes a difference is exercising the former, whereas the latter also requires

some intention or target. In the absence of evidence of a target or of movement toward it, we can have

inuence but not control. Pettits terminology points up the analytic signicance of accountabilitys two

phases, will or judgment (choosing the target) and effective sanction (causing movement toward the

target). Using some prominent recent elections in the U.S.A. as food for thought-experiment, we can see

how regular competitive elections typically fail to identify a target and to move government toward it.

Few would dispute, in retrospect, that the selection of George Bush the younger rather than Al

Gore as president in 2000 made a difference, perhaps a very large one, over the following four or eight

years. But this difference was the result of, in Pettits terms, causal inuence rather than institutional

control. The consequences of the election werent within anyones control to the extent that no one

couldve adequately assessed in advance either the propensities of the candidates (however hard we may

try during the campaign) or the uctuations of events. Whatever target the popular will might

theoretically have settled on during the 2000 campaign (say, reducing the chances of adultery among

high ofcials), events in the world soon made it irrelevant: the electoral result helped to cause one set of

actions rather than another, but not by dint of setting any target toward which the actions were driven.

Another interesting example is the bid of George Bush the elder for re-election in 1992. There

were not two but three major candidates in this poll, and therefore the citizenry sorted itself into four

camps: supporters of each of the three candidates plus supporters of none of them (including non-

voters). Among voters for Bush, suppose that many of them were satised with his performance and

wished to reward him by reselection, but also that some of them wished to punish him with deselection

but were deterred from doing so by their unhappiness with his rivals. In both the Clinton and Perot

camps, suppose that many of these voters wished to punish Bush, and that some of them probably

didnt but were enticed for one reason or another to vote for one of the challengers. Among non-voters,

suppose that some wished to punish Bush but didnt like the alternatives, that some wished to reward

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Bush but were kept away from the polls by accident, circumstance, etc., and that some had no desire in

either direction. If we could obtain reliable information about the exact proportions of these different

wills and judgments within the electorate, only then could we estimate the accountability result of the

1992 election. The important point, however, is that the electoral process itself obviously isnt designed

to yield such a result: it allows (untargetted) inuence but not control; its function, in other words, is

selection not accountability.

Even if mass voting results could be reliably associated with a targetted popular will, a counter-

factual question about 1992 accentuates the weakness of the effective translation of this will into

sanctions: what if a quirky Texas millionaire had decided not to launch a self-funded national campaign?

Its likely that Perots advertising elicited discontent with the incumbent which otherwise wouldve

remained latent, and its possible that, in the absence of Perots candidacy, Bush wouldve narrowly

defeated Clinton. Would we then have been forced to say that the American people rewarded Bush

through electoral means? If Perot himself constituted such a decisive factor in the nations political

judgment, it hardly makes sense to speak of the electoral process in terms of democratic accountability.

The Perot-less counter-factual for 1992 seems all the more plausible when we consider Bush the

youngers bid for re-election in 2004. Public discourse in the mass media was xated on the decision to

invade Iraq and the conduct of the subsequent occupation, though of course voters were anything but

united around this issue as the sole criterion of electoral judgment. If a conservative anti-war candidate

say, Pat Buchanan had entered the race that year, its conceivable that John Kerry wouldve played

Clinton to Buchanans Perot, and Bush the younger wouldve followed Bush the elder to electoral

defeat. In the absence of a Buchanan gure, however, Bush the younger earned a narrow victory,

showing what the elder mightve achieved in the 1992 race without Perot. Even with only two

candidates, however, the target indicated by this result was unclear, given that American voters appeared

to disagree whether the Iraq war or the legalization of homosexual marriage (among other issues) was

the most important standard for evaluating the candidates that year. While many observers considered

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the war to be very unpopular, Bushs campaign was able to invoke other criteria of judgment to

discourage deselection. On the terms of Ferejohns analysis of electoral control, the incumbent used

informational advantages and cognitive diversity within the electorate to fend off accountability. On the

terms of Stokes analysis of Peru, Bush 2004 was Fujimori 1995 redux.

What lies behind the intuitions Ive tried to elicit through these examples is a basic analytic

difference between accountability and selection, i.e. between sanction and choice, which poses

insurmountable obstacles to translating judgment into sanction by electoral means. As is well known,

certain assumptions about the psychology of voters and candidates must be in place in order for the

threat of removal to act as a genuine deterrent to some behaviors and a spur to others; moreover, voters

information about candidates must be good for the threat or spur to be applied effectively. But there is

another stringent condition that Figure 1 brings to light, under the heading of judgment: unless the

voting is done for a plebiscite or retention election, in which the incumbent is isolated for purposes of

scrutiny and judgment and the choice is purely and simply between reselection and deselection, voters

cant truly be said to exercise a power of sanction. Contested elections with multiple candidates always

mingle prospective with retrospective considerations (Fearon 1999, 58-60) because even voters wanting

to remove the incumbent must rst weigh whether the alternative candidates would bring any

improvement. But in fact its not the prospective or retrospective as much as the comparative character

of electoral judgments which inhibits accountability. Thats why representatives whom voters would like

to punish often get re-elected anyway: the decision depends more on the challengers than on the

incumbent. Negative campaign advertising, designed to sully ones opponents reputations, is

controversial for its effects on voter turn-out and for its ethical implications, but its primary purpose is

to defeat democratic accountability. It does this by actively discouraging voters from doing what we

expect accountability to do: judging the incumbent.

Its an analytic dead-end, therefore, to expect a competitive election to do the job of translating

a clear judgment into an effective sanction; and, ironically, the less is known about a victorious

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challenger, the more entitled we are to say that electoral accountability has been realized. A voter who

decides to study carefully the character, conduct, and plans of every candidate is neutering any

sanctioning potential inherent in the vote. Only if all voters in a particular election decide to ignore the

challengers, or at least a majority who are solidly united in their judgment about the incumbent do so,

can they be said to be using their votes for accountability. In exchange, of course, theyd be surrendering

the function of selection to fate. Voters can use an election for selection or for accountability, but not for

both. When voters try to use elections for both, as in any sizeable electorate they inevitably will, the

result is the mutual attrition of both: rather than doing one job well, they do two jobs badly. We can

now see that regular competitive elections are in theory a mechanism of pure selection, not of

accountability. The electoral thesis of accountability requires elections to carry more than they can bear.

Skepticism about the electoral connection between voting for representatives and holding them

accountable has been advanced on both empirical and analytical grounds before now (Przeworski et al.

1999, 22, 24, 44, 50), and my analysis so far claries and reinforces those doubts. But Ive also developed

reasons for radicalizing the skepticism: even the remediation of all the empirical failures, from electoral

fraud to party activities to pecuniary corruption, couldnt remove the analytical weaknesses inherent in

the electoral thesis of accountability. A particularly striking implication of my analysis is that improving

information, though necessary to the processes of scrutiny and judgment which both selection and

accountability have in common, is radically insufcient for the latter. In this connection, one ambiguity

about the new accountability agencies recommended by Przeworski et al. (1999) is whether theyre to

be robustly punitive institutions or merely clearing-houses of high-quality information. If the latter,

were still caught in a trap: information alone cannot supply the accountability decit of the electoral

thesis. If the former, however, we need to consider the institutional-design possibilities for non-electoral

mechanisms of sanction.

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Theories and Institutions

Electoral skepticism within democratic theory has in recent decades thrown up two alternatives to the

conventional wisdom that regular competitive elections make governments accountable to citizens. Both

the minimalist and the deliberative schools of democratic theory are grounded in some sense of

electoral accountabilitys inadequacies, whether empirical or analytical.

The minimalist theory of democracy surrenders the very notion of popular control through

accountability, building on Schumpeters redenition of democracy as a forum of competitive partisan

struggle which enables popular authorization of governments but not sanction or control (Schumpeter

1942, ch. 22). Whereas Schumpeter dismissed the idea of democratic accountability in primarily

normative terms, Przeworski (1999) is less scornful than mournful: given the ease with which political

elites manipulate electoral processes in order to avoid accountability, democratic theory has no choice

but to retreat to more modest goals. Hardin (2000) reaches a similar conclusion by emphasizing the

informational and epistemological limitations of citizens attempts to hold their representatives

accountable through elections. But elections at least have the saving virtue of allowing peaceful

transfers of power from one set of elites to another, which is no small matter, considering the alternative

of civil war (Przeworski 1999). They also offer subjects the existential drama (Dunn 1999, 342) of the

occasional humbling of one set of elites for the benet of another. Thus the operational focus of

minimalist democracy turns to using elections as instruments of stability, e.g. through understanding

the conditions of losers consent (Anderson et al. 2005). Reform elections by all means, the minimalists

say, but with an eye to psychic assurance and social peace rather than democratic power.

The deliberationist theory also proposes reforms around the edges of existing electoral

institutions, and in some variants is also primarily motivated by the norm of ameliorating disagreement

in pluralistic societies. But the deliberationist impulse is basically resistant to the notion that citizens

cant be well enough informed, as either an empirical or analytical matter, to govern themselves.

Accordingly, the focus of deliberative reform has been to create opportunities for citizens to learn about

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public policy and then to communicate their informed, rational judgments to their representatives and

fellow citizens: focus-groups and deliberative panels ought to issue advice to the general public before

elections and to the elected ofcers after elections (e.g. Fishkin 1995, Gastil 2000). By offering citizens

forums in which to become better informed and through which to offer advice to policy-makers,

deliberative reforms are often explicitly aimed at soothing disenchantment and healing disagreement

within a particular society (e.g. Gutmann & Thompson 1996).

Despite marked differences in tone and method, the minimalist and deliberationist responses to

the accountability decits of electoral democracy seem to share a fundamental premise: the end is

consent, not control. This premise is made explicit only in minimalism, but the citizen of a deliberative

democracy is promised the power of advice, not of sanction. There accountability means merely the

right to ask questions and to receive answers, and persuasion and shame are citizens only means of

inuencing their political superiors. If we relax the analytical assumption that this verbal or discursive

exchange counts as popular control over government, or the empirical assumption that it will proceed

from the formation of a genuinely popular and coherent will, a rapprochement between minimalism

and deliberationism is possible. The presence of deliberative forums might, under the right

circumstances, be more likely than their absence to promote civic harmony: solidifying winners

consent before elections and losers consent after.

Theres a third possible response to electoral skepticism. Instead of keeping elections while

jettisoning the norm of control which formerly supplied their rationale, or injecting elections with some

participatory ideal while leading them into the analytic dead-end of more or better information, we

might consider a radical alternative: popular control might be achieved through non-electoral

institutions.

In other words, it may be possible to retain electoral forms for purposes of selection but to

implement non-electoral processes for purposes of accountability. For this there is long-standing

historical precedent (Maloy 2008, McCormick 2011), according to the extant records of ancient and

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Renaissance politics, as well as surviving practices in Anglo-American law. The two basic forms of non-

electoral accountability in the Western tradition are audit and impeachment: the rst involves a

thorough review of an individuals conduct at the end of a dened period of time; the second, an ad hoc

review on some emergent occasion. The classic case of the former is the review (euthyna) given to each

magistrate in ancient Athens at the end of his one-year, non-renewable term; of the latter, the

indictment and trial of ofcers of state for high crimes in British and American constitutional history.

Both audit and impeachment allow persons holding authority to be scrutinized and sanctioned

by persons granting authority. Neither involves a cognitive process of comparison among several

candidates who engage in campaigning to inuence the result; unlike competitive elections, therefore,

neither allows the structure of incentives of an authoritative gure to be skewed by the vagaries of a

multi-player game of manipulating information.

In the roster of democratic institutions now recognized by popular and scholarly standards

alike, versions of audit and impeachment are relatively invisible compared to electoral institutions. Yet

analogs do exist in modern constitutional republics. In the U.S.A., for example, committees in Congress

are supposed to perform audits, or oversight, with respect to other departments of the federal

government. And the power of impeachment which Congress holds over executive and judicial ofcers

has been invoked on two occasions in the last 40 years. Procedures like these offer some means for

governmental ofcers to be held accountable independently of elections and therefore offer a concrete

starting-point for thinking about the possibilities of non-electoral accountability.

Yet there are two related limitations on the potential of these already existing versions of audit

and impeachment in American national politics to remediate the accountability decits of regular

competitive elections. First, ordinary citizens have no agency in these processes, which are essentially

vehicles of intra-elite as opposed to mass-on-elite accountability. Whats important about

congressional oversight and impeachment is that Congress thereby acquires some control over other

players within the federal government. As James Madison made abundantly clear in 1788, the basic aim

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of the U.S. Constitutions checks and balances is that they rst enable the government to control the

governed, and in the next place oblige it to control itself (Wootton 2003, 247); they shouldnt, obviously,

enable the governed to control the government.

Secondly, the saving democratic feature of congressional oversight and impeachment powers

can only come from some connection between the controllers (i.e. Congress) and the controllers

controllers (i.e. voters). But in regular competitive elections the one mechanism allowed by Madison to

enable the people to control the government weve already seen a mechanism ill-suited to the job of

accountability. As currently constituted, then, audit and impeachment within the American federal

government continue to beg our original question.

Conclusion

Shortly after his successful bid for re-election in 2004, George Bush the younger was asked whether his

administration would hold anyone in the American government accountable for faulty intelligence and

poor planning for the invasion of Iraq. His response was negative, because we had an accountability

moment, and thats called the 2004 elections (VandeHei & Fletcher 2005). Its unsurprising that the

idea of electoral accountability is popular among the established governments of the world: its meant to

give them what they want, which is popular consent as a substitute for popular control. But Ive

attempted to show that consent and control arent the same thing, and that these separate political

functions happen to require distinct institutional arrangements. Unfortunately, it appears that the only

applications for which the idea of electoral accountability is suited are the rhetorical and the naive.

Democratic accountability has to be pursued beyond electoral bounds, or not at all.

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