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This introductory chapter begins with a discussion on the challenges of democratic accountability in Latin America. It then presents the three main themes that run throughout the book. These are the controversies about the definition of accountability, the relationship between electoral accountability and mechanisms of control and oversight of public agencies, and the shortcomings and advances of non-electoral forms of accountability in contemporary Latin America.

This is the second of two chapters on preference democracy. It points out that theories of liberal democracy necessarily require systematic responsiveness to popular wishes, in ways that make them fundamentally ‘preference‐respecting’, but that there are many different kinds of preferences and correspondingly many different ways of respecting them. Different models of democracy are better at providing certain sorts of respect for certain sorts of preferences than others, and which model of democracy liberal democrats want to adopt therefore depends on which sorts of preferences they want to accord which sort of respect. The central claim of this chapter is that the author's preferred model of ‘democratic deliberation within’ is preference‐respecting in the right way, and that it therefore deserves a key role in any larger system of democratic accountability. The different sections of the chapter are: Respecting Preferences, Not Just Recording Them; Permissible Paternalism; Assessing Alternative Models of Preference‐Respecting Democracy; The Virtues of Sporadic Assessments: Preference‐Respecting Arguments for Indirect Democracy; and Combining ‘Democratic Deliberation Within’ and Trustee‐style Representative Democracy.

The idea of basing further progress towards European integration on a permissive consensus has been substantially challenged since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, primarily because of its objective of establishing a single European currency. The Euro has strong implications for increasing the visibility of the lack of democratic accountability, and of the lack of a European demos. In the light of these developments, the chapter brings together a number of conclusions suggested throughout this volume.

This chapter introduces another voting mechanism — the absolute majority rule. Absolute majority voting rules, which require a majority of all eligible members or voters to take institutional action, can promote accountability by insuring legislative and democratic majorities against strategic behavior by minorities. Moreover, such rules simultaneously promote the accountability of legislators and other officials to broad electorates and minimize the accountability of officials to narrow interest groups and other democratically suspect third parties. These two effects are complementary — the first promotes accountability where it is desirable, the second dilutes it where it is undesirable. Absolute majority rules, which can be used in conjunction with submajority rules, thus provide a tool for optimizing accountability.

This chapter examines partisan calculations about party reputations as influences on routine and event-driven public hearings, using the classic typology of police patrols and fire alarms. It considers committee choices regarding the content of national security oversight hearings by comparing routine inquiries to reviews of major crises and scandals. The chapter uses the unique characteristics of fine-grained coding of hearings to develop measures for police patrol and fire alarm oversight of national security. It also discusses expectations about committee behavior as well as the distribution of patrols and alarms for the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, particularly as they relate to changes in military casualties from 1947 to 2008. Finally, it explores crisis oversight as a form of committee review that is particularly important to democratic accountability.

This chapter addresses the question: In a democratic polity, how (if at all) can judges promote accountability and allied democratic virtues? It suggests a supermajority voting rule that weights law in favor of the exercise of delegated lawmaking authority by government officials. Legal doctrine already requires this, but does not enforce the requirement with a voting rule. The suggestion here is that a small-scale institutional mechanism can better enforce the current law, promoting the democratic accountability of administrative law and policy at lower cost than the current regime. The chapter thus connects delegation with voting rules geared to promoting accountability, the theme of Chapters 3 and 4.

In representative democracies accountability is seen as an ideal and an achievement and also as partially constitutive of democratic government. Democratic accountability implies governance based on feedback, learning from experience, and the informed consent of the governed. Citizens are neither the initial authors of laws and budgets nor the designers of the political order under which they live. But they are not powerless. Although most decisions are made by elected representatives, appointed officials, and other power holders, rulers still have an obligation to be appropriately accountable to the ruled. However, a rising number of demands for explanations and justifications indicate the limits of popular acceptance, allegiance, and support. This chapter outlines elements of an analytical framework for thinking about the interrelations between democratic accountability, political order, and orderly change, that is, how democratic accountability processes are affected by an existing political order and how they, in turn, affect that order.

Federal systems are about the distribution of legal and political power, but law is not only one of the currencies of federalism, it is also one of federalism's most important supports; this chapter considers the role that law plays in establishing and enforcing the system by which both legal and political power are distributed within the USA and the EU. Bermann explores the various ways in which the courts can, and choose to, enforce the principles of federalism beyond the classical ‘political’ and ‘procedural’ safeguards provided by the institutional structures themselves and the constraints on the deliberative process. He describes the reluctance on the part of courts on both sides to police the borders of enumerated competences, assess the ‘necessity’ of federal action, or carve out the ‘core’ of state sovereignty, all of which are ways of ‘second‐guessing’ the political process; he then points to the recent emphasis of the USA Supreme Court on what he calls the ‘relational’ aspects of federalism, whereby courts can identify ‘forbidden interfaces’ between State and federal governments, even without specific constitutional grounds. Bermann uses the examples of sovereign immunity and of anti‐commandeering to illustrate the manner in which court‐enforced constraints on the manner in which different levels of government interact can protect and promote democratic accountability in the USA. In contrast, European Union law offers no protection against risks to democracy from commandeering, but more broadly relies almost exclusively on the representation of member states and sub‐national units in the Council as structural political safeguards.

This chapter explores other ways that trustee-style representation preferences within constituencies could ultimately translate into trustee-style governing styles on the part of elected representatives (and vice versa). Using the same data from previous chapters, the chapter demonstrates that citizens who are represented by Republicans are more likely to say that their representative is a trustee, regardless of their own preferences regarding one or the other style. The chapter also explores matters of democratic accountability: does disappointment in a legislator's representation style translate into lower job-approval ratings (and thus job insecurity) for that representative? And is it worse for those representatives who are deemed not responsive enough, as opposed to those who are considered too responsive? Democratic theory answers both of these questions in the affirmative, and so do our empirical tests. However, Christian traditionalists (and Republicans) are much less likely to express disapproval toward a legislator who is perceived as nonresponsive than are secular progressives (and Democrats). This pattern suggests that trustee-style representatives are much less likely to suffer electoral defeat if they represent culturally Red districts than if they represent culturally Blue ones.

This chapter develops a conceptual model of intelligence accountability as a relationship between accountability holders and holdees, or principals and agents. This model identifies three conditions for accountability to occur: access to information, existence of adequate standards, and authority and willingness to use them. The model posits that the existence of these conditions and the broader relationship between accountability holders and holdees are not fixed in time. When one or more of these conditions is not satisfied, accountability problems emerge and trigger responses that may or may not fill accountability gaps. This conceptual model is used to broaden the study of intelligence accountability – which has largely focused on the role of the three branches of government – and take into account the place of non-state actors in the U.S. system of intelligence accountability.

This chapter examines publicly accessible urban green spaces, from both anthropological and socio-legal perspectives. It explores the concept of communal property through a case study of Heeley People’s Park and two other urban parks in Sheffield, UK. It draws on a range of sources, including evidence of individual and collective practices which have changed the land over time. Tensions between the social understandings of ownership and belonging, and the legal definition of property, are highlighted through a bundle of rights analysis. The chapter considers different ownership structures and governance frameworks for urban green spaces, concluding that there is a mismatch between these legal arrangements and experiences of belonging and ownership, in the non-legal sense. The consequent difficulty in articulating a discourse of communal property undermines efforts to secure the funding needed to protect and maintain these important community resources.

This article contributes to the study of democratic problems related to governance networks, by focusing on the role of the media. Two main rivalling hypotheses are examined. The functionalist hypothesis postulates that the media accurately inform the public about policy actors and their responsibilities, independent of these actors' institutional status. The media-bias hypothesis postulates an attention bias towards elected policy actors, resulting in reduced public visibility of non-elected policy actors. The analysis uses standardised data on decision-making processes and newspaper content relating to public transport and economic promotion policies in eight western European metropolitan areas. Findings are that the actor mix of governance networks is quite accurately reflected in newspaper reporting. However, elected actors are more often presented as responsible for policies ('over-responsibilised'), and they are more often blamed for policy failures than other actors ('over-blamed'). The extent of this media bias depends on commercial pressure on media outlets. We also show that variations of this general pattern are linked to different types of media systems found across the cases under scrutiny.

This chapter asks whether there is cause for pessimism or optimism regarding groups as democratic agents. It rehearses the main findings from the book and suggests areas where further work may be carried out. It also ponders how we might explain and then deal with the finding that most groups do not wholly fulfil representative potential. It argues that the paradox of representation — claiming to speak for what is absent — means that all groups confront a ‘gap’ in terms of demonstrating democratic accountability and authorization. The key question is how this gap is assessed. The discussion argues that modes of representation are institutions, and, as such, the appropriateness of a form of representation will change over time and be contested.