| Review of: | Enforcing the Rule of Law: Social Accountability in the New Latin American Democracies edited by Enrique Peruzzoti, Catalina Smulovitz |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Uri Ram |
| Reviewed in: | Constellations |
| Date accepted online: | 10/04/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 14, Issue 04, Pages 661-670 |
Book Reviews
The study of accountability - as it is articulated in the book edited by Enrique Peruzzoti and Catalina Smulovitz - is a study in democratic representation; it directs the magnifying lens to the seam in between the represented and representatives and exposes how much that seam is precarious. That seam in between represented and representative or the "people's two bodies" - as Andrew Arato put it (308) - is an endemic problem of any democratic regime, and the more so the more the regime is inclusive, since "an uneducated, relatively poor, hard-working electorate has much greater difficulty observing, criticizing and controlling elected officials than did the more privileged social strata of pre-democratic representative regimes" (309). It is quite obvious however that Latin American democracies evince a more severe problem in this regard than, say, West European democracies. And this defines the regional focus of the book.
"Democracy" is today a universal ideology. The common US promotion of democracy in the world today is done mainly under the slogan of free elections. The hidden assumption is that this procedure is both the utmost expression and ultimate warranty for democratic rule. But obviously, this is a reduction of democracy and its shrinkage into a fleeting, dispersed and passive moment. Democracy, as the editors and contributors to this book argue, requires an ongoing constitutional and public monitoring, and therefore it requires functioning and effective mechanisms that can guarantee that the representatives and administrators would not turn their backs on the represented in the moment right after elections (or in fact would also distort the elections in various ways). As the editors put it "The central question addressed by the concept of accountability is precisely how to regulate and reduce the gaps between representatives and the represented while simultaneously preserving the differentiation between political authorities and the citizenry that characterize the relations of representation" (5).
The novelty of this book is in the articulation of the concept of
One way to understand the novelty and significance of the concept of
The argument made in this book is that both of the older mentioned mechanisms - the legal and the political - while being necessary, are not sufficient. Thus in addition to these traditional or institutional mechanisms, the authors document and advocate their own concept of SOCIAL accountability. This offers an alternative - and certainly a corrective - to those liberal-parliamentary mechanisms, which in many cases proved defective or in absence, especially - but far from only - in Latin America. Since I mentioned already the US promoted concept of democracy, one might also add the observation that in today's USA - of the Patriot Act and of the Gauantamo camp - this added mechanism of social accountability is badly needed and is indeed implemented to some extent.
In the cases where accountability is successful, it "improves citizens' ability to realize their interests, to protect themselves from arbitrary political powers, and to control the way in which public authorities behave in public matters" (348). I think that this concept of
The importance of the concept of social accountability, in conjunction with legal and political accountabilities, is valid far beyond the case studies in this book. It is arguable that it is exactly in today's globalizing world, where the concept of electoral democracy becomes a widely accepted token of political legitimization, that the concept of accountability gains even a greater purchase. In the absence of accountability democracy may turn in the worst case into a mere formal ritual, or, in the best case into a passive grid of rights. Moreover, if one bears in mind Foucault's political pessimism, which is anchored in the transformation of power in modernity from sovereign or despotic into disciplinary or governmental, the concept of accountability and especially of social accountability may offer a ray of hope.
With that said, one should not ignore some pressing questions that are not addressed in this book. The problematics of the book is marked by the society/state relationship, with a strong implicit assumption that the state is the potential culprit. But as Adam Przeworski points out in this book, society is not necessarily a homogeneous or benign concept itself, and societal interventions themselves may be implicitly or explicitly non-egalitarian or hierarchical. This argument does not diminish, however, the significance of the concept, but just points to the open-ended nature of democratic practices and to the challenges still facing the research program which this superb book demonstrates and promotes.