Representation and Accountability: Communicating Tubes?

Abstract

Although representation and accountability require one another in modern democracy, there are many possible tensions between them. Democratic theories tend to combine the two but in ways that are not always obvious, and, depending on the institutional properties of a political system, varied ways of combining representation with accountability can amount to significant differences in the practice and quality of democracy. The authors review those effects through the lens of the British and American traditions of representative government, and they also make their own attempt to bring greater conceptual order to an understanding of the relationship between representation and accountability in democratic politics. They show how representation and accountability are ‘unsaturated’ concepts, whose relationship one to another can only be properly understood through several further stages of specification. These must at least include specification of what kind of representation is thought desirable, of the major choices that need to be made in the design of any democratic polity, and of social and international contexts. The last point is of special relevance to the transposition of representation–accountability relationships to the EU.

Notes

1. It seems fair to call it the US model since its theoretical content was mainly developed in the Federalist and Anti-federalist Papers and preceding discourses on the establishment of a new political order.

2. It is not surprising then that the principle of virtual representation is found in a number of European constitutions but not in any of the American constitutions. On the contrary, the constitutions e.g. of Massachusetts (1780), Pennsylvania (1776), North Carolina (1776), New Hampshire (1783), Vermont (1777) and Virginia (1776) explicitly allow for the imperative mandate.

3. The same definition can be found in John Adams (see Peek 1954: 68), Theophilus Parsons (see Handlin and Handlin 1966: 341), ‘Brutus’ in the Anti-Federalist Papers (Bailyn 1993: 320) and others.

4. Ankersmit (2002) and Saward (2003) see in the evocation of the represented an aesthetic moment.

5. Edmund Burke's insistence on the representation of the interests of the nation by the individual representatives is a reaction to George III's attempt to extend the royal prerogatives. In addition Burke was also carried by the wish to form England into ‘one family, one body, one heart and soul’ (Burke 1887: 21). And it is an expression of the Whig party's strategy to justify the narrow electoral base of the House of Commons.

6. For the assumption that citizens can arrive at rational decisions even under the condition of defective knowledge the ability to substitute through opinion leaders, parties etc. was introduced (Berelson et al. 1954; Downs 1957; see also Ferejohn and Kuklinski 1990; Lodge and McGraw 1995; Popkin 1991).

7. The more interesting question seems to be if voters would have decided otherwise under the condition of better information. Staffan Kumlin's (2004) excellent study deals with this question under the title of ‘informed accountability’.

8. Consequently, possible negotiation results do not have to be implemented by the national members.