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Agents, arenas and institutions The number and characteristics of democratic agents have concrete implications for the nature of accountability relationships. It matters whether there are one or multiple account givers, or account holders, whether these are elected or appointed and whether they have short- or longterm ambitions. In its simplest form, the most direct or conventional form of accountability involves the relationship between two single agents (e.g. a voter and an elected official), in which the former delegates authority to the latter and holds her accountable for her actions. In contemporary representative democracies, however, there are many variations to this basic model. • The basic relationship becomes more difficult when a single agent has to respond to the expectations, needs and demands of competing principals. For example, an elected legislator may be responsive to the citizens who put her in office, but her political career choices may depend on the goodwill of her party leader or the D emo c r a t i c a c c o u n t a b i l i t y a n d s e r v i c e d e l i v e r y demands from the leader of the government who controls access to important state resources (Carey, 2009) • The presence of non-elected agents, such as bureaucrats and civil servants, may also undermine ‘pure’ accountability relations when they respond directly to the elected official who appointed them – and can in theory remove them • Sometimes, state agents can acquire considerable autonomy to ignore citizens’ demands and/or bypass mechanisms of control and oversight. This can be the case for agents who have gained considerable job security through the civil service, form part of a government majority, or develop specialist knowledge that gives them unique advantages over the principals (Carey, 2009; Kiewiet and McCubbins, 1991; McCubbins and Schwartz, 1984) From an accountability perspective, these important variations in the number and nature of agents may undermine the scope or effectiveness of existing formal Figure 1: A mapping of accountability relationships in a presidential system Attorney general/public prosecutor Executive Judicial Vertical accountability Civil society Human rights ombudsman Commonwealth Governance Handbook 2013/14 55 Horizontal accountability Elections Media Supreme audit institutions Legislative Citizens Source: Payne, Mark, Daniel Zovatto, Fernando Carrillo Flores, Andrés Allamand Zavala, Democracies in Development. Politics and Reform in Latin America (Washington DC; Inter-American Development Bank and International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 2002).


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