Making a case for political accountability

Goodmorning minister, the prime minister wants to speak with you in half hour.

Oh! Anything serious, did I say or do something wrong lately?

Well, the PM is worried that your PeopleScore is steadily falling on NextElection.com, the press and opposition are using this to push for your resignation and she’s getting worried that you may have to be dropped. Your recent confidential performance ratings are not so good… you know we’ve adopted the NextElection.com scorecard for our internal rating methodology…

Gulp!

Career politicians and elected ministers being publicly rated on a bunch of parameters in real time by large swatches of the electorate, thus impacting them as well the political party and the government they are part of! Does that sound too good to be true?

Well, that’s the future that we at NextElection are determined to create. A time, in the not so distant future, where we will be able to hold elected officials accountable and create a more transparent view of the political world. A time when empowered citizens, with perseverance, would be able to make “issues” the currency of all political discourse and perhaps even change political outcomes!

Its an exciting time to launch such a political platform that may have a disproportionate impact on the world as we know it.

In all spheres of life, accountability is highly valued. At its heart, accountability is answerability — taking or being assigned responsibility for something that one has done or is supposed to do, and then being liable for such responsibility. Authority without accountability is morally repugnant.

Private enterprise values accountability — From the entry level worker to the executive and even the board, people are held responsible for their words and deeds. Words and deeds that go against guidelines, rules, laws or natural justice are questioned by peers, organization superiors, other stakeholders like shareholders, investors, affected citizens, whistleblowers, and of course by external agencies like analysts, auditors, government departments, and so on. Thus one may see that there is a set of checks and balances that attempts to keep private enterprise by and large acting in the larger interests of society, rather than only in self-interest.

There are similar expectations of accountability from private persons & individuals living in society. Every person is supposed to adhere to various formal and informal codes of conduct, and of course numerous laws which govern his daily existence from birth till death, and even beyond, e.g. wills and inheritance laws.

However, political accountability in just about every country seems to be such a mythical creature as to be almost nonexistent.

Political accountability is the accountability of the government, civil servants and politicians to the public and to legislative bodies such as a congress or a parliament. This is the heart of democracy, and without political accountability, the system may reduce to autocracy[1], and onto dictatorship. It is the responsibility or obligation of government officials to act in the best interests of society or face consequences.

Representative democracy and the notion of people power

Lets digress for a moment to talk about what democracy really is, versus the idealistic notions we carry about what we think it is. The word democracy comes from demos + kratos or “Common people” + “rule, strength, power” which one may interpret to be that common people themselves have the power and control the government.

Alas, we know this is not really the case, and at best it’s the common people’s power to elect a group of people who are allowed (for a period of time) to have power over the common people. The strength of democracy lies not so much in common people holding power and ruling over themselves, but more about belief and trust in the idealistic notions of democracy, society, rule of law, and that decisions made by a subset of people (the elected group) must needs be followed by all.

A delegation of power from citizens to representatives, representative democracy has become the most popular form of government in the world.

Is democracy better than other forms of governance or rule? Perhaps not, but until something better comes along, most nations around the world are dependent on democratic procedures to sustain themselves as a functional society.

Accountability framework

Concern with accountability is hardly novel; indeed, the ancient Greeks were obsessed with keeping their officials legally accountable for their actions in office. Scholars have studied the complex legal mechanisms developed by fifth century B.C.E. Athenians for controlling official actions.

Vertical accountability is support and control exercised by electorate via voting mechanisms and actions performed by civil society to limit the actions of elected officials. This role is largely undertaken by citizens (voters and civil society) and media.

Horizontal accountability is when agencies of the state are legally empowered and more importantly willing and able to take action on unlawful actions or omissions of other agencies.

In principle, legislative bodies are accountable to people and provide oversight to the executive. In parliamentary systems, the government (part of the executive) relies on the support or parliament, which gives parliament power to hold the government to account. People elect their representatives to legislative bodies by casting a vote in favour of their candidate of choice, e.g. in India we have the Lok Sabha at the center and Legislative Assemblies in the states, with independent elections to each.

Several institutional weaknesses affect the quality of democracy. On of the biggest challenges for improving the quality of democracy revolves around how to build more effective accountability mechanisms. Most countries have seen a failure of horizontal accountability, and hence it is of paramount importance to strengthen vertical accountability.

So now we come to the crux of the problem:

1. Given the plethora of individuals (aka the politician) vying to be the people’s representative to such legislative bodies, how does a voter decide which politician will best serve her interests?
2. How does a citizen subsequently hold elected representatives to account during the term for which they have been elected?
3. By extension, how does the citizen hold the legislative and the executive (elected government and appointed bureaucracy) to account during the term?

It may also be evident that empowering citizens to be able to hold their domestic governments to account via a vertical accountability framework is incredibly complex in practice. Citizens get a chance to remove the elected representatives only at the end of the term, and may have no recourse during the term to remove the representatives or to force them to work in public interest. Even if one had the interest to hold representatives to account, there are some further issues:

1. What is the framework available to the citizen to quantify and measure performance during the term? Given diverse sets of issues and varying citizen interest in each issue, how does one prioritize which set of topics or issues or parameters should occupy the attention of such representatives? Further, having decided on a set of prioritized issues that the representative’s constituency is interested in, how does one rate the representative on such parameters?
2. How does such a mechanism become broad-based enough to sufficiently capture enough voices (qualitative comments, feedback, etc) and votes (quantitative ratings) to sufficiently represent a large demographic cross-section of citizens, such that most issues are sufficiently brought into the public eye, even those that might not ordinarily get a voice.
3. Further, can the framework empower citizens, and can it make an impact in helping that candidate get elected who has the most overlap of promise and/or performance with the prioritized set of issues.

In Part 2: A glimpse into the power of NextElection, we see how NextElection may be such an empowered vertical accountability framework.

NextElection has been conceived as an empowered vertical accountability framework that will be used by citizens, electorate, civil society and the media and journalists to bridge the gap between people and their elected representatives and the executive.

[1] Autocratic rulers make economic, social and political decisions without consent from the citizens.