Sanctions, benefits, and rights: three faces of accountability

As countries throughout the world democratise and decentralise, citizen participation in public life should increase. It is said citizens in a decentralised and democratic system of government are governed better because they can punish electorally those who do not deliver on promises. This paper suggests that local government 'by the people' is enhanced when citizens have access to at least three mechanisms for holding local officials accountable for their actions. It studies 30 randomly selected municipalities in Mexico.

The three mechanisms are:

• using the vote effectively to reward and punish the performance of local public officials
• generating response to their collective needs from local governments
• Bbing ensured of fair and equitable treatment from public agencies at local levels.
  

These mechanisms relate to the sanctions, benefits, and rights when local governments assume more responsibilities and political systems become more competitive. The paper presents the following specific means through which citizens enforce accountability:

• Elections for local officials will enforce accountability by sanctioning public officials and the parties they represent, holding out the prize of electoral victory to those who perform well and the threat of defeat to those who are unresponsive or corrupt.
• Collective Action - the capacity to influence allocative decisions of government through collective action is expected to be enhanced through decentralisation.
• Citizenship Rights - the ability to claim rights to certain standards of public performance.
  

The publication argues that these three mechanisms of accountability define expectations about relationships between state and society in decentralised and democratic settings. However, simply altering the structural relationship among different levels of government and democratic electoral procedures may not lead automatically or swiftly to greater accountability of government to its citizens.

The paper concludes with the following observations:

• Comparative research in Mexico suggests that contextual factors may limit the capacity of citizens to hold local governments accountable for their performance.
• More competitive elections and greater decentralisation encouraged political parties to pay more attention to local contests and to democratise their internal procedures.
• Citizen groups showed considerable knowledge about how to extract benefits from government.
• The effectiveness of civic action in Mexico was limited by the weakness of political and administrative institutions but their pressure on government contributed to the delivery of services in all the municipalities.
• The increased importance of competitive elections provided opportunities for new leadership groups to reach public office.