Controles Democráticos No-Electorales y Regímenes de Rendición de Cuentas en el Sur Global: México, Colombia, Brasil, China y Sudáfrica

In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 04, 1989, which epitomized the end of the Cold War, many countries experienced new forms of democratization with the involvement of non-State actors in politics. It had taken two decades for the democratic transition to spread around the world. Blossoming civil society organizations would need another decade to “democratize democracy” () in these countries. In the meantime, almost every country from Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe [...]

Yet there are huge differences regarding both the initial political context and the outcome of the transition. Mexico and Colombia are both cases where formal democratic rules already applied but were hindered by dominant party regimes, with the former being a single party and the latter a two-party system. Brazil is a case of a military government withdrawing to give way to a multi-party system with the 1985 elections and the 1988 constitutional reform. South Africa is a case of institutionalized racism turning into a multi-ethnic democracy through the 1994 elections. China remains a case of non-democratic regime based on a longstanding single-party system, in spite of the ideological conversion to State capitalism turning this country into a major actor of globalization. The very notion of 'Global South' used here as a common ground is troublesome, since it seems to conflate economic characteristics with political features of the selected countries, regardless of their obvious disparities in terms of history, culture, demography, etc.
Therefore, contrary to what the editors argue, the choice of these countries to compare public accountability regimes does not fit in a most-similar systems research design. Instead, when treated as most-different systems, these five cases exhibit a high potential for theory building and testing of what are the causes of public accountability enforcement, and which are the sufficient conditions for non-State actors to play an active role in politics, beyond electoral processes. Once this methodological contradiction has been clarified, we can value the empirical findings of each chapter and the theoretical contribution of the overall book to the study of democracy.
Public accountability has been traditionally conceptualized as a twofold problem of answerability and responsibility (SCHEDLER, 1999). While answerability refers to citizens' faculty to demand State actors to justify their decisions for the greater common good, responsibility refers to the obligation of State actors to attend and occasionally anticipate these demands. In other words, public accountability is simultaneously a matter of rights and duties, of power and capacity, hence calling for "balance agencies" (O'DONNELL, 1999), that is to say, agencies responsible for controlling the government, and controlling standard operative procedures. It involves both State and non-State actors at many different levels of the democratic process.

Guillaume Fontaine
What makes the discussion about public accountability tedious is the fact that it has convened three epistemological approaches which do not actually dialogue with one another. The administrative approach has traditionally made emphasis on infra-State mechanisms of public accountability, following the tradition inherited from British political science concerned with the Westminster mode of governance (BOVENS, GOODIN and SCHILLEMANS, 2014). The political science approach has developed a different approach with a focus on State-society relationships through the formal organizations and mechanisms studied by political institutionalism from the Northern American Academy (SCHEDLER, DIAMOND and PLATTNER, 1999). A more sociological approach has brought in a better knowledge of non-electoral mechanisms of public accountability, coined "social accountability" (PERUZZOTTI and SMULOVITZ, 2006), after notable political scientists inspired by the critical theory and the European sociology of collective action (re-)discovered the role of civil society in democratization (COHEN and ARATO, 1992).
In that context, the greatest contribution of the research conducted by Isunza Vera and Gurza (2018) is to provide in-depth analyses of how non-electoral mechanisms are utilized by social actors to diversify their control over the State.
These mechanisms, coined 'democratic controls', are particular modalities of public accountability, which can be bottom-up, horizontal or inclusive, as they refer not only to social movements and networks but also to councils, citizen assemblies, revocatory mandates, etc. They act as causal forces in the democratic interplays between the society and the State, mediated or not by civil society organizations and balance agencies. Non-mediated interplays refer to vertical accountability, which essentially consists of the electoral process. Mediated interplays are far more complex, since they involve quite heterogenous categories besides the citizenship and the State.
The book theorizes three ideal types of such mechanisms. The first one, called 'institutional non-electoral democratic controls', is made of the State-society interplays mediated by both civil society organizations and balance agencies. In that case, balance agencies act as intermediary on behalf of civil society organizations to control the government or the legislative power. The second one, called 'mixed institutional non-electoral democratic controls', refers to citizens' participation, Another strong aspect of this book is its focus on institutional change, which is arguably the best means to secure public accountability. Each case study sheds light on the complementarity of public accountability mechanisms under the concept of regimes. These mechanisms mobilize four different logics, namely 'synergy' between agents, 'equilibrium' between diverging intentions, 'blame avoidance' among State actors, and 'coercion' in principal-agent relationships.
Although each mechanism works independently from the others, they are all framed in a country's socio-political system, hence interacting with one another. Therefore the performance of one mechanism relies on the existence of the others, which raises the question of how democratic controls can be effective in nondemocratic regimes. The answer to that question, of course, is to be found in the study of Chinese personal networks as a substitute to the lack of actual citizens control over the State. But even in democratic countries, effective public accountability is often hindered by a goverrnment's authoritarian practices, by civil service corporativism, or in absence of true checks and balance between the executive and the legislative due to party hegemony, as in South Africa and Mexico.