Vol. 16 No. 9 (September, 2006) pp.761-766

 

ENFORCING THE RULE OF LAW:  SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY IN NEW LATIN AMERICAN DEMOCRACIES, by Enrique Peruzzotti and Catalina Smulovitz (eds).  Pittsburgh:  University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.  376pp.  Paper. $29.95.  ISBN:  0-8229-5896-1

 

Reviewed by Lydia Brashear Tiede, University of California, San Diego; email:  ltiede [at] ucsd.edu.

 

The role that civil society organizations and the media play in new or emerging democracies is an increasingly important area of inquiry for both scholars and development experts. The editors and contributors to ENFORCING THE RULE OF LAW:  SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY IN NEW LATIN AMERICAN DEMOCRACIES predominantly focus on how such organizations in conjunction with pre-existing government institutions can enhance government accountability.   In general, the authors of the various articles focus predominantly on two allegedly positive attributes stemming from the proliferation of civil society organizations and effective media in Latin America.  First, the authors focus on how civil society organizations work as watch dog organizations to ensure that government officials carry out their duties.  Second, some of the authors also focus on how certain institutions allow opportunities for citizen involvement in areas traditionally reserved for politicians.

 

While this edition mostly provides case studies, rich in detail, on the positive work of civil society organizations and new government institutions which allow for citizen access, the introduction and final section on theoretical issues address the core debate regarding mechanisms available to make government accountable to citizens.  In their introduction, Enrique Peruzzotti and Catalina Smulovitz describe the main debate in the literature as “precisely how to regulate and reduce the gap between representatives and the represented while simultaneously preserving the differentiation between political authorities and the citizenry” (p.5).   In effect, the debate entails what is the best way to make political officials accountable either through vertical accountability (elections), horizontal accountability (a system of checks and balances amongst government branches) or social accountability (a new mechanism described in this volume and below).  Peruzzotti and Smulovitz describe the differences in accountability mechanisms in a useful table (p.27).

 

According to Peruzzotti and Smulovitz, on one side of the debate is O’Donnell’s (2003) assertion that most Latin American democracies are “delegative,” rather than representative because many Latin American countries possess ineffective government institutions for checking abuses of power by other political actors.  For O’Donnell, the deficiency in Latin American democracies lies in weak horizontal accountability, which he defines as, “[t]he existence of state agencies that are legally enabled and empowered, and factually willing and able, to undertake [*762] actions that span from routine oversight to criminal sanctions or impeachment, in relation to actions or omissions, by other state agents or agencies, that may be qualified as unlawful” (p.334, referencing O’Donnell 1999, 2003). 

 

On the other side of the accountability debate is Moreno, Crisp and Shugart (2003), who argue that the system of checks and balances in Latin America should be understood as “horizontal exchange” rather than horizontal accountability, because in “presidential democracies, the separate origin and survival of the executive and legislature makes them agents of the voters, not one another, and therefore not institutionally accountable to one another” (Moreno et al., at p.80).  For these authors, a lack of accountability in Latin America is due to a lack of vertical accountability mechanisms, in the form of electoral institutions and processes.  To deal with Latin America’s “accountability deficit,” they propose reforms to such systems and processes.

 

For the editors, representative government works when governments can be held “politically and legally accountable” to their citizens (p.6).  How citizens can make officials “answerable” when they have acted improperly is problematic, especially in Latin American countries.  As pointed out by the editors, while elections serve as the main basis for holding politicians accountable, there has been an increasing emphasis for the complementary mechanisms of an independent media and strong civil society organizations.  Peruzzotti and Smulovitz, enter the debate by attempting to define a new type of vertical accountability mechanism that they refer to as “social accountability” (p.10).   For these authors, social accountability is defined as “a non-electoral yet vertical mechanism of control of political authorities that rests on the actions of an array of citizens’ associations and movements and the media” (p.10).        

 

Specific social accountability mechanisms for these authors are the judiciary, mobilization, and media (p.19).  However, the authors fail to show how the judiciary can simultaneously serve as a mechanism for social accountability and also serve as an accountable government institution.  From the authors’ descriptions and the various case studies, social accountability seems to refer to the manner in which citizens make horizontal control mechanisms work more efficiently. 

 

Once the introduction sets the stage for the debate, the majority of the book focuses on cases studies.  These case studies not only illuminate specifically how civil society organizations and government institutions interact, but they also draw attention to the diversity of such organizations in function, skill, and effectiveness.  This in turn suggests that further theoretical work should account for the differences in civil society organizations. 

 

The book is divided into three parts.  Part I, entitled “Civil Society and the Control of Political Power,” provides many detailed and interesting case studies of the action of organized groups [*763]  that either urged or compelled actors to intervene in cases of human and civil rights abuses.   Part II deals with watchdog journalism, and Part III provides some theories concerning the accountability debate.

 

The case studies in Part I provide a diverse selection of descriptions of civil society organizations’ interaction with government bodies.  In the first chapter, Calvancanti provides a description of the new Brazilian Public Prosecutor that has new institutional functions allowing it to act as a party to a law suit.  As such, citizens now address the public prosecutor directly when there is concern about public officials.  Despite the enhanced role of the public prosecutor, the author correctly warns that its ability to hear citizens’ complaints may compromise this institution’s independence and impartiality.

 

Like Calvancanti, Smulovitz shows that courts played a significant role in redressing citizen complaints regarding government restrictions on cash withdrawals during Argentina’s financial crisis of 2001.  She concludes that the mobilization of citizens around legal strategies can have both political and symbolic benefits.

 

According to Lemos-Nelson and Zaveruch, besides courts, parliamentary investigation commissions, such as those found in Brazil, provide room for citizen action and “bolster the investigative power of the legislator” to produce change (p.77).  These authors study a number of such commissions in northeastern Brazil to discover the relationship between vertical and horizontal accountability.

 

In a more theoretical piece, Grau focuses on the use of citizen deliberation mechanisms to make government more accountable.  Grau provides several “models” of these deliberation mechanisms used in varying degrees in several Latin American countries that either empower citizens to sanction officials or allow forums for public scrutiny and hearings.   Although Grau seems to think that deliberative bodies are a positive step towards accountability, he does not engage in the larger debates about whether deliberation itself effectively enhances democracy.

 

Fuentes’ piece focuses on what he views as the enigma of democratic development in Chile.  He finds that, in the period from 1990 to 2001, the work of human rights organizations declined, while the incidents of police brutality increased.  As discussed below, this and other chapters may suffer from assessing only a limited time period.

 

Also in Part I, Rivera focuses on the role of Civic Alliance in Mexican elections and how this organization actually became a victim of its own success.  Finally, Behrend analyzes citizen action in both the CABEZAS and CARRASCO murder cases in Argentina.

 

Part II of this edition talks about the role of the media and government accountability.    Peruzzotti studies Argentina’s Senate scandal initiated by a newspaper editorial discussing an accusation that Congress had passed a [*764] labor reform law due to bribes.  This editorial led to larger scandals involving both the Senate and the judiciary.  Peruzzotti’s article evaluates the role that political scandals, such as the Senate scandal can have in making government more accountable.  Also, in Part II, Waisbond writes about another Argentine media scandal concerning Argentina’s role in sending arms to the Balkans in 1995.  While the two case studies that comprise Part II are quite interesting, analysis involving countries other than Argentina would have added to this section.

 

While this book is valuable for its case studies, it needs to be updated.  As stated in the forward, the book, published in 2006, arose from discussions and presumably papers from a conference that took place in Buenos Aires in 2000.   Although Smulovitz and a few other authors update their pieces through 2002, the vast majority of the case studies end in 2000 or 2001.  This is especially problematic for several pieces.  For example, Fuentes, in “Violent Police, Passive Citizens,” argues that for the period from 1990 to 2001, human rights organizations have become increasingly less effective as human rights abuses by the police have increased.  This argument, however, is weakened when one considers post-2001 events such as the enactment and implementation of major criminal law reforms that strengthened prosecutors while weakening the police.  Further, major developments in the prosecution of Pinochet and other human rights abusers have occurred since 2001.  As with the Fuentes piece, several arguments made by the authors in the case studies need to be updated.  While it is recognized that this is an edited volume from a 2000 conference, the case studies would be more valuable with updated research.

 

Finally, Part III, entitled “Theoretical Issues,” provides a much needed discussion of what social accountability adds to the debate regarding democracy and accountability in general.  Arato finds that institutional design alone can not make government more accountable.  He contends that, to make government more accountable, governments should allow for “a dimension of deliberative democracy” (p.316) where civil society can engage in the public sphere.  While there are many advocates of deliberative bodies as a panacea for democracy, there have been few tests of the effectiveness of deliberation in modern society.

 

In Part III, Przeworski aptly argues that accountability deficits are not unique to Latin America, but are a problem faced by many democracies.  Further, Przeworski warns that the use of social accountability mechanisms as an alternative to weak or ineffective political parties may just be a fad.  Although not specifying an alternative cause, Przeworski finds that poverty and inequality in Latin America are not linked to a lack of accountability mechanisms in any of their variations.

 

Also, in the theoretical section of this book, O’Donnell provides an extremely useful summary of how the three forms of accountability, namely vertical (elections), horizontal, and social accountability, are interrelated.  Further, he advocates a research agenda that [*765] would establish a typology of the different and diverse methods of social accountability.

 

Despite the title of this collection of thought provoking essays, ENFORCING THE RULE OF LAW:  SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY IN NEW LATIN AMERICAN DEMOCRACIES is not really a book about the rule of law or enforcement of the law per se, but rather a book about what role civil society organizations and the media play in making weak or failed government institutions function in the ways they were intended by policy and law makers.  Although the title refers to the “rule of law,” and judicial institutions are the focus of some of the chapters, none of the authors or editors ever actually define “rule of law” or explicitly state how civil society organizations are linked to rule of law enforcement.  Although there is a plethora of available definitions, the authors of the various contributions seem to imply that for them, the rule of law is equated with checks on government power.  It would have been useful to analyze how other conceptions of the rule of law are linked to the accountability debate.  For example, in the past O’Donnell has provided a useful definition of the rule of law, namely “the degree to which the legal system extends homogeneously across the entire territory of the state” (O’Donnell 2004, at p.43).  Further exploration of the link between government accountability, civil society, and this definition of the rule of law would have been interesting. 

 

Finally, as aptly pointed out by the editors, the ultimate success of mechanisms of social accountability depends on the “existence of institutions with the ability to impose sanctions” (p.351).  As a result of this assertion, further research should be conducted on the enforcement mechanisms available to government institutions and the way in which they can be put into force by society as a whole.

 

REFERENCES:

Feinberg, Richard, Carlos Waisman, and Leon Zamosc.  2006. CIVIL SOCIETY AND DEMOCRACY IN LATIN AMERICA.  New York:  Palgrave MacMillan.

 

Moreno, Erika, Brian F. Crisp, and Matthew Shugart. 2003. “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” in Scott Mainwaring and Christopher Welna (eds), DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY IN LATIN AMERICA.  New York: Oxford University Press. 

 

O’Donnell, Guillermo.  1999.  “Horizontal Accountabilities in New Democracies,” in Andreas Schedler, Larry Diamond, and Marc F. Plattner (eds), THE SELF-RESTRAINING STATE:  POWER AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN NEW DEMOCRACIES.  Boulder and London:  Lynne Rienner Publishers. [*766]

 

O’Donnell, Guillermo.  2003. “Horizontal Accountability:  The Legal Institutionalization of Mistrust,” in Scott Mainwaring and Christopher Welna (eds), DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY IN LATIN AMERICA.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

 

O’Donnell, Guillermo.  2004.  “Why the Rule of Law Matters.” 15 JOURNAL OF DEMOCRACY 32-46.

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© Copyright 2006 by the author, Lydia Brashear Tiede.