Sanctions, Benefits, and Rights: Three Faces of Accountability

Merilee Serrill Grindle

Scholarly Articles from Harvard Kennedy School of Government

Abstract: As countries throughout the world democratize and decentralize, citizen participation in public life should increase. In this paper, I suggest that democratic participation in local government is enhanced when citizens can reply affirmatively to at least three questions about their ability to hold local officials accountable for their actions: Can citizens use the vote effectively to reward and punish the general or specific performance of local public officials and/or the parties they represent? Can citizens generate response to their collective needs from local governments? Can citizens be ensured of fair and equitable treatment from public agencies at local levels? The findings of a study of 30 randomly selected municipalities in Mexico indicate that, over the course of a decade and a half, voters were able to enforce alternation in power and the circulation of elites, but not necessarily to transmit unambiguous messages to public officials or parties about performance concerns. More definitively, citizens were able to build successfully on prior political experiences to extract benefits from local governments. At the same time, the ability to demand good performance of local government as a right of citizenship lagged behind other forms of accountability.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4448874/Grindle_SanctionsBenefits.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hrv:hksfac:4448874

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard Kennedy School of Government Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().