THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEFICIT IN LATIN AMERICA
Matthew Soberg Shugart
University of California, San Diego
Erika Moreno
University of Arizona
and
Brian F. Crisp
University of Arizona
Draft
April 20, 2000
Please do not quote this draft directly
Prepared for the conference on “Institutions, Accountability, and Democratic Governance in
Latin America,” Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, Notre
Dame, Indiana, May 8–9, 2000.
THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEFICIT IN LATIN AMERICA
As result of much human sacrifice, democracy made a comeback in Latin America in the
1980s and 1990s, and scholars turned their attention to the explanations for these transitions from
authoritarianism. As democracy’s tenuous foothold endured, with some notable exceptions, both
practitioners and researchers began to examine the “quality” of democratic rule in Latin
America.
Even casual observation was sufficient to recognize that the reestablishment of
elections guaranteed neither decision makers responsive to popular will nor unfettered political
rights and civil liberties. Unpopular economic policies, striking levels of corruption, recurring
constitutional crises, recurring civil unrest (often violent), and popular sympathy for coup
attempts indicated the level of disjunction between politicians and their citizenry.
Guillermo O’Donnell (1994) characterized these less than satisfying regimes as “delegative
democracies” — as opposed to more liberal “representative democracies.” While evocative and
intuitive, the term proved complex, defying parsimonious definition or systematic
operationalization. In an effort to clarify the exact nature of the shortcomings, more recently
O’Donnell (1999) has argued that liberal, representative relationships fail (or delegative
democracy results) because elected branches and autonomous agencies fail to hold one another,
especially presidents, accountable.
“Horizontal accountability” is “the existence of state
agencies that are legally enabled and empowered and factually willing and able to take actions
that span from routine oversight to minimal sanctions or impeachment in relation to actions or
omissions by other agents or agencies of the state that may be qualified as unlawful (O’Donnell
1999, 38).
In this paper we illustrate that the crux of the problem is not “horizontal” at all. It is in fact
“vertical.”
“Horizontal accountability” is an oxymoron. “Horizontal” implies equal or at the
same level while “accountability” implies some form of hierarchy that permits the assignment of
responsibility and the meting out of rewards and punishment. Principal–agent relationships are
inherently vertical — the agent’s authority originates in a delegation from the principal, a
delegation that can be (renewed and) revoked. Presidential democracies are unique in their
creation of multiple agents of the same principal, the electorate. The separate origin and survival
of the executive and legislature makes them agents of the voters, not one another, and therefore
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
not institutionally accountable to one another (Shugart and Carey 1992). Courts and other
branches that the legislature and executive appoint are not “autonomous” but instead exist within
a nested hierarchy. They are agents once removed from the ultimate principal.
As the authors of the Federalist Papers reasoned, agents engage in exchange (not
accountability) by sharing powers. Their willingness to check and balance one another is a
function of the clarity with which they have been endowed with countervailing ambitions. The
preferences, goals, or ambitions of representatives (agents) stem from the rules under which they
are selected, i.e. electoral processes. Thus, the only way to get effective horizontal exchange
where the diverse preferences of the voters are reflected in the policy-making process by
multiple agents is to assure that vertical accountability functions properly, such that elected
agents are effective representatives of the collective interests of their principals. We show the
electoral roots of the deficit of (vertical) accountability in Latin America and offer
characterizations of effectively functioning institutions — including political parties (during the
candidate selection process), electoral rules, and “autonomous” agencies (agents once removed).
The structure of our argument is as follows.
First we elaborate on the notion of
accountability as an inherently vertical relationship between principals and agents. Next we
show how the constitutional design of accountability varies between parliamentary and
presidential systems. We then elaborate on the difficult balance between vertical accountability
and horizontal exchange in presidential systems by focusing on sources of the independence of
branches, overlapping functions, and countervailing ambitions. We then provide a descriptive
overview of institutions for horizontal exchange as they currently exist in Latin America.
Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how to strengthen vertical accountability through
candidate selection procedures, electoral rules, and methods of appointing, funding, and
removing non-elected branches.
What is Accountability?
This paper takes an approach to the notion of accountability inspired by the “new
institutionalism.”
There are many different interpretations of the new institutionalism (for
reviews, see March and Olsen 1984, Grofman 1989, Moe 1990, Steinmo and Thelen 1992). We
follow an interpretation that has its intellectual roots in a very old institutionalist, James
Madison, and has been recently refreshed (made “new”) by the melding of studies of law,
3
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
economics, and organization into a theoretical framework that stresses that accountability takes
places within the context of principal–agent relationships (Grofman 1987, 1989, Palmer 1994,
Strøm 2000).
Decision-making in large entities, such as democratic states, implies delegation of authority.
In agency relationships, the right to make a decision is assigned by a “principal” to an “agent,”
but this assignment, i.e. delegation, is conditional. That is, it continues only at the pleasure of
the principal. That it may be withdrawn is the very essence of accountability. Only when the
right to make a decision is subject to withdrawal can we understand a relationship founded on
accountability to be in place. Thus delegation occurs within hierarchies when one person or
entity, as agent, receives conditional authority from another person or entity, as principal.
Relations of delegation run in one direction, from principal to agent, while relations of
accountability run the opposite direction, from agent to principal.
Accountability means that the principal has the right to withdraw the conditionally delegated
authority altogether. This usually means dismissing (firing) the agent. However, especially in
politics, often it means something short of immediate dismissal. It may mean refusing to renew a
delegation relationship that has a fixed endpoint or it may mean simply downgrading the agent’s
authority, but allowing the agent to retain her office. For instance, the accountability of a
legislator to her constituents usually means that the opportunity to renew or discontinue the
relationship occurs only at fixed points in time. Voter-principals can exercise accountability over
their legislator-agents only at election time.
As elections may occur only at intervals of
1
anywhere from two to six years, the opportunity for the agent to “shirk” against the principal is
obviously greater than if the principal could fire the agent at the moment that some infraction
against the original terms of delegation occurs. This is one of the reasons that delegation
relationships are more imperfect in democratic politics than in, for example, the firm.2 Holding
an agent accountable may also imply not firing or refusing to retain the agent, but withdrawing
1
We are ignoring here the possibility of recall elections, a prospect that exists in some U.S. states and in the new
Venezuelan constitution.
2
There are other reasons, including that agents exercise effective authority in politics (Moe 1984) and that the
principal (i.e. the citizenry) as a large group, faces serious problems of collective action. On the problems of
effective monitoring by collective principals and other principal–agent problems more generally, see Kiewiet and
McCubbins (1991, Chapter 2). On the problems of collective action, see Olson (1965) and Cox and McCubbins
(1993, Chapter 4). Cox and McCubbins specifically focus on the role of political parties in (partially) overcoming
citizens’ and legislators’ collective action problems.
4
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
some portion of the delegated authority. This form of accountability is especially common in
political systems that entail separate institutions, such as the fixed-term executive and legislature
of presidential systems. For example, a legislature can rescind or allow to expire delegated
decree authority or it can reinstate constitutional guarantees, the suspension of which gave the
executive “emergency” powers.
A key point of this paper is that when institutions are formally independent of one
another—as with the independent branches of presidential systems—they are not accountable to
one another. Independence and accountability are two contradictory features of institutional
design. The legislative majority in a prototypical presidential democracy cannot dismiss the
president and only the voters (if even the voters) can decide whether or not to renew the
president’s right to exercise the executive authority for a new term.3
While the executive branch is not an agent of the legislature in a presidential system in the
sense of deriving its authority from the legislature, the executive can be the legislature’s agent in
the carrying out of discrete tasks. For instance, congress may delegate by statute the right to
negotiate trade agreements to the president, as under U.S. “fast track” trade negotiating authority,
which existed until congress let it expire in 1995. In delegating such authority, it establishes a
“contract” that states the terms under which the president may bargain with foreign governments
and the terms under which an agreement may be brought before the congress for ratification. In
this sense, the president is congress’s agent for the purposes of forging trade agreements and is
accountable to the congress for the conduct of his trade policy and for the ultimate enactment of
any trade agreement he negotiates. If congress is unsatisfied with the president’s actions in the
area of trade, it can withdraw the delegated authority, either by passing legislation rescinding the
right to negotiate future trade agreements or by failing to renew that right it when it comes up for
“sunset” review. Note that in this example, the principal is not denying the agent his position
(through dismissal). The president remains president, but with somewhat diminished authority.
3
Wherever presidents are barred from immediate reelection—as in most Latin American countries—the
accountability relationship is severely weakened. See Shugart and Carey (1992: 87–91). Accountability of
presidents is most effectively exercised when the president is subject to personal accountability as an incumbent
running for reelection. However, where parties are important channels of presidential recruitment they may become
agents of accountability if the president himself is term-limited. More amorphously, presidents’ desire to protect
their legacy or to remain active in politics as “elder statesmen” or in lower elected office, may prevent their
accountability from being totally severed even where they are ineligible for reelection.
5
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
In the various examples just cited, the agency relationship is vertical in the sense that the
principal is holding accountable an agent who is, by definition, inferior to the principal in a
hierarchy. The electorate is superior to the legislator in the hierarchy of democracy, and can hold
the legislator accountable by not renewing her authority to exercise delegated rights as the
voters’ representative. In trade policy—at least in the American example—the congress is
superior to the president, because only it can enact trade agreements into law, and it can hold the
president accountable by withdrawing his conditional authority to engage in trade negotiations.
This is a ubiquitous fact of delegation and accountability relationships:
they are vertical
relations between subordinate agents and superior principals.
Any relations between institutions or officials within a democratic state that are not vertical
are not relations of accountability. Presidential systems are peculiar in their establishment of
several agents, including at least the executive and the legislature, of a single principal, the
electorate. These multiple agents do not hold one another accountable but engage in horizontal
“exchange.” They have separate origin and survival but overlapping functions or shared powers,
meaning they must reach agreement to govern (pass legislation, for example). Distinct
mechanisms for constituting the branches in presidential systems leave them with countervailing
ambitions that encourage them to check and balance one another in a process of exchange as they
carry out of their overlapping tasks. Before discussing the various processes by which horizontal
exchange functions, we define how the major alternative forms of constitutional design establish
relations of delegation and accountability as means to further the interests and rights of citizens.
Constitutional Design and Relations of Delegation and Accountability
Government, in theory, is an agent of the citizenry in democracies. If this is not the case,
then, simply put, the government is not democratic. The analogy from the economic firm—on
which the notion of agency relations is based—is far from perfect. Indeed, Moe (1984) warned
us of a too-facile importation of the concepts of agency from economics to political science. For
example, as Moe notes, the effective authority in politics is actually wielded by the agent (i.e.,
those who win governmental control get to tell the rest of us what to do), not by the principal
(e.g. stockholders who can pull their shares out of the firm). Nonetheless, this caution merely
reminds us of the importance of constitutional design:
Because exit from an oppressive
principal–agent relationship is far more costly and difficult in politics than in economics, it is all
6
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
the more important that the relationship build in safeguards to ensure that politician-agents
cannot oppress citizen-principals. There are two basic ways in which constitutions attempt to
ensure that the basic rights and interests of citizens as the ultimate principal are not harmed. One
is through nested hierarchies. The other is through horizontal exchange. Nested hierarchies are
typical of parliamentary systems, while horizontal exchange is typical of presidential systems.
Both solutions are employed to some degree in all democracies and in various combinations
within hybrid systems, but as “ideal types” parliamentarism and presidentialism can be
conceptualized as relying on one of the two basic devices for ensuring accountability to the
citizenry as ultimate principals in a democratic state.
Nested hierarchies. Parliamentary systems in their purest form consist of a single chain of
nested principal-agent relationships. As depicted in stylized form in Figure 1, parliamentary
democracy entails each entity as a single agent of its immediately superior principal.4 Voters
make only one voting choice: they select a candidate or party to represent them in parliament.5
Parties serve as a screening mechanism for voters, enabling them to select legislators who will in
turn select cabinet ministers who share their policy preferences.
Voters hold legislators
accountable through the shadow of future elections and with the assistance of “fire alarms,” i.e.
third-party provision of information that assists voter-principals in monitoring their politicianagents (McCubbins and Schwartz 1984). Opposition parties and the media provide these fire
alarms for voters by publicizing alleged misdeeds by politicians.
The executive enjoys no constitutional independence from the legislature and no direct
connection to the electorate. It is instead a pure agent of the parliament, headed by a prime
minister and other ministers selected to reflect the partisan composition of the parliamentary
majority and accountable to that majority in the most simple and direct way: subject to ouster at
any time by a vote of no confidence. Short of no-confidence votes, the cabinet is also
accountable through oversight committees in parliament or through other institutions such as the
4
In Figures 1 and 2, the “superior” principal (the electorate) is shown at the bottom in keeping with common
parlance of authority stemming in a democracy “from below.” Nonetheless, in principal-agent terms, those below
are in fact superior in the sense of holding authority over their delegated agents.
5
The example assumes unicameralism as an essential feature of the pure type of parliamentarism. In fact, many
parliamentary systems are bicameral, and even weak upper houses may exercise important powers (Tsebelis and
Money 1997). However, nearly all parliamentary systems make the cabinet an agent only of the lower house (i.e.
the upper house has no right to cast no-confidence votes). Italy is one of the few exceptions to this rule. On the
other hand, most presidential democracies have powerful upper houses.
7
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
“question period” used in the British House of Commons. The bureaucracy is an agent of the
cabinet in that, even if individual bureaucrats enjoy civil-service protection, they must carry out
the legislation and ministerial orders by which their political principals delegate tasks to them.
The cabinet can sanction bureaucrats through its control over budgets or, ultimately, the structure
of the agencies and the civil service system itself (Moe and Caldwell 1994). In the sense
described here, a parliamentary system is a nested hierarchy in that each link in the chain is
uniquely accountable to its principal.6
Horizontal exchange.
An alternative means of organizing the state is to establish the
executive and legislature as separate and independent agents of the electorate. In presidential
systems, the executive is headed by a popularly elected president. The president and legislature
then transact with one another in a series of exchanges to produce policy and, in theory at least,
prevent a “tyranny of the majority” from developing. Instead of being accountable to the
legislative majority through votes of no confidence, the executive has a fixed term and serves as
a check on the ambitions of the legislative majority.
Figure 2 shows the relationships of delegation, accountability, and horizontal exchange in a
stylized presidential system.
Unlike the single chain of nested hierarchies that typify the
parliamentary system, in a presidential system we have multiple agents of the electorate. Figure
2 implies a unicameral congress, but in fact many presidential systems are bicameral, meaning
voters have three elected agents. Policy in this system is a product of a series of exchanges (or
transactions) between elected agents, who must negotiate a set of instructions for their shared
bureaucratic agents. These exchanges frequently spill over into the public arena, as each agent
of the electorate seeks to promote its own preferred policy outcomes and blame the other for the
failure to enact its own conception of popular preferences. This spillover of disagreements
arising out of horizontal exchange serves a fire-alarm function in the sense of providing
information for voters to use in assessing the performance of their agents, and voters can use this
information in subsequent elections. The information produced by public interbranch disputes
thus augments that provided by opposition parties and the media and implies that presidential
As Strøm (2000) has noted, there are informal senses in which the cabinet is directly accountable to the electorate,
but there is no formal link between them.
6
8
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
systems potentially provide more information for voter-principals to use in monitoring their
agents than do parliamentary systems.7
Bureaucrats in presidential systems, then, are accountable to two principals (three in a
bicameral system). They are accountable in that their political principals define through a
“contract” the process by which decisions are to be reached and what interests are to be
represented in an agency’s decision-making process. Administrative procedures ensure that
affected interests have a right to participate in rule-making (McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast
1987, 1989). Moreover, legislators build into the enabling legislation of each bureaucratic
agency fire alarms whereby the constituents that they seek to have represented in the decisionmaking process can inform legislators of bureaucratic transgressions. We know less about the
how this form of decentralized monitoring and accountability of agents works in Latin America
than we do in the United States, but growing evidence suggests that the basic logic holds.8
Courts in hierarchical vs. transactional systems. In a pure hierarchical political system, the
courts are essentially another part of the bureaucracy (Ramseyer and Rosenbluth 1993),
responsible for applying the laws enacted by parliament on behalf of the citizenry, and not
empowered to overturn laws. In transactional presidential systems, where there is no notion of
parliamentary sovereignty (which is really a “nice” term for “tyranny of the majority”), courts
typically have authority that overlaps with the elected bodies and may even overturn acts of the
elected bodies on constitutional grounds.
Increasingly, even in parliamentary systems,
constitutional courts or other bodies are being endowed with sufficient independence so as to
serve as checks on the parliamentary majority (Lijphart 1999, Stone 1992), though the origin of
constitutional arbiters almost always is based in appointment for relatively short terms by elected
agents of the electorate.
7
The quality and usefulness of that information is a separate matter, and depends to a large degree on the
mechanisms of accountability of legislators and presidents to voters. We take up the issue of legislative
accountability in detail below. For a parallel argument about the information content of accountability relations in
presidential and parliamentary democracies, see Strøm (2000).
8
See the various chapters in Haggard and McCubbins (2000) and various works on regulatory policy by Pablo
Spiller (complete citations unavailable at time of writing).
9
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
Much of the action of courts in democracies concerns applying and enforcing the law. Even
without a right to declare laws themselves unconstitutional, courts would be expected to be more
active in presidential systems than in parliamentary, because bureaucrats serve multiple
principals (Moe and Caldwell 1994; McCubbins, Noll and Weingast, 1987, 1989). Because of
the transactional nature of law-making in presidential systems, there is more potential for
conflicting interpretations of legislative intent. There are also the built-in fire-alarm procedures
referred to above, which often explicitly allow affected parties to sue agencies for alleged failure
to conform properly to procedures or to allow necessary evidence into their decision-making
process. Because of the single-line hierarchy, agencies in parliamentary systems are more
directly accountable to the executive. Thus the opportunities for third-party intervention through
recourse to the courts are diminished. As a result, recourse to the courts in parliamentary
systems is more likely to take the form of ensuring compliance with an agency decision than
overturning it, let alone overturning a law. In these respects courts can be a tool for ensuring the
vertical accountability of bureaucracies to their political principals, especially legislators. This
may even be the most fundamental function of courts in modern democracies. This is why—as
we shall develop below—it is so important that legislators be real partners with the executive
branch in policy-making, for if they are not, they are far less likely to have an interest in
independent courts as a check on the executive and its bureaucracy.
In presidential systems—and increasingly in parliamentary systems, too—judicial bodies are
taking on more and more the role of a check on the legislative process itself, in addition to
ensuring the proper application of laws duly enacted by legislators.
Courts that have the
authority to veto legislative acts are thus another actor in the process of horizontal exchange.
Courts are independent to the extent that they are not accountable to the political bodies. They
are a separate branch to the extent that they share powers in some areas with the political
bodies—or with other independent branches. Independent branches are thus institutions for
10
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
horizontal exchange, rather than accountability, and below we will undertake an extensive
review of such institutions.
“Autonomous” Agencies. There are several non-elected branches of government, in
addition to the courts, that are often identified as ‘autonomous’ agencies. In transactional
presidential systems, bodies that possess overlapping authority with elected branches can engage
in horizontal exchange. However, most agencies are not entirely independent or autonomous
because elected politicians are charged with the selection, funding, and dismissal of those actors
(see tables 2 through 5). In a sense then, these are agents once removed from the ultimate
principal, the electorate. The elected branch charged with their appointment, funding, and
dismissal mediates the connection between principal and agent once removed.
Given this
mediating role, it is all the more important that the vertical connection between voters and
elected officials be functioning properly.
If voters cannot hold elected officials clearly
accountable, the appointment of once-removed agents will undoubtedly be influenced by other
priorities.
Independent screening committees are important in determining nomination/selection and
survival of those branches in a number of cases. However, most ‘autonomous’ offices are staffed
by elected politicians, either in consultation with other elected branches, non-elected officials,
civic or human rights groups, or some combination thereof. Separate survival can be
compromised by appointment procedures that make ‘autonomous’ branches accountable to
elected politicians (either presidents or legislators). Under these circumstances, we would be
hard pressed to argue that such actors are truly autonomous. Instead, these “watchdog branches”
exist within a nested hierarchy (much like what we see in the multi-level, hierarchical
parliamentary systems). In most cases, elected officials may dismiss agents once removed only
under extraordinary circumstances (like criminal activity). The dismissal process usually
involves a series of steps must be followed to impeach and, eventually, dismiss the actor in
question. If the appointment process involves independent screening bodies and dismissal is
determined by independent disciplinary committees (or not possible, in the case of life terms),
then we could expect more vigilant exchange among agents. However, many of these branches
have less independence than is required for this level of vigilance.
Assuming a non-elected branch has some degree of independence, its ability to engage in a
horizontal exchange with elected officials is possible only if it has overlapping authority with the
11
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
elected branches. If this is the case, then the non-elected control branches may be able to behave
like the higher courts do. Indeed, this is typically the case for many attorneys general, public
prosecutors, and controllers general in the region. However, there are ‘autonomous’ agencies that
lack overlapping authority. Most ombudsmen, for example, are unable to engage in a horizontal
exchange, even though they possess some degree of independence, because they are only granted
the authority to publicize human rights abuses. In some instances, they are capable of
prosecuting offenses, but this authority overlaps with that held by courts, but not by elected
officials. Instead, these agencies are capable of performing fire-alarm oversight by publicizing
the misdeeds of governmental actors and agencies. If control branches are given the correct
incentives to oversee the actions of elected officials, then fire-alarm oversight may be an
important factor in improving the efficiency and responsiveness of government—a responsibility
that all of these actors are charged with. Institutional variation will be explored in subsequent
sections to highlight these points.
Vertical Accountability and Horizontal Exchange in Presidential Systems
Presidential systems entail a mixture of vertical accountability and horizontal exchange.
They do not have the single-line hierarchy of a parliamentary system in which one relationship
of vertical accountability is nested within another. As noted in the previous section, they are
defined by their horizontal exchange between separately elected branches, and by the presence of
one or more separate appointed branches. Yet the characteristic horizontal exchange does not
mean that vertical accountability is unimportant in presidential democracies. In fact, one of our
central premises is that it is an especially challenging aspect of presidential constitutional design
to get vertical accountability “right,” and that presidential framers are far more prone than
parliamentary ones to get it “wrong.”
The Madisonian principles of constitutional design that modern presidentialism rests upon
rely on horizontal exchange between agents with different vertical accountability ties to the
citizenry. In Madison’s famous phrase, ambition must be pitted against ambition. The notion is
that of countervailing ambition, such that legislators and the executive do not collude with one
another to the detriment of the principal (citizens). Countervailing ambitions between legislators
and the executive arise when each represents a different manifestation of the electorate, through
the different electoral systems or drawing of constituencies. The ambitions of legislators are to a
12
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
significant degree set by the institutions of vertical accountability between them and their
constituents.
In this section, we discuss the interplay between vertical accountability and
horizontal exchange. We argue that the nature of the vertical accountability relationship between
voters and legislators is crucial to the functioning of a system of horizontal exchange.
Legislators in presidential systems are vertically accountable to citizens just as in
parliamentary systems, so it follows that the electoral system that defines the nature of the
hierarchy between voter-principals and legislator-agents is a crucial aspect of the design of a
presidential system.
The fundamental difference between presidential and parliamentary
democracies is that the hierarchical connection between voter-principals and the executive
authority is not mediated through the legislative majority in a presidential system as it is in a
parliamentary system. This fundamental distinction has serious consequences for legislative
incentives in presidential systems (Shugart and Haggard 2000), and, in turn, for how well
horizontal exchange functions to align the incentives of actors in the various branches with the
interests of the ultimate principal, the citizenry.
It has been argued in the literature on the US presidential system that legislators are singleminded in their pursuit of reelection and that they have designed the institutions of the US
Congress in order to facilitate that goal (Mayhew 1974). A large literature has developed that
traces the organization of Congress—especially the House of Representatives—as a series of
institutions that enable legislators to “claim credit” for particularistic services to their
constituents (e.g. Weingast 1984, Shepsle 1986, Weingast and Marshall 1988). It is not that
legislators in parliamentary systems are not as interested in furthering their own political careers;
rather what differentiates parliamentary legislators is that the parliamentary majority is
collectively responsible for governing. This vertical accountability relationship between the
executive and the majority leads to more programmatic and disciplined parties, because it is only
through such parties that a link exists between voters and the executive. As a result, the pursuit
of individual political careers takes place within a framework of much stronger parties than we
find in the US.
In a parliamentary system, one of the principal commitments legislative candidates have to
offer their voters is their support of a party that seeks to claim the executive, or a share of it
(Epstein 1967, Cox 1987, Shugart and Carey 1992, Palmer 1994, Moe and Caldwell 1994, Strøm
2000). This commitment does not exist in presidential systems because the electoral connection
13
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
between voters and the executive does not run through legislators, but is direct, via presidential
elections. As a result of this distinction, it has been noted in the US literature that voters tend to
demand different things from legislative and presidential candidates (Jacobson 1990, Moe 1990,
Moe and Caldwell 1994).
Presidents are held accountable for overall management of the
economy—and, given the US status as a great power, for foreign affairs. Legislators, on the
other hand, are held accountable to a large degree for distributive policies, and are also expected
to deliver pork-barrel favors to their districts.
If this distinction between what legislative candidates and presidential candidates offer their
principals is significant in the US, it is even more so in other presidential systems. Latin
American electoral systems tend to one or the other extreme, compared to the participatory
nomination procedures and single-seat districts of the United States (Shugart 2000; Crisp,
Moreno, and Shugart 2000). They tend either to emphasize party even less than in the US, as a
result of intraparty competition—as in Brazil and Colombia—or to emphasize party at the
expense of the individual legislators, as a result of party-list systems—as in the Dominican
Republic and Venezuela. Thus at the “weak-party” extreme, legislators have even less incentive
to offer voters a commitment to a party and its national-policy priorities than in the US, while at
the “strong-party” extreme, legislators are not individually accountable to their constituents at
all.
If legislators in presidential systems lack a balance between collective accountability to
parties and individual accountability to constituents, a crucial link in the interplay between
vertical accountability and horizontal exchange is lacking. If legislators are either uninterested in
national policy (weak parties) or unaccountable to voters (excessively strong parties) they have
little interest in exercising “political control” over the executive. That is, they are neither
partners in the crafting of national policy, nor engaged in oversight of the executive branch’s
policy-making process. Much of the policy relationship between legislator-principals and the
executive as an agent to carry out legislation will look more like abdication than delegation, and
the dominant feature of interbranch transactions will not be over broad policy provisions but over
patronage in exchange for votes.
Without a vertical accountability relationship based on
programmatic commitments, legislators are more likely to be concerned with patronage and
clientelistic relationships rather than policy. This is why getting the vertical link between
citizens and legislators “right” is crucial to the entire system. Horizontal exchange can work to
14
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
bring about collective accountability to the citizenry only when the partners in the transactions
over national policy are all accountable to the citizenry themselves on the basis of collective
interests, i.e. voters’ national-policy priorities.
The vertical accountability link is also important for the other branches engaged in horizontal
exchange because of the curious feature of these other “independent” branches: legislators are
almost always engaged in the origin of the authority of these other branches. Because members
of judicial bodies, human-rights ombudsmen, and other entities that O’Donnell (1999) identifies
in his discussion of “horizontal accountability” are generally elected or confirmed by legislators,
the incentives of legislators to provide broad collective goods for their citizen-principals are
fundamental. Where legislators are more interested in clientelistic relations, any agents that they
select—including judges and other members of supposedly independent agents of horizontal
exchange—are likely to be selected on a clientelistic basis as well.
Horizontal exchange involves the existence of independent branches that check one another.
As we have argued, horizontal exchange is not a form of accountability. It is misleading to call it
accountability because the very notion of independent branches is that they are not accountable
to one another. Indeed, their independence and lack of mutual accountability, along with the
overlap of functions, is what allows them to function as checks and balances. No branch could
effectively serve as a check on the other if its authority was derived from serving as the agent of
the branch to be overseen. The only senses in which relationships between branches are ones of
accountability are, first, in the assignment of discrete tasks (such as the trade-negotiation process
referred to earlier), and, second, impeachment. When one branch initiates impeachment over
another, the officials subject to possible impeachment are accountable to another
branch—always the legislature, though the legislative authority of impeachment may be shared
with other branches in some systems. The evocation of impeachment proceedings, then, is the
conversion of a constitutionally horizontal relationship between branches into a legal relationship
of accountability in which, typically, legislators intercede between the impeached official and the
ultimate principal, the voters.
Thus relations between branches are horizontal, and they are not relations of accountability.
Impeachment is a relationship of accountability, but in being so, it ceases to be a horizontal
relationship. In separation-of-power (i.e. presidential) systems, usually there are at least three
formally separate branches of government and usually only two of those (executive and
15
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
legislative) are elected by the voters. Presidential systems, due to their transactional nature and
the fact that the executive does not originate as an agent of the legislature but as a direct agent of
the electorate, practically require separate branches like courts to serve as “referee.” Indeed, the
notion of judicial review—that courts may overturn laws—is a product of the American notion
of limited government. That is, even if judicial review is not enshrined in the constitution, it is
implied in a constitutional design that renders neither the legislature nor the separate executive
sovereign. It is further implied in federal systems, wherein sovereignty over some policy areas is
lodged in a subnational level of government (Lijphart 1999). Whereas the pure notion of
parliamentary sovereignty implies no independent branch to counteract the authority of the
parliamentary majority to act on behalf of the citizenry, political systems that do not establish
such sovereignty require independent branches to enforce the limits on the central government
that their constitutions formally establish.
In modern democracies, the existence of independent nonelected branches—most
prominently constitutional courts—is common even in unitary parliamentary democracies (Stone
1992). That is, the notion of limited government has gone far beyond its “natural” home in
presidential and federal states. If government is to be limited, then, there must be agencies
located within the state that can cross over and restrain other agencies, including the elected (but
non-sovereign) ones. This is the essence of “horizontal accountability” in O’Donnell’s (1999)
sense, as we understand it. It is horizontal, in the sense that it does not involve executive (or
legislative) officials acting with restraint out of fear of retribution by their ultimate principal (the
voters), or being in fact punished by voters at the polls. This sort of restraint would reflect
vertical accountability. Rather, when officials are restrained by a veto exercised by a nonelected
branch, they are being checked by officials that are not themselves accountable to the citizenry.
Thus this is horizontal, yet it is not accountability in the sense we have defined it, i.e. fear of
retribution by one’s principal.
Separation of origin and survival. Independent branches, most prominently the judiciary,
usually originate from an appointment process in which elected officials take part. That is, their
“separateness” as a branch is already compromised by a lack of the same sort of fully separate
origin enjoyed by the two elected branches. To the extent that legislators or the president
participate in their selection, especially when judicial terms are short, what we have are “agents
once removed” of the electorate, rather than a fully separate and independent branch. That is
16
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
why, as we have argued, it so important for the functioning of these non-elected branches for the
vertical relationship between voters and their more immediate agents (legislators) to be designed
well. The separation of non-elected branches is a matter of degree. To have fully separate
survival would imply either direct election or else an appointment process in which elected
officials (or their agents) play no role. Separately elected agents of horizontal exchange aside
from the legislature and executive are not found in any nation that we are aware of, though they
are quite common at the state level in the United States. Many states employ popular elections
for judges, as well as other officials such as the state Attorney General and heads of various
governmental departments.9 Judiciaries in which elected officials play no role in the appointment
process are rare, but have existed, for instance in Colombia (1958–91), Ecuador, and Peru. These
are the unusual cases, however, and most courts and other non-elected agents of horizontal
exchange derive their authority from an appointment process in which elected agents of the
citizenry play a part. In this sense, their origin is never fully separate. It can be partially
separated, however, by employing one or more of the following devices: consent of both elected
branches to appoint (which is significant only of the two branches do not collude); staggered
terms (such that one president or one congress does not appoint all members); extraordinary
majorities (so that the congressional majority cannot alone appoint its own candidates);
intercession of a screening body such as a Judicial Council. We detail the prevalence of each of
these mechanisms below in our compilation of existing Latin American institutions.
For a branch to be separate and independent, it is even more critical that survival be
separated. That is, to be a separate branch, the officials must not be subject to dismissal by the
president or by a congressional majority. Judges cannot be accountable, once appointed, to
politicians. By the same token, politicians cannot be accountable to judges (or other appointed
officials). If politicians were accountable to judges in the sense that they could be removed from
office by them, then we would have a form of hierarchical accountability in which judges were,
oddly, a principal of the politicians. If, on the other hand, judges can veto certain actions by
politicians, what we have is a form of checks and balances (horizontal exchange) that should not
9
Whether these officials—such as Secretaries of State and Insurance Commissioners—can be seen as heads of
separate branches depends on the degree to which they have distinct authority from the executive and the extent to
which functions overlap with other elected officials—the essence of horizontal exchange. They always have
separate origin and survival in that they are popularly elected for fixed terms.
17
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
be mistaken for “accountability.” Judiciaries and other agencies in Latin America vary greatly in
the extent to which they have separated origin and survival vis-à-vis elected politicians.
Overlapping functions. Another necessary condition for effective horizontal exchange is
overlapping of function between branches. In order for horizontal exchange to take place, each
branch that is party to the exchange must have something to offer the other in a transaction. For
instance, in the standard legislative process of a presidential system, the congress has the
authority to pass—or not pass—legislation desired by the president. The president, in turn,
typically has the authority to veto legislation passed by the congress, and also has some
discretion over the enforcement of enacted legislation. Thus each of these two branches has
something the other side wants. The president wants votes in congress, and congress wants the
president’s assent to legislation and his commitment to enforce it vigorously. Such is the essence
of exchange: while the branches are independent in the sense that they have separate bases of
authority, they are not fully separate in terms of their functions. They need to cooperate with one
another in order to accomplish their tasks. Their functions, in short, overlap.
Overlapping functions also occur with respect to the non-elected branches. For instance,
where there is a constitutional court or other body empowered to exercise review of the
constitutionality of laws, the legislative function overlaps all three branches. This is especially
true in those systems in which a court or judicial body may exercise “abstract review,” whereby
a law that is challenged on constitutional grounds cannot be promulgated until it is approved by
the branch that exercises constitutional control (Stone 1992).
Likewise, in the judiciary-
dominant model of impeachment (Kada N.d., Perez-Liñan 2000), the legislature is not the only
branch that determines whether a case against the president (or other official) may go forward.
In such cases the Supreme Court or an independent Attorney General or Public Prosecutor must
also give its assent, and thus functions overlap.
A branch may be independent in the sense of having a reasonably high degree of separation
of origin and survival, yet not be equipped to engage in horizontal exchange if its functions do
not overlap in some respects with those of other branches and, in particular, of the elected
branches. Absent overlap of functions, whereby one branch needs the cooperation of another to
perform certain tasks, no horizontal exchange—let alone accountability—exists. For instance,
the Ombudsman’s Office in Peru is a constitutionally defined office with some degree of
separation of origin, in the form of an extraordinary congressional majority for appointment. Yet
18
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
the authority delegated to it by the constitution is quite limited. According to Kenney (2000), all
it can do is investigate and publicize violations of rights; it has no function that it shares with
other branches.
Officials of other branches may be embarrassed by accusation by the
Ombudsman, but no official needs the cooperation of the Ombudsman to perform his own
constitutional tasks.
If the Ombudsman is not institutionally equipped to engage in horizontal exchange, this does
not mean it is irrelevant. Indeed, in publicizing misdeeds, a credible Ombudsman or other
independent watchdog may play a vital role as a fire alarm in vertical accountability. Recall that
fire alarms are third-party opportunities to reveal an agent’s misdeeds to the agent’s principal. If
shedding light on abuses of human rights by agents within the executive branch provides
information that legislators can use to sanction the executive, or that voters can use in the next
election, then the Ombudsman has played a role in enhancing vertical accountability. For another
example of actions by an independent branch that is not horizontal exchange, suppose a Fiscal
exists who can blow the whistle on corruption. If the Fiscal has sufficient independence (from
his origin and survival) to reveal the corruption of a legislator, that information may be useful to
the legislator’s principals, the voters. The extent to which this information leads to punishment
of the legislator, then, depends on the extent to which the electoral process facilitates the
accountability of legislators, as well as the preferences of the voters for non-corrupt legislators.
The extent to which credible information about official misdeeds will lead to the ultimate
principal—voters—holding the official accountable therefore depends on institutions of vertical
accountability. We return to this theme below.
Countervailing ambitions.
A third condition for horizontal exchange to work is
countervailing ambitions. Madison’s pitting of ambitions against one another assumes that
agents have incentives to do different things. For instance, firms often require large expenditures
to be approved concurrently by both the CEO and the controller. The CEO is rewarded for
increasing profits, but the controller is rewarded for holding down costs. Both are agents of the
firm’s board (and, through the board, of the stockholders), but they have countervailing
ambitions in the sense that each has a different incentive. In political systems founded on
horizontal exchange, similarly, separate institutions must have different incentives.
In presidential systems, countervailing ambitions are implied by separate electoral origin of
the president and executive. Presidents are elected in a nationwide race for a single office, while
19
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
legislators are typically elected at least partially in regional districts. Even in those rare cases of
single nationwide legislative districts (e.g. Peru and the Colombian senate), the use of
proportional representation as opposed to the necessarily majoritarian election of the president
implies responsiveness to different manifestations of the electorate. What is more, the relatively
lower threshold for obtaining a seat, relative to the race for the presidency, means that a victor’s
vote can come from a geographically concentrated portion of the electorate.
The greatest threat to the existence of countervailing ambitions is the presence of informal
hierarchical relations between formally independent branches. If a hierarchy exists between
separately elected agents of the electorate, then separation is replaced by accountability to a
single principal. An example occurs under what might be called majoritarian presidentialism.
For instance, if the president is the head of the majority party in the sense of nominating the
party’s legislative candidates and offering them “pensions” in the form of government
appointments after their legislative service ends, then the president becomes a principal over
legislators.
In this scenario—which approximates that seen in Mexico until recent years
(Weldon 1997)—legislators and president continue to have formally separate origin and survival
in the electoral process, but cease to have countervailing ambitions. It should be noted that this
model of majoritarian presidentialism is quite different from the model of majoritarian
parliamentarism. In the latter, the executive is the agent of the legislative majority, accountable
to it. In majoritarian presidentialism, accountability relations run in the opposite direction,
implying a much greater concentration of authority in the chief executive.
Even without a majority party headed by the president, the countervailing ambitions on
which horizontal exchange depends can be overridden by relations of accountability that make
the legislators dependent on the president. Where legislators win office primarily on patronage
rather than on policy-based campaigning, they are in a dependent position vis-a-via the president,
whose position at the head of the executive branch gives him vast patronage resources with
which to “buy” votes.
Although not a formal relationship of accountability, this sort of
interbranch bargaining of votes for patronage undermines the countervailing ambitions of the
branches by inducing legislators to abdicate the autonomy of their branch and hence its ability to
serve as a forum for the reconciliation of policy disagreements.
It follows from this discussion that either situation—the president as the head of a majority
party or parties so weak that patronage pervades legislators’ election campaigns—undermines
20
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
countervailing ambitions. Both situations place the executive in a superior position and shortcircuit horizontal exchange. It follows further, then, that situations of moderately strong parties,
none of which is subordinate to the president, are the most promising means of ensuring
countervailing ambitions. Parties are the principal means of ensuring collective accountability of
policy-makers to voters, so their virtual absence as coordinators of the legislative process makes
legislators highly dependent upon executive patronage.
Parties and legislators must retain
sufficient independence from the president that they can represent the preferences of their voterprincipals.
In the non-elected branches, the same fundamental limitations on countervailing ambitions
apply. For example, when the same unified party controls both elected branches, justices are
unlikely to be independent of the elected branches even if both branches must participate in their
appointment. If the overwhelming majority of legislators is primarily interested in patronage,
they will have little incentive to select officials for the control branches who will exercise
effective control over the source of patronage, the executive, even if the selection process
requires a supermajority. Thus, as noted in the section on separation of origin and survival, the
independence of the control branches is largely dependent upon the incentives of legislators who
play a part in staffing them. If the vertical delegation from voters to legislators is not designed to
properly reflect the collective wishes of the electorate, then horizontal exchange is unlikely to
work and politicians may collude to oppress citizens.
Institutions of Horizontal Exchange in Latin America
This section will briefly review the provisions for separate origin and survival as well as
some of the key overlapping functions in Latin America’s non-elected agencies charged with
oversight or control over the executive. First, we focus on the selection, dismissal and primary
functions of Latin America’s supreme courts. Then we will turn our attention to these features
across Latin America’s other non-elected control branches: Attorneys General, Public
Prosecutors, Ombudsmen, and Controllers.
Most supreme courts are capable of engaging in horizontal exchanges because they have veto
power over elected politicians. Most of these courts are equipped to make rulings on the
21
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
constitutionality of laws and decrees.10 In some instances, the supreme court can judge the
admissability of an impeachment motion against elected officials (e.g. Honduras and Venezuela
1961). The basic functions of the supreme court, such as protecting the constitution and
upholding the law, are also important in creating a potential for countervailing ambitions.
However, that potential is dependent on the institutional arrangements that guide the selection
and dismissal of its members.
In most cases, politicians play a role in the selection process. However, there are a few cases
where justices are chosen in a manner that enhances independence from both the legislature and
the president. For instance, constitutional provisions in the 188611 Colombian and 1998
Ecuadorian constitutions give Supreme Court justices complete control over the selection
process. Provisions in the Dominican and Peruvian (1993) constitutions enhance independence
because they dictate that justices must be nominated and selected by a separate body. In Peru, the
National Council of Magistrates, which is composed of representatives from national
professional organizations, universities, and the supreme court, is charged with appointing
judges. This particular design implies a high degree of judicial independence in Peru. However,
that potential is limited by the dismissal rules incorporated into the constitution which allow
congress to remove Supreme court members with an two-thirds vote; thus their survival is much
less separated than their origin. In the Dominican Republic, members are chosen by the National
Council of Magistrates, which is composed of elected representatives from the executive and
legislative branches as well as representatives from other, non-elected, branches. Since Supreme
Court justices in the Dominican Republic are accountable to the Appeals Court (Corte de
Apelación) and they are elected to life terms, which means that there is a strong possibility that
no single congress or president will be allowed to select all Supreme Court justices.
In contrast, one branch or another may have complete control over the selection of Supreme
Court justices—thereby restricting the independence of the court. For instance, the national
legislature dominates the appointment process in six of the twenty-three cases examined in Table
1: including Costa Rica, Ecuador (1984), El Salvador, Honduras, Uruguay,12 and Venezuela
(1961). In a few cases, congressional majorities can remove members of the court, although only
10
In a few rare cases, this power is not expressly stated in the constitution (e.g. Ecuador 1984, Costa Rica,
and Argentina 1860).
11
As amended in 1958 under the National Front accords.
22
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
when criminal charges have been made.
In other instances, the dismissal process is not
completely controlled by the legislature (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela 1961).
The most common form of selection involves the consent of executive and legislative
branches. In some cases this means that the executive branch selects a candidate for office that is
ratified by congress (Argentina 1860, Argentina 1994, Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua,13 and
Panama). Several countries (Bolivia, Chile,14 Colombia 1991, Guatemala, Paraguay,15 Peru
1979, and Venezuela 1999) use an independent screening body to nominate justices
Attorneys General play important roles in facilitating horizontal exchange because some
constitutions grant them powers that overlap with those of the Supreme Court (Brazil and
Mexico), while others allow them to question the constitutionality of decrees and other
legislation (Brazil). Mostly, however, these offices are charged with the task of upholding the
law, in addition to providing the state with legal counsel. In some cases, they are even charged
with removing officials (Colombia 1991, Mexico). These features place them in a position to act
as either or fire-alarms or participants in an exchange.
Without exception, Attorneys General are selected with the participation of elected
politicians (see Table 2). In Bolivia (1967), El Salvador, and Honduras, the process is dominated
by the national legislature. In Bolivia (1994), Guatemala, Uruguay, and the Dominican Republic
the attorney general is appointed by the president without legislative approval. However,
presidents do not have sole authority to dismiss the attorney general in those cases; therefore,
they are not completely dependent on the executive for their existence. Separate origin is
enhanced by constitutional provisions that require consent between both elected branches or
require the participation of an elected branch and a screening body. In Brazil, Colombia 1886,
Mexico, Panama, Peru (1979), Venezuela (1961), Venezuela (1999), Ecuador (1984), and
Ecuador (1998) one branch makes a final selection from among a list presented by the other
branch of government. In Colombia (1991), Guatemala, and Paraguay the president consults the
screening committee during the nomination process. For the most part, Attorneys General can be
dismissed by politicians only under extraordinary circumstances; that is, when they are accused
of criminal activity and tried by congress or the Supreme Court. However, there are a few
12
Uruguay requires an extraordinary majority of legislators to elect justices.
In Nicaragua, the list of nominees is created by with the consultation of civilian groups.
14
In Chile, the Supreme Court acts as a screening committee.
15
In Paraguay, the Council of Magistrates is also involved in creating a list of nominees.
13
23
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
instances where they are directly accountable to the president; this is the case for Mexico,
Guatemala, Paraguay, and Peru (1979). In Brazil, these officials can be dismissed, at any time,
by the president only with the consent of two thirds of the Senate, thereby tempering a unilateral
action against the sitting attorney general. In other cases, independent disciplinary bodies have
the sole authority to dismiss the attorney general.
Much like Attorneys General, Public Prosecutors may be fire-alarms or participate in an
exchange. After all, their primary function is to oversee and—in some cases—audit officials and
their agencies. Since they are capable of charging and prosecuting those who commit criminal
infractions, they have a unique ability to publicize the improprieties of elected officials. There
are a few Public Prosecutors that have overlapping powers.16 Two cases restrict the selection
process to the national legislature: El Salvador and Honduras. Yet, unlike El Salvador, survival
in Honduras is not determined by the congress. Bolivia (1966) and Colombia (1886) are
examples of executive-dominant selection. Interbranch consent is required in Colombia (1991),
Ecuador (1984), Paraguay, and Venezuela (1961). In most cases, the legislature can dismiss
members especially when it finds evidence of negligence or criminal activity.
Ombudsmen play an important role in providing fire-alarm oversight. Most ombudsmen in
Latin America lack the overlapping functions needed to engage in horizontal exchange with
elected branches of government. There are only two exceptions: Venezuela (1999), which allows
its ombudsman to veto laws and decrees on the grounds of constitutionality, and Bolivia, which
allows its ombudsman to question the constitutionality of laws and decrees.17 In six of eleven
cases, congress is solely charged with the election of individuals to this office. Congress also
determines the survival of ombudsmen in each of these cases. The rest are determined by
criminal or disciplinary organs. In contrast, interbranch consent is required in Colombia (1991),
where the congress selects from a slate of nominees chosen by the president. In most cases,
ombudsmen can be dismissed by congress only as a result of a political trial for criminal
activities.
Finally, we turn our attention to the origin and survival of controllers. This ‘autonomous’
agent can audit officials and governmental agencies and participate in the formulation and
execution of the national budget. Therefore, they have a series of tools at their disposal that may
16
For instance, the 1979 Peruvian constitution allows Public Prosecutors to provide congress with legal advice on
pending legislation. In Venezuela, the Public Prosecutor may determine the merit of an impeachment motion.
24
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
facilitate horizontal exchange. There are many examples of legislative dominance in the
selection process: including Argentina, (1994), Colombia 1886, Costa Rica, El Salvador,
Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru (1993), Uruguay, Venezuela (1961), and Venezuela (1999). In
contrast, in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador (1984) and Peru (1979) congress selects from a set
of candidates provided by the president. In Bolivia and Ecuador (1998) the president selects from
among a set of candidates proposed by congress. In some cases selection committees are
consulted, most notably in Colombia (1991), Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Venezuela (1999). The
potential for separate origin exists in many of the current constitutions. The Controller is usually
accountable to congress for any improprieties, negligence or criminal activities (see Table 5). In
contrast, some are subject to the whims of a single actor (Peru 1993, Guatemala, Ecuador 1984,
Costa Rica). However, this relationship of accountability is only relevant under extenuating
circumstances, criminal charges; otherwise, the controller is independent.
Effective Vertical Accountability
As we introduced the concept of accountability above, we noted that achieving both effective
legislative oversight of the executive and effective autonomous agencies requires what we might
call “getting vertical accountability right.” The apparent dearth of “horizontal accountability” is
in fact a malfunctioning of vertical accountability. Getting vertical accountability right is, we
argue, a prerequisite to effective horizontal exchange. We do not claim that strengthening
vertical accountability is a sufficient condition, but we do claim that it is a necessary one. As we
have already mentioned, the checks and balances required to enhance accountability only emerge
through purposive action by elected officials. With respect to the creation or maintenance of
autonomous agencies of control, it is evident that their very existence and capacity to check the
powers of elected officials are dependent upon the roles/resources assigned to them by elected
officials. In the worst case scenario, we might find these bodies are ineffective because of the
limitations placed on them by the politicians that created them. It would seem counterintuitive to
expect elected officials to act in a manner that would limit their own powers. Indeed, this begs
the question: under what conditions would we expect politicians to engage in oversight or create
truly autonomous agencies? Left to their own devices, we might never expect them to encourage
17
This does not give the ombudsman the right to veto laws or decrees.
25
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
autonomy or the necessary checks and balances. This is especially true if they are insulated from
the public—which may otherwise play an important role in encouraging the creation of checks
and balances.
In an ideal system, voters would transmit their preferences over collective-goods policies
through the electoral process. Legislators (and parties) would respond to the tides of public
opinion by allowing the voters to evaluate their policy positions and behavior and reward or
sanction them accordingly. Presidents would respond to nationwide public sentiment in a similar
fashion. The transactional relationship that exists between these two actors may promote the
installation of checks and balances. In an effort to respond to the public and put forth policy,
these two agents would form a partnership to exchange policy for support. Indeed, when vertical
accountability is working we expect this process to foster a relationship of coequals, each
motivated by the desire to translate voters’ preferences over broad policy into substantive
policies. The independence that this would foster would be conducive to vigilant participation in
the policy-making process and the placing of limitations on the powers of the other branch. In
other words, the legislature, spurred by policy motivations, would seek to limit the powers of the
presidency to increase its own bargaining power in the policy-formation process. This would
encourage legislators to install oversight mechanisms (and/or create autonomous agencies) to
check executive power. Ultimately, however, the very mechanisms that they implement to check
executive power would, eventually, set limits on their own actions.
The proper functioning of the checks and balances between independent branches assumes
direct and distinct mandates from the electorate—the single principal. When politicians are not
fully accountable to the voters there are few incentives to check executive and (by extension)
legislative power. A diffuse linkage between voters and their representatives will introduce an
incentive structure that would produce a series of suboptimal outcomes. If voters cannot
adequately express their policy preferences through the electoral process, legislators may be hard
pressed to identify themselves with a distinct set of policies since that behavior cannot be
rewarded by the electorate. Legislators may feel obliged to gain support through particularistic
behavior. Meanwhile, the executive is placed under extreme pressure to produce policy in an
effort to meet the demands of the citizenry. Under these circumstances, legislators are likely to
delegate authority to presidents to ensure that policy is created. This delegation of powers allows
elected representatives to pursue the particularistic needs of their support base while presidents
26
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
are left alone to address the broader policy needs of the national constituency.
Vertical
accountability between principal and agents and the horizontal exchange among agents would be
perverted into a series of deals where presidents buy support for their programs with patronage
that legislators can distribute to their followers.
Given these conditions, it is not hard to see how oversight mechanisms might be abandoned
or ignored. For example, executive dominance over the national policy agenda in pre-reform
(and to a lesser extent in post-reform) Colombia was permitted as long as congressmembers were
left to pursue their own particularistic/clientelistic goals (Archer and Shugart 1997, Crisp and
Ingall 2000). In most cases, this meant that presidents were forced to exchange patronage for ad
hoc support on policy issues. The linkage between voters’ policy preferences and their
representatives is effectively short-circuited and so are any possibilities of fostering effective
horizontal exchange. The incentive to limit executive power or install autonomous agencies
charged with controlling the activities of other branches diminishes because legislators in these
circumstances benefit from delegation (even it tends towards abdication) and they would not feel
obliged to take responsibility for the policy process.
What conditions enhance (or produce) vertical accountability? We maintain that vertical
accountability is a function of the institutional incentives that face politicians. Whether a voter’s
policy preferences are acted upon is contingent upon the incentive structures that face legislators.
The incentive structures that produce variation in vertical accountability are those that define the
linkage between voters and their representatives at the candidate selection and general election
stages. We hypothesize that a well-designed combination of institutional features can produce
powerful incentives for legislators to support a system of checks and balances.
The lack of (vertical) accountability in Latin America is a function of compromised
independence of branches. The first link in the delegation relationship, between voters and their
multiple agents, is not working. A prominent task of constitutional redesign in Latin America is
not to create new institutions of “horizontal accountability” (actually, exchange). Indeed, as
Tables 1-5 showed, such institutions are quite prevalent already in Latin America, and recent
constitutional replacements have without exception led to the establishment of new institutions
of this sort. Instead, the key task is to align the incentives of legislators with the broader interests
of the electorate. Fixing the link between voters and legislators is particularly important for a
number of reasons. First, the legislature approves the budget for the rest of the state—usually
27
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
including the budgets even of otherwise autonomous institutions. Second, as we have seen, the
legislature in many cases elects or confirms officials to the other branches. Finally, given the
plural nature of the legislative branch, it is the home of “opposition voices” — parties that do not
form the executive.
As we have already noted, presidential systems are characterized by the presence of multiple
agents of the electorate: presidents and legislators. Although they represent overlapping
constituencies, they do not necessarily serve the same sector(s) of society. Presidents are
representatives of the national constituency. In contrast, individual legislators often are one of
several representatives of more concentrated and, potentially, homogenous constituencies. The
variations in district magnitude that characterize these two positions tend to create different
incentives for presidents who have stronger institutional ties to the national constituency than
members of the legislature. Presidents are easily identifiable heads of government (and of state);
they are easy targets for public disdain or praise when it comes to public policy. Indeed, the
perception that presidents are imperial figures responsible for the direction of governmental
policy encourages them to formulate and pass policy. If presidents fail to meet the demands of
their office, they can be sanctioned directly by the public through the electoral process or by
other actors (including the military); therefore, there are built-in incentives that foster some
degree of policy responsibility in the presidency.
Members of congress, on the other hand, do not automatically share responsibility for policy
since they normally represent (or share responsibility for representing) much smaller districts.
Other institutional factors play an important role in promoting particularistic behavior over
programmatic behavior by legislators as well. For instance, the use of non-party list systems and
uncontrolled ballot access in Colombia fosters intense intraparty competition which creates few
incentives for programmatic, policy-based behavior (Archer and Shugart 1997, Colombia,
Ministry of the Interior, 2000). After all, legislators in these institutional contexts would be
forced to distinguish themselves from their copartisans, effectively reducing the importance of
the party label and any policy relevance that label might carry. Voters that might have otherwise
used party policy positions as informational cues must instead rely on characteristics of the
individual legislator. In response, legislators will seek to cultivate personal reputations through
the provision of particularistic benefits for their constituents. While this process produces
benefits for a legislator’s constituents, it does so on a highly individualized and disaggregated
28
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
basis, rather than on the collective basis required for legislators to aggregate the policy
preferences of their constituents.
Electoral rules that link a candidate’s electoral success to their party will produce markedly
different incentives to engage in policy oriented behavior, provided that the internal incentive
structure of the parties themselves does not interfere. Vote-pooling mechanisms that benefit the
entire party over individuals (party lists) or the use of a single party vote encourages voters to
rely more heavily on party affiliation as a powerful voting cue. Additionally, the presence of a
single party vote, as opposed to a factional vote, will also strengthen the role of partisanship and
programmatic behavior. These factors encourage candidates to campaign on their partisan
affiliation and support policy positions congruent with their party. This allows voters to identify
the policy repercussions of their electoral choice prior to casting their votes. Although the
cultivation of a party reputation is an important and fundamental contributor to accountability,
there are other factors—located within parties—that foster vertical accountability.
Vertical accountability is strongly influenced by internal party structure. Before the electoral
system can act to maintain vertical accountability, such accountability first must have been
established—or at least not have been short-circuited—during the candidate selection process.
Parties that lack internally democratic mechanisms for candidate selection weaken the bonds
between voter preferences and policy formulation. This is made worse when party leaders are
unaccountable to the voting public or even the rank-and file-membership. In general elections
voters may be able to choose from among political parties but those parties may not encourage
their members to cultivate close ties with their constituents. When publicly unaccountable party
leaders control the candidate selection and nomination process, we would expect a much more
strained relationship between legislators and voter preferences. This is often the case when party
elites control access to the ballot. Under these conditions, nominees will be obliged to court party
leaders who are not directly responsible to the electorate or the party membership. This creates a
rather strong bond between candidates and the party leadership, since they are dependent upon
the leadership to further their political careers. Voter preferences are not fully accounted for in
this scenario since candidates would have few incentives to cultivate ties with their particular
constituents. Instead, legislators from the same party would have to appeal to their potentially
diverse districts using the identical “party line.”
29
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
In contrast, wherever prospective candidates are required to gain the approval of a broader
party selectorate (e.g., nomination convention delegates or dues-paying members) we would
expect candidates to cultivate closer ties with their constituents, especially if that selectorate is
limited to the electoral district. This is typically the case when ballot access is gained through
decentralized internal party procedures which may include but are not limited to local primaries,
caucuses, or nomination conventions.
Systematic intraparty competition at the candidate
selection stage is particularly important for establishing vertical accountability when electoral
rules do not provide for intraparty competition at the general election stage. If at the general
election stage voters have a choice only among parties, the candidate selection stage is the only
point in the process where legislative candidates must be responsive to district-level demands.
Party-controlled ballot access under systems that permit a preference vote (e.g. open lists) can
still create incentives to cultivate constituencies and represent their policy preferences. We
would expect legislators to address the policy demands of their particular constituents while still
facing relatively strong incentives to maintain a programmatic party reputation, provided that the
rules do not permit legislators to win with very small subparty constituencies.18
It should be noted that internal party structures are unique to parties, not political systems.
Electoral systems condition internal party structures but do not determine them. We could
expect wide variation in accountability across parties both across cases and within cases. For
example, in Venezuela prior to 1993 voters could only select among closed party lists during the
general elections.
Most parties, including Acción Democrática (AD) the dominant party,
coupled this lack of intraparty choice during the general election with very centralized
nomination procedures — leaving it to the National Executive Council of the party to determine
the make-up of the closed list. To be sure, there was factional infighting regarding who would
make the list and in what order, but this was typically part of a power struggle between
competing party elites. Given the highly centralized candidate selection process and the “hypercentralized” electoral system, it is no surprise that most Venezuelan congressional delegations
were known for their incredibly high levels of party discipline (Crisp 2000, Kulisheck and Crisp
2000). Despite this typical coupling of centralized rules at both stages of choosing legislators, at
least one party, Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), maintained very open candidate selection
processes. It experimented with party caucuses and primaries at the district level throughout the
18
We discuss rules that narrow or expand the subparty constituents of legislators below.
30
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
1970s and 1980s.
As a result, its legislative delegations were the most likely to diverge
internally on policy issues with legislators having more freedom to represent particular
constituencies/districts (Kulisheck and Crisp 2000). MAS was able to maintain its third party
status where many other parties had come and gone.
The desire to achieve policy goals will ultimately motivate elected officials to install and
sustain mechanisms that will maintain a balance between governmental actors’ power. Clearly,
however, this is an idealized description (in part because voters will not always be motivated by
policy issues), but this demonstrates how institutional factors impact the likelihood of pursuing
policy goals. Electoral arrangements that foster party vote seeking will create a foundation for
subsequent candidate/party evaluations based on policy concerns. This creates a powerful
sanctioning mechanism, which is required for a properly functioning principal-agent relationship.
Countervailing ambitions are created when actors seek to gain leverage over policy formation.
This ultimately motivates agents (usually the legislature) to limit executive power. Efforts to
limit executive authority initiate a process which culminates in the creation of a system of checks
and balances. On the other hand, relationships in which legislators are subject to de-facto
accountability to the executive or party elites will decrease the incentives to curb presidential
authority and they contribute to the accountability deficit that has been identified throughout the
region.
How can the (vertical) accountability deficit be addressed? Reform of internal party rules and
electoral systems is required. Either extreme—the lack of party control over the electoral fates of
individual candidates or hyper-centralized domination of the process by insulated party
elites—decreases the potential for a policy-based transactional relationship between the
executive and the legislature. In contrast, candidate-selection and electoral rules that promote
relatively programmatic political parties while assuring that legislators owe part of their success
to a particular constituency create more opportunities for a policy based exchange between the
two agents (executive and legislature) with countervailing ambitions. Below we elaborate on
institutional designs for the selection of candidates, the election of legislators, and the
appointment of “autonomous agencies” that maintain effective vertical accountability.
The Candidate Selection Process. The candidate selection process is chronologically the first
opportunity to establish the relations of vertical accountability. It precedes the general election
and, if poorly designed, can prevent what might otherwise be appropriate electoral arrangements
31
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
from establishing a link of accountability between the electorate and legislators. For vertical
accountability to work legislators must feel both the need to serve a particular
district/constituency but to do so as members of a partisan delegation. Candidate selection
processes that are overly decentralized, allowing a group of partisans who constitute only a small
subset of the partisans in the district to choose nominees, will err in the direction of emphasizing
district over party (constituency service of narrow interests).
Processes that are highly
centralized, allowing a group outside of the district to choose nominees (including leaving
candidate selection in the hands of the party elite), will err in the in the direction of emphasizing
party over district. As we will detail below, these effects are moderated by the scope of the
district itself.
A common shortcoming of candidate selection processes in Latin America is excessive
centralization—leading to legislators who are responsive to party elites rather voters. In other
words, internally undemocratic parties where national leaders hand pick legislative candidates
eliminate any sense of connection legislators might feel to a particular electoral district. They
know that the electorate in the district cannot punish them by choosing a copartisan in their
stead. Punishment may come in the form of electing a candidate in the general election from a
party with more responsive selection processes, but that threat does not change what constitutes
rational behavior by the legislator wishing to remain the candidate of the highly centralized
party. What is more, if all viable parties in the system are highly centralized, the party itself
cannot be punished for its extreme centralization. A less extreme form of centralization would
be allowing a national convention to pick candidates to run in geographically more focused
districts. The location of the nominators outside the district could diminish the connection to
districts’ peculiar policy positions unless some form of logrolling occurred where the delegates
of all other districts deferred to the candidate preferences of the district in question.
Manifestations of this centralization (that are not somehow compensated for during the
general election) include the selection of candidates with no life history in a district and the
indiscriminate use of generic suplentes (substitute legislators). Some political systems do not
mandate residency within one’s district, and highly centralized candidate selection processes
increase the prospects that a nominee with no personal history in a district or special knowledge
of its characteristics will be imposed upon the district from the outside. Highly centralized
systems can also lead to the use of suplentes with no particular connection to a district. In the
32
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
highly centralized Venezuelan system described briefly above, when a legislator was unable to
attend plenary sessions, whether for a day or a year, leaders could designate an alternate from
among their lists of party faithful. Indiscriminate use of suplentes and lack of residency illustrate
some of the impacts on representation of highly centralized candidate selection processes.
At the other extreme, it is possible to imagine very small portions of the selectorate placing
candidates on the ballot who would then be beholden to those very narrow interests rather than
the interests of the party as a whole. This, of course, would only lead to a breakdown in the
programmatic aspect of vertical accountability if the electoral system did not somehow
compensate for these particularistic incentives by assuring that narrowly selected candidates
could not be elected without a broader base of support. Electoral systems with very high district
magnitudes and highly proportional seat allocation formulas, for example, would not compensate
for decentralizing tendencies in the candidate selection process. Candidates would have every
incentive to cater to the very defined needs of a particular selectorate (and electorate) rather than
thinking of the district as a whole, not to mention the party platform.
Perhaps more common than decentralized candidate selection processes are systems with
virtually no candidate selection process at all.
In such systems the prospects for vertical
accountability are determined by the electoral rules alone. Where the electoral rules encourage
particularistic, pork barrel forms of representation, the candidate selection process cannot
counteract them. Perhaps the best example is Colombia where neither party leaders nor rankand-file members have any control over the use of the party label. For a small fee and minimal
number of signatures, one can declare candidacy under the party label of choice. The pooling of
votes at the sub-party list level means legislators lack much incentive to think of the party’s
reputation.
Instead, they survive (get reelected) by delivering pork-barrel projects to their
districts or clientelistic services to groups of followers. These incentives hold to a large extent
even for Senators running in a national district—with a district magnitude of 100 they can
nominate themselves and be elected by a relatively small portion of the electorate.19 The
“grandfather clause” in Brazil that guarantees incumbents use of the party label in essence
19
These problems of the Colombian electoral process, identified by Archer and Shugart (1997), have recently
receive official recognition in the form of a proposal to abolish the subparty lists and reduce the senate magnitude
(Colombia, Ministry of the Interior, 2000).
33
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
eliminates the candidate selection process as well. Incumbents running for office do not have to
cater to larger party interests in order to assure themselves a viable place on the ballot.
Manifestations of candidate selection processes that stress district over party would include
very low levels of party discipline and virtually exclusive attention to particularistic activities.
Party discipline would be low because legislators would need to be responsive to their particular
selectorate, not the party members as a whole. Low levels of discipline would impede partisan
pursuit of programmatic platforms. Instead, legislators would focus on divisible resources they
could provide to their constituents and for which they could clearly claim credit. Bills to
commemorate every anniversary of a little town proliferate and include not only calls for the
attention of the nation and a commemorative plaque but also sewer systems, paving roads, and
sports facilities. Likewise, budgets are often amended repeatedly to allow for this kind of pork
barrel spending.
The key here is moderation or balance between extremes that will eliminate the tension
between representing a particular constituency and representing a programmatic party.
Legislators subject to incentive structures at either extreme will not have the countervailing
ambitions necessary to check and balance presidents. Those facing excessively decentralized
candidate selection processes will be easily bought out by presidents as legislators pursue
resources to distribute to their districts. Legislators from excessively centralized parties will
abdicate vigilant participation in the policy-making process in favor of slavish loyalty to the
party line. Where this occurs legislatures become empty shells devoid of interest to those who
want to shape policy outcomes. Organized interests turn their attention to executives and party
machines, neither of which is interested in district level concerns. There is no single formula for
establishing this tension in legislators’ incentives. A candidate selection process that empowers
those with an interest in the party’s reputation at the district level is most likely to strike this
balance. Either rank-and-file members or district-level party elites could straddle these concerns.
They are within the district yet they do not constitute only an extreme element within the larger
whole of the party at that level.
As noted above, getting vertical accountability right during candidate selection is only part of
the battle. The electoral system can undo well-designed selection processes or help compensate
for some poorly structured ones. Because not all combinations are equally likely, whether one
stage or the other is sufficient for explaining vertical accountability, or is merely one necessary
34
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
part of the link, depends on the specific combination chosen. We elaborate on the possible
combinations at the end of the following section on electoral systems.
Electoral systems. The electoral system is a critical link in any process of strengthening the
accountability of the policy-making process to voter-principals. As we have stressed, a crucial
distinguishing feature of presidential systems is that the connection between voters and the
executive does not run through legislators as it does in parliamentary systems. Instead of being a
direct agent of the legislative majority, a presidential executive is a direct agent of the electorate.
This means that legislators have little incentive to take into account the consequences of their
actions for the executive’s national policy program. Thus, if legislators’ exchanges with the
executive branch are to take place in a context of bargaining over policy, rather than an exchange
of executive-offered patronage for legislators’ votes, the electoral system must encourage
legislators to emphasize voters’ policy preferences. That is, legislators in presidential systems
will be articulators of voters’ collective policy preferences only to the extent that it is in their
electoral interests. In this section we discuss features of electoral systems that help to encourage
legislators to be collectively accountable to their constituents over policy.
In other work, we have classified electoral systems according to the extent to which they give
legislators the incentive to be “efficient” articulators of the collective preferences of constituents
(Shugart 2000; Crisp, Moreno, and Shugart 2000). On an intraparty dimension, electoral
efficiency refers to the simultaneous accountability of legislators to constituents and to their
party.20 Accountability to a party—and, crucially, to the package of collective goods that the
party label signifies to voters—is important to mitigate tendencies of politicians to use the pork
barrel or to develop clientelistic relations. Thus some degree of party strength is necessary to
ensure collective action by legislators on behalf of a policy program preferred by a segment of
the electorate. On the other hand, when parties are too strong, individual members are not
themselves accountable before their voter-principals for their activities in office. Instead, they
are accountable to an internal constituency within their own parties. Thus, we argue, electoral
systems that encourage either very weak or very strong parties are inimical to the representation
of voters’ broad interests, and hence to the overall accountability of a system founded on
20
There is also an interparty dimension, concerning the extent to which parties aggregate into blocs that voters can
identify as potential “governing teams” before elections.
35
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
horizontal exchange. We shall refer to systems of very weak parties as “personalistic” and of
very strong parties as “hyper-centralized.”
A situation of high personalism is one in which incumbent legislators and new aspirants to
legislative office within the same party compete against one another. In situations of intraparty
competition, the party label is an insufficient cue to voters in making their voting choice. Hence
candidates (incumbents as well as challengers) must make use of narrower appeals to distinguish
themselves from copartisans. Such narrow appeals typically take the form of clientelistic goodsdistribution or the pork barrel. When these forms of narrow campaign strategies dominate, they
crowd out appeals based on the collective identity of the party and the policies for which it
stands.
A situation of hyper-centralized parties is one in which the identity of individual legislators
and candidates is unknown to voters, who cast only a “closed” party list. If candidate-selection
practices are sufficiently decentralized, closed lists may permit a considerable degree of
collective accountability of party contingents to the electorate. However, when combined with
centralized nominations, a closed-list electoral system admits individual legislator accountability
to constituents at neither the nomination stage nor the general election stage. Thus if parties are
hyper-centralized, legislators are effectively agents of their leaders and not of their supposed
constituents.
Solutions to the perils of either extreme of high personalism or hyper-centralization lie in
institutional arrangements that align the incentives of individual candidates with the collective
incentives of their party and its constituents. In parliamentary systems this is not such a delicate
balance because the executive itself is collectively accountable to the parliament and therefore
legislators themselves are collectively accountable for their position for or against the
government and its policies. In presidential systems, the separation of executive and legislative
powers implies greater opportunity for legislators to go their own way and duck governing
responsibility, if they have electoral incentives to do so.
To generate the alignment of individual and collective incentives implies an electoral system
that permits accountability of individual legislators to voters but also gives them the incentive to
align with a party. This implies another level of countervailing ambitions in addition to that
between legislators and executives. It implies that within the party, legislators should feel both
the pull of representing individual local constituencies and the pull of toeing a party line. Such
36
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
countervailing ambitions are present within the US electoral system, for example. The US
system is neither the only nor the best model for Latin American conditions, but it is instructive
to consider how it generates the mix of incentives that we are referring to. First, there is
intraparty competition within districts, but it occurs some months prior to the general election in
the form of a primary. The primary—in the language of agency theory—serves as a selection
and screening mechanism by which principals can vet those who aspire to be their agents.21
Second, the districts themselves are geographically defined and fairly compact, with a single
representative per district.22 In this way, each member is personally accountable to the locality.
Conversely, because each party has only one candidate per district in the general election, each
candidate is also the sole representative of his or her party in the local campaign, which
encourages a significant party-based vote. Despite all the emphasis on constituent service and
the pork barrel in the US, the House is organized on a partisan basis and party affiliation remains
the most important criterion in voter choice (Cox and McCubbins 1991). In these ways, the US
process of primary elections and single-seat districts provides for countervailing ambitions
between candidates’ needs to cater to local interests and their need to represent their parties to
their districts.
We would not necessarily recommend the US formula for Latin America, particularly those
countries with significant ideological or regional cleavages.
However, single-seat districts
(SSDs) are a component of the increasingly popular “mixed-member” system. In a mixedmember system some members are elected in SSDs and some from party lists, and voters are
generally given both a list vote and a vote for a candidate in their SSD (Shugart and Wattenberg
2000). Mixed-member systems also generate countervailing ambitions within the party, in that
to do well in the overall system, at least the major parties must present both candidates who are
attractive to local constituencies and a party label that can attract list votes. Studies of mixedmember systems have shown that even members elected from lists tend to be responsive to
localities, probably because their parties recognize the importance of maintaining a profile in
SSDs that they may not have won in the last election, but may hope to win in the future (Barker
et al 2000, Klingemann and Wessels 2000).
21
22
See Kiewiet and McCubbins (1991) on selection and screening mechanisms.
The Senate has two representatives per district (state), but only one is elected at a time.
37
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
Moderate forms of intraparty competition in general elections may also provide a balance of
incentives. The key is not to allow the share of the party’s vote—or the total vote—needed for
election to be so small that simply providing pork or clientelistic services to a very narrow
constituency is sufficient to win a seat. For example, the Chilean system is obviously compatible
with meaningful party labels despite its provision for candidate preference voting. No doubt the
strength of Chilean parties derives in part from their significant connections to social groups
(Valenzuela 1978, Scully 1995), but even a party with a strong social identity must develop a
strategy for coping with intraparty competition when the electoral system requires it. PostPinochet, there is not actual intra-party competition, because the two-seat districts have
encouraged alliances that nominate only one (at most) candidate of any one component party in
each district. However, from 1958 through 1969, interparty alliances were not common and the
district magnitude was greater than two, yet the preference voting did not undermine party labels.
The key to how to generate a workable mix of intraparty competition and meaningful party
labels can be discerned through a brief comparison of some key features of proportional
representation (PR) systems that use preference votes as the sole criterion for determining the
intraparty ranking of candidates. Such systems are found in Latin America in Brazil, Chile, and
Peru. Outside Latin America, Italy (before 1993) and Finland are examples. One distinction is
between “quasi-list” systems in which the preference vote is mandatory and open-list systems in
which it is not (Taagepera and Shugart 1989). Finland and Chile use the quasi-list, while Brazil,
Peru and formerly Italy use the open list. When the preference vote is mandatory, the average
share of votes per candidate is simply the party’s vote (V) divided by the number of candidates
(c):
V/c. When the preference vote is optional, the average vote per candidate may be far
smaller than V/c (because many voters choose not to rank candidates but instead cast only a
party vote, yet the order of election is determined only by preference votes). Thus under the
quasi-list it is not possible for candidates to be elected with only a very small share of their
party’s electorate, but under the open list, it is.
District magnitude—the number of seats elected per district—is also a critical factor in
determining how narrow a personal-vote constituency may be sufficient to elect a candidate
(Carey and Shugart 1995). The larger the magnitude, the more copartisans one candidate must
face, and thus the smaller is V/c. Thus the low magnitudes in pre-Pinochet Chile (average 5,
largest 18) imply larger personal-vote constituencies than the very high magnitudes in Brazil
38
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
(average almost 20, largest 70)23 or Peru (single national district of 60). Systems of intraparty
competition can be consistent with the countervailing ambitions of both local personal voteseeking and allegiance to a party where the district magnitude is relatively low because it is not
possible to win with extremely narrow personal-vote constituencies—party incentives can
counter the personal-vote incentives.
No electoral system single-handedly can transform a personalistic system into one where
legislators begin campaigning on party labels and policy. Nor can electoral reform assure that a
hyper-centralized system is replaced by one in which individual candidates cater to voter policy
preferences rather than primarily to party leaders. However, electoral reform can shift the
calculus of candidates in the desired direction, by eliminating or reducing incentives to cultivate
a personal vote in personalistic systems or adding a constituency feature of decentralized
nominations in hyper-centralized systems.
Where an electoral system provides for
countervailing personal-vote and party-vote incentives, the odds are increased that candidates
will be both responsive to local interests and articulators of national policy, because such mixed
strategies are more likely to pay off electorally.
As noted above, candidate selection processes and electoral rules are stages of the same
process, and, as a result, their combination greatly affects the prospects for getting vertical
accountability “right.” There is as yet little research on the combination of these stages, but we
can make some preliminary assessments. It would seem that excessive centralization in the
candidate-selection stage is likely to swamp decentralizing incentives at the electoral stage.
Thus, for example, the adoption of single-seat districts for about half the seats in Venezuela in
1993 showed little effect on the tendencies of legislators to represent district interests, because
the nomination process remained as centralized as ever in the then-dominant AD (Kulisheck and
Crisp 2000). On the other hand, an overly open nomination process may vitiate the partycentered institutions at the electoral stage. For example, in Ecuador before 1996, most parties
required practically no commitment of prospective candidates to a party organization (let alone a
policy platform) to get on the party list, so parties were weak, undisciplined, and personalistic in
spite of a closed-list system (Conaghan 1995). If getting vertical accountability “right” in the
principal–agent relation between voters and politicians means encouraging candidates to
23
In Brazil, the share of votes needed to win is made even smaller by a provision that permits parties to nominate
one-and-a-half times as many candidates as there are seats in the district.
39
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
represent the collective preferences of their constituents with respect to policy issues, as we have
argued, both the candidate-selection and electoral stages of that relationship must be designed
well. Thus reformers need to consider both stages carefully.
“Autonomous” Agencies. As we argued earlier, when elected officials are involved in the
selecting, funding, and/or removal of other bodies, these actors are not “autonomous” but are
instead agents once removed from their principal, the electorate. Given the mediating role
played by elected officials, we cannot expect effective horizontal exchange from courts, for
example, unless vertical accountability between voters and the elected officials is effectively
established in the candidate selection process and electoral system (as detailed above). These
agents once removed must also posses overlapping functions and countervailing ambitions to
effectively check and balance the president or the legislature. Overlapping functions is a matter
of constitutional mandate or legal statute, but countervailing ambitions are determined by their
method of selection, funding, and removal. Where overlapping powers are absent, appointed
officials performs a “police patrol” or “fire alarm” role (i.e. assisting their principals in
monitoring their other agents), but where powers are shared they can engage in horizontal
exchange. Agents once removed have been created throughout Latin America in an effort to
check the actions of elected government in a number of ways: by creating institutions to uphold
the rule of law, respect the rights of individuals, prevent corruption, and oversee the
administration and the use of funds. The mere creation of non-elected control institutions does
not automatically ensure that these high-minded and well intentioned goals will be achieved.
Where procedures do not establish overlapping functions and countervailing ambitions between
elected and appointed officials, it is unlikely that effective horizontal exchange will result.
Typically the process of selecting, dismissing, and funding non-elected control branches
involves the participation of elected officials. This is normally the case for even the most
‘independent’ of branches, like the judicial branch, as well as specialized ‘autonomous agencies’,
like the Human Rights Ombudsman. As shown in Tables 1–5 above, selection procedures for
non elected agencies vary across Latin America; some involve independent bodies, others
require consultation among different elected (and sometimes non-elected actors), while others
only require one elected branch to participate. Requiring the participation of both executive and
legislature in the appointment of other branches can help assure that the the appointees have
ambitions which countervail both elected branches (though this will be undercut to the extent
40
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
that a single, disciplined party controls both branches). Alternatively, vacancies may ve filled by
a vote of the remaining members members of the respective body, or members may be selected
by a separate body that has no origin in the elected branches. These latter two procedures tend to
promote countervailing incentive structures, though they may tend to promote too much
independence in the sense that neither the voters nor their (supposed) agents in the elected
branches have any say in staffing important parts of the state.
Such highly separated
appointment processes are probably desirable only when vertical accountability is
malfunctioning, and should not remain necessary if the fundamental problem of legislators’
accountabiulity can be solved.
Independence is severely restricted when a single elected branch is charged with the full
responsibility of selecting justices or agency heads. In fact, the most common method of
selection requires the legislature (typically both chambers)
to make an appointment
unencumbered by other elected, or even non-elected, branches. Under these circumstances, there
is potential to skew the process in favor of selecting individuals that will lack the necessary
countervailing ambitions to check legislative power. In many cases a majority is sufficient to
appoint. In other instances, extraordinary majorities are needed to appoint.
Requring an
extraordinary majority (usually two thirds) has the advantage of ensuring that the selection
process does not reflect the whims of the party or bloc controlling the congress, but it has
potential pitfalls.
First of all, extraordinary majorities raise decision costs (Buchanan and
Tullock 1962) and thus increase the potential for deadlock. Second, when multiple officials of
agents once removed are being selected at the same time or over a short period of time, different
parties may engage in logrolling to ensure that their favorites are selected, rather than bargain
over comeptent nonpartisan officials. Finally, in those cases in which the collective interests of
an overwhelming majority of legislators (e.g. in preserving access to patronage) are a prpoblem
more so than the interests of any one party, an extraodinary majority may make little functional
difference. The collective interests of legislators will mirror the interests of citizens only when
vertical accountability is well functioning. Simply requiring an extraordinary majority may
therefore be insufficient to guarantee independence from the legislative branch. If the legislature
itself lacks the incentive to oversee the executive, due to malfunctioning vertical accountability
during candidate selection or election, the bodies it appoints are unlikely to have much incentive
to engage in the task.
41
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
Separate survival is another feature that determines relative independence of non-elected
branches. There are a few instances in which survival may be determined by an ‘independent’
disciplinary body that has no ties to elected officials. Under these rules, non-elected branches
may be best able to maximize independence. In contrast, removal may also be the sole domain
of the president or a legislative chamber. Under these circumstances, agents once removed are
not likely to possess ambitions that countervail those of elected politicians. The most common
form of dismissal is one that involves congressional majorities in a process that is applicable to
all elected officials (impeachment and political or criminal trial). Although this makes
‘independent’ branches accountable to the legislature for misconduct, this relationship of
accountability is episodic. Under normal circumstances, members of the independent branch are
not subjected to daily scrutiny by elected officials.
Related to both questions of origin and survival is the issue of term lengths. Where agents
once removed have terms that begin and end with the elected officials who participate in their
appointment (and dismissal), they are least likely to exercise countervailing ambitions. On the
other hand, where terms are staggered, with appointed officials spending most of their term
overseeing officials who did not appoint them (life terms being the most extreme example),
effective exchange is most likely. If terms shorter than life are to be used, appointment at the
end of an elected body’s term should enhance oversight of the incoming officials.
Once in office, these agents once removed are usually guaranteed functional and
administrative autonomy. However, this can be seriously undercut if the agency has no control
over the drafting of its own budget. In most cases, control over this feature is handed over to the
respective agencies of control. Control over one’s own budget is a vitally important prerequisite
for autonomy, even if it must be submitted for approval to congress and the president. Without
budgetary authority, they are subject to the whims of elected politicians who can effectively
starve them of the resources necessary to perform overlapping functions (necessary for
horizontal exchange) or oversight. Excessive control over non-elected branches, by limiting the
separation of origin and survival and budgetary dependence, will ultimately reduce that branch’s
ability to control politicians or their excesses. When relative budgetary independence is
combined with institutional arrangements that give non-elected control agencies incentives and
capabilities to engage in horizontal exchange, then these agencies may be able to carry out their
goals -- promoting a more efficient and responsive government.
42
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
Thus, getting vertical accountability right must start with the candidate selection process and
the electoral system. If vertical accountability is not established for elected officials, there is
little prospect that those they participate in appointing will have the faculties necessary to engage
in effective horizontal exchange (or, in the case of no overlapping functions, oversight).
However, once elected officials are vertically accountable to the electorate, methods of
appointing, funding, and removing agents once removed become important for maintaining
vertical accountability. If these procedures do not provide for some separation of origin and
survival and countervailing ambitions, the mediating role played by elected officials in this
nested hierarchy will prevent “third” branches from enhancing accountability.
Relations Among Agents are a Function of Their Connections to the Principal
Agents cannot hold other agents accountable, only their principals can. Horizontal exchange
based on the policy preferences of the electorate, the ultimate principal in a democratic system,
will only occur where the vertical connections between the electorate and its multiple agents
encourage those elected officials to act upon countervailing ambitions. Presidential systems
provide for separate origin and survival and overlapping functions; candidate selection and
electoral processes (are supposed to) assure that incentives for countervailing ambitions over
programmatic policy outcomes lead to horizontal exchange among agents. Where horizontal
exchange over policy preferences is lacking it is because the vertical links between voters and
elected officials are malfunctioning.
The solution to an accountability deficit in Latin American is not the rapid proliferation of
agents once removed (“autonomous” agencies or fourth branches). Assuring that the vertical
links between elected officials, especially legislators, and voters encourage effective horizontal
exchange is a necessary first step. Once this is accomplished, the creation of new actors may not
be necessary, but, if it is, the prospects that they will fulfill the roles for which they are intended
increase dramatically when the legislators who participate in their appointment are vertically
accountable to citizen interests. In fact, creating additional branches without repairing the
vertical accountability of legislators will raise expectations that have little hope of being fulfilled.
Creating a new branch with much fanfare but then failing to endow it with the necessary faculties
to fulfill its role only heightens the public’s sense of disillusionment, and undermines the
43
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
integrity and legitimacy of the very democracy-strengthening project to which the authors of new
or reformed constitutions have committed so much effort.
44
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
Table 1: Constitutional Provisions for Horizontal Exchange in Latin America
(Supreme Courts)
Nominate
Confirm/
Appoint
Term ?
Accuse
Dismiss
Argentina
1860
Argentina
1994
President
Senate
lifetime
Senate
President
Senate- 2/3 vote
Bolivia
1967
Bolivia
1994
Brazil
Council of
Judicature
Council of
Judicature 1
President
Congress- 2/3
vote
Congress-2/3
vote
Senate
lifetime (5
for 75+ yr.
old)
10
Chamber of Deputies
(authorizes trial - 2/3 vote)
Chamber of Deputies
(authorizes trial - 2/3 vote)
Chile
Supreme
Court-slate of 3
Colombia
1886
Colombia
1991
Costa Rica
Dominican
Republic
Ecuador
1984
Ecuador
1998
El Salvador
Guatemala
Honduras
Mexico
Nicaragua
Panama
Paraguay
Peru 1979
Peru 1993
Uruguay
Venezuela
1961
Venezuela
1999
Chamber of Deputies
Senate (officials may also be tried
in criminal courts - depending on
the crime)
Senate
10
Chamber of Deputies
Senate
(not identified)
President
Lifetime,
after 2 yrs.
8
Respective tribunal dismisses
with 2/3 vote.
Attorney General
Supreme Court
Supreme Court
lifetime
Council of
Judicature 2
Congress
Supreme Court
8
8
National
Council of
Magistrates 3
Congress
Congress- 2/3
vote
National
Council of
Magistrates
Congress
Supreme Court
Supreme Court
Congress
Congress
No fixed
term
5
Postulation
committeeslate of 26 by
2/3 vote 4
Congress
President
President (w/
consultation
from civic
gps.)
President (with
VP &
ministers)
President
(Council of
Magistrates
submits list)
National
Council of
Magistrates 5
Congress
5
Congress
Senate- 2/3
Congress - 60%
vote
4
15
7
Congress
10 (ev. 2
yrs)
Senate
5
Chamber of Deputies
Senate - 2/3 vote
Congress
(no fixed
term)
Senate trial; National Judicature
may also dismiss members for
other disciplinary infractions.
National
Council of
Magistrates 6
Congress
National
Council of
Magistrates
Congress - 2/3
vote
Congress
lifetime
Chamber of Deputies may
accuse in event of criminal
activity; National Council of
Magistrates authorizes trial.
Congressional Permanent
Committee
10
Chamber of Deputies
Senate -2/3 vote
9 (ev. 3
yrs.)
12
Senate
Criminal trial
Congress
“Poder
Cuidadano” 7
Congress
President may request
disciplinary action from
Attorney General
Determined by law.
Chamber of Deputies
Senate (criminal charges tried in
Supreme Court)
Supreme Court - 2/3 vote
lifetime
Corte de Apelacion dismisses
members.
4
Congress
Congress _ vote
Congress; National Judicature
Anyone can accuse, Congress
authorizes trial
No specific dismissal
procedures indicated.
Passes to the respective court
chamber * for trial
Congress
Chamber of Deputies
Congress- 2/3 vote ( removes
immunity)
Supreme Court
Senate - 2/3 vote
Tried criminally
Supreme Court
Congress
Congress - 2/3 vote.
1 Elected by congress; 2 Elected by congress and judges from high ranking courts.; 3 Composed of the President, Public Prosecutor, President of Senate, a senate member, President of Chamber
of Deputies, one deputy, President of Supreme Court, and one Supreme Court justice.; 4 Selection body includes president (or vice president), president of senate, president of chamber, president
of Supreme Court, one Supreme Court justice.; 5 Composed of the Public Prosecutor, representatives from the Supreme Court, the national Federation of Colleges and Lawyers, one
representative from the Lima Law College, and two representatives from law colleges throughout the country. ; 6 Selection body includes officials from other branches (Supreme Court justices)
and members of civil society (lawyers, university deans); 7 Composed of the National Public Defender of Human Rights, Comptroller, Ministry of Public, and Public Prosecutor; *If grounds for
a trial are justified, the issue goes to the “Camara de Segunda Instancia” for trial. Resolutions made in the Camara de Segunda instancia go to the Supreme Court.
45
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
Table 2: Constitutional Provisions for Horizontal Exchange in Latin America
(Attorneys General or State legal counsel)
Nominate
Bolivia
1967
Bolivia
1994
Brazil
Colombia
1886
Colombia
1991
Congress
(President)
Confirm/
Elect
Congress2/3 vote
(President)
President
President- slate of
3
President, Sup.
Ct., Council of
state-slate of 3
President
Senate- 2/3
Chamber of
Deputies
Senate
Congress- slate of
3
President- slate of
3
El Salvador
Dominican
Republic
Ecuador
1984
Ecuador
1998
Accuse
Dismiss?
10
Chamber
Senate
Not
specified
2
4
Chamber of Deputies
Senate
President
Senate 2/3 vote
Determined by law
4
Determined by law.
Chamber of
Deputies by _ vote
Yes, impeachment.
Congress - _ vote
President
Not
specified
4
Congress
4
Congress _ vote;
Congress
Congress
3
Anyone can accuse,
Congress authorizes
trial
Guatemala
President
President
4
Honduras
Mexico
Congress
President
Conress
Senate
Panama
Paraguay
President
President
(Council of
Magistrates
submits list of
candidates)
President
Congress
Senate
4
Law
determines
term
10
President
determines
term
Congress; Laws
determine other
dismissal procedures.
Passes to the
respective court
chamber for trial
President removes for
“just cause”
Supreme Court trial
Senate, 2/3 to dismiss;
President may also
dismiss at will
Supreme Court trial
President
Peru 1993
National
Committee of
Attorney Generals
Uruguay
President
National
Committee
of Attorney
Generals
President
Venezuela
1961
Venezuela
1999
President
Senate
President
Congress
Peru 1979
President
Term?
Senate
Not
specified
3
Determined
by
Contentiou
s- Admin.
Tribunal
Not
specified
Not
specified
Congress
Chamber of
Deputies
(not identified)
President
Congressional
Permanent
Committee
Congress
Determined by
Contentious
Administrative
Tribunal
Determined by
Contentious
Administrative
Tribunal
Senate
Criminal trial
Supreme Court
determines merit
Congress
*If grounds for a trial are justified, the issue goes to the “Camara de Segunda Instancia” for trial. Resolutions made in the Camara de Segunda
instancia go to the Supreme Court.
46
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
Table 3: Constitutional Provisions for Horizontal Exchange in Latin America
(Prosecutor General or bodies that prosecute officials)
Appoint
Bolivia 1994
(President)
Confirm/
Elect
(President)
Colombia 1886
President
President
Length of
term?
Not
specified
4
Colombia 1991
President,
Supreme Court,
and Council of
State- slate of 3
President- slate
of 3
National Council
of Judicatureslate of 3 1
Congress
Senate
4
Congress
4
Congress
4
Congress by _ vote;
Congress; National
Judicature may also
dismiss members.
Congress
3
Anyone can accuse,
Congress authorizes trial
Passes to the respective
court chamber * for trial
Postulation
committee -slate
of 6 by 2/3 vote 2
Congress
President
4
Congress
5
Congress
Supreme Court trial
President
(Council of
magistrates
submits list)
National Council
of Magistrates 3
Senate
5
Chamber of Deputies
Senate -2/3 vote
National
Council of
Magistrates
Congress
3
Chamber of Deputies
may accuse in event of
criminal activity.
Senate
Senate
Supreme Court
determines merit
Congress
Ecuador 1984
Ecuador 1998
El Salvador
Guatemala
Honduras
(Director of
Administrative
Probity)
Paraguay
Peru 1979
Venezuela
1961
Venezuela
1999
President
Committee of
Postulation 4
Congress
Accuse
Dismiss?
Chamber of Deputies
Senate
Chamber of Deputies
Determined by law
Senate (criminal
charges tried in
Supreme Court)
Congress
President removes for
“just cause”
Not
specified
7
Criminal trial
1 Independent body, composition determined by law.; 2 Composed of representatives for the deans of universities throughout the country, deans
of law departments, deans of law/social science departments of each university in the country and an equivalent number of representatives from
the National Assembly of Lawyers and Notaries.; 3 Composed of member of legal professions and university deans.; 4Originates in the “Poder
Cuidadano” branch of government.; *If grounds for a trial are justified, the issue goes to the “Camara de Segunda Instancia” for trial. Resolutions
made in the Camara de Segunda instancia go to the Supreme Court.
47
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
Table 4: Constitutional Provisions for Horizontal Exchange
in Latin America (Defender of the People or Human Rights Ombudsman)
Nominate
Argentina
1994
Bolivia 1967
Congress
Bolivia 1994
Congress
Colombia
1991
Ecuador
1998
President- slate
of 3
Congress
(w/hearing
from human
rights
organizations) 1
Congress
El Salvador
Guatemala
Nicaragua
Paraguay
Congress
Committee of
congress 2
Congress
Peru 1993
Senate-slate of
3
Congress
Venezuela
1999
Committee of
Postulation 4
Confirm /
Elect
Congress2/3 vote
Congress2/3 vote
Congress2/3 vote
Chamber of
Deputies
Congress
Length
of term?
5
Accuse
5
Attorney General
requests trial
Attorney General
requests trial
5
Dismiss
Congress - 2/3 vote
4
Supreme Court
Supreme Court
Determined by law.
Congress by _ vote;
5
Congress; National
Judicature may also
dismiss members.
No specific dismissal
procedures indicated
Congress2/3 vote
Congress
3
Congress
Determined
by law
5 3
Congress- 2/3 vote
No specific dismissal
procedures indicated.
Tried criminally
Chamber of Deputies
Senate -2/3 vote
5
Congressional Permanent
Committee
Supreme Court
determines merit
Congress -2/3 vote
Chamber of
Deputies
Congress2/3 vote
Congress
5
7
Congress dismisses
1 Selection Process includes a hearing in which non-governmental actors may participate but do not vote.; 2 A nominating committee composed
of representatives from all represented parties presents 3 nominees. Congress makes a final selection.; 3 Concurrent with legislative term; 4
Originates in the “Poder Cuidadano” branch of government.
48
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
Table 5: Constitutional Provisions for Horizontal Exchange in Latin America
(Controller General and / or organs of fiscal control and oversight)
Argentina
1994
Bolivia 1966
Bolivia 1994
[Tribunal
Cuentas]
Brazil
Nominate
Confirm/ Elect
Length of
term?
Accuse
Dismissal
Opposition party
with most seats in
congress
Senate -slate of 3
President- slate of 3
(see nominate)
Not
specified
Not specified
Not specified.
President
Senate
10
4
Attorney General
Chamber of
Deputies
Supreme Court
Senate
1/3 chosen by
President; 2/3
chosen by
congress
President
Not
specified
Chile
President
Colombia
1886
Colombia
1991
Chamber of
Deputies
Constitutional
court, Sup. Ct, and
Council of State slate of 3
Congress
Chamber of
Deputies
Congress
Dominican
Republic
Ecuador 1984
President- slate of 3
Not
specified
4
Determined by law (criminal)
Chamber of
Deputies
Senate
Determined by law
4
Determined by law.
Chamber dismisses with 2/3 vote
Senate
8, 2 yrs.
after pres
term
4
President- slate of 3
Congress
4
Congress
Ecuador 1998
Congress- slate of 3
President
4
El Salvador
(Corte de
Cuentas)
Guatemala
Congress
Congress
3
Postulation
committee (2/3
vote) 1
Congress
Congress
Congress - 2/3
vote
4
Congress
Congress
Congress
Panama
President
(w/consultation of
civic groups)
Congress
5
Determined by
law
6
Congress
6
Paraguay
Senate- slate of 3
5
Peru 1979
President
Chamber of
Deputies - 2/3
vote
Senate
Peru 1993
Congress
Congress
7
Costa Rica
Honduras
Mexico
Nicaragua
Congress
Determined by law
Congress by _
vote;
Anyone can
accuse, Congress
authorizes trial
Congress; National
Passes to the respective court chamber
* for trial
Congress (mental incapacity, crime,
negligence)
Congress
Supreme Court trial
Chamber supervises performance. No
specific dismissal procedures.
Congress - 2/3
vote
Tried criminally
Supreme Court
Chamber of
Deputies
7
Senate -2/3 vote
Senate
Congressional
Permanent
Committee.;
Congress; National Council of
Magistrates also oversees/ ratifies
members every 7 years.
Congress - 2/3 vote
Uruguay
Congress
Congress -2/3
Not
(Tribunal de
vote
specified
Cuentas)
Venezuela
Congress
Congress
Not
No specific dismissal procedures
1961
specified
indicated.
Venezuela
Committee of
Congress
Not
Supreme Court
Congress
1999
Postulation 2
specified
determines merit
1 Composed of representatives of university deans of Accounting and Auditing departments throughout the country and an equal number of
representatives chosen by the National Assembly of Economists, Accountants, Auditors, and Business Administrators.; 2 Originates in the “Poder
Cuidadano” branch of government.; *If grounds for a trial are justified, the issue goes to the “Camara de Segunda Instancia” for trial. Resolutions
made in the Camara de Segunda instancia go to the Supreme Court.
49
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
Figure 1
Relationships of delegation and accountability:
Nested hierarchies in a parliamentary system.
BUREAUCRACY
Delegation via legislation and ministerial
order.
Accountability via built-in “police patrols,”
“fire alarms,” and threat of sanction.
CABINET
(Prime Minister and other ministers)
Delegation via partisan selection of cabinet.
Accountability via oversight in committees
or “question period” and no-confidence
votes.
PARLIAMENT
Delegation via electoral system with parties
as screening mechanism.
Accountability via parties, future elections,
and “fire-alarm” function of media
publicity and opposition criticism.
ELECTORATE
50
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
Arrows indicate the direction of a delegation relationship, running from principal to agent.
Accountability relationships run in the opposite direction, with agent accountable to principal.
Figure 2
Relationships of delegation and accountability
and horizontal exchange in a presidential system
BUREAUCRACY
Bureaucrats have two principals
(three if bicameral congress)
Horizontal exchange involves
transactions over legislation and
instructions for bureaucrats,
PRESIDENT
CONGRESS
and public interbranch disputes
provide “fire alarm” information
for voters’ use at election time.
Electorate has two agents (three
If bicameral congress).
ELECTORATE
51
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
Arrows indicate the direction of a delegation relationship, running from principal to agent.
Accountability relationships run in the opposite direction, with agent accountable to principal.
Double-headed arrows indicate horizontal exchange.
52
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
References
Archer, Ronald and Matthew Soberg Shugart. 1997. “The Unrealized Potential of Presidential Dominance
in Colombia.” In Shugart and Mainwaring, eds.
Barker, F., Boston, J., Levine, S., McLeay, E., and Roberts, S. 2000. “An Initial Assessment of the
Consequences of MMP in New Zealand.” In Shugart and Wattenberg, eds.
Buchanan, James M, and Gordon Tullock. 1962. The Calculus of Consent, Logical Foundations of
Constitutional Democracy. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.
Carey, John and Matthew S. Shugart. 1995. “Incentives to Cultivate a Personal Vote: A Rank Ordering of
Electoral Formulas” Electoral Studies 14, 4: 417-439.
Colombia. Ministry of the Interior. 2000. Exposición de Motivos de la Convocatoria al Referendo.
Santa Fé de Bogotá, April 5.
Conaghan, Catherine M.. 1995. “Politicians Against Parties: Discord and Disconnection in Ecuador’s
Party System” In Mainwaring and Scully, eds.
Cox, Gary W. 1987. The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in
Victorian England. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Crisp, Brian F. 2000. Democratic Institutional Design: The Powers and Incentives of Venezuelan
Politicians and Interest Groups. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Crisp, Brian F. and Rachel E. Ingall. 2000. “Determinants of Home Style: The Many Incentives for Going
Home in Colombia.” Unpublished manuscript.
Crisp, Brian F., Erika Moreno, and Matthew Soberg Shugart. 2000. “Bolivarian vs. Consensual Modes of
Constitutional Replacement in Latin America in the 1990s.” Paper presented at the 22nd International
Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Miami, March 16-18.
Cox, Gary. 1987. The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian
England. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cox, Gary and Matthew McCubbins. 1993. Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Epstein, Leon D. 1967. Political Parties in Western Democracies. New York: Praeger.
Grofman, Bernard N. 1987. “Will the New Real Institutionalism Please Stand Up and take a Bow?”
Unpublished.
Grofman, Bernard N. 1989. “The Federalist Papers and the New Institutionalism: An Overview.” In
The Federalist Papers and the New Institutionalism, ed. By Bernard Grofman and Donald Wittman.
New York: Agathon Press.
Haggard, Stephan, and Mathew D. McCubbins, eds. 2000. Structure and Policy in Presidential
Democracies. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Jacobson, Gary. 1990. The Electoral Origins of Divided Government: Competition in U.S. House
Elections, 1946-1988. Boulder: Westview Press.
Kada, Naoko. n.d. “The Politics of Impeachment.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of
California, San Diego.
53
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
Kenney, Charles. 2000. “Presidents, Parties, and Horizontal Accountability.” Prepared for delivery at the
2000 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Hyatt Regency, Miami, March 16–18,
2000.
Kiewet, D. Roderick and Mathew D. McCubbins. 1991. The Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties
and the Appropriations Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Klingemann, H., and Wessels, B. 2000. “The Political Consequences of Germany’s Mixed-Member
System: Personalization at the Grass Roots?” In Shugart and Wattenberg, eds.
Kulisheck, Michael and Brian F. Crisp. 2000. “The Legislative Consequences of MMP Electoral Rules in
Venezuela” In Matthew Soberg Shugart and Martin Wattenberg, eds. Mixed-Member Electoral
Systems: The Best of Both Worlds? Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press.
Lijphart, Arend. 1999. Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six
Countries. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Mainwaring, Scott, and Timothy Scully, eds. Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin
America. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mainwaring, Scott, and Matthew S. Shugart, eds. 1997. Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin
America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
March, James G., and Johan P. Olsen. 1984. “New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political
Life.” American Political Science Review 78: 734–49.
Mayhew, David. 1974. Congress: The Electoral Connection. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Moe, Terry and Caldwell. 1994. "The Institutional Foundations of Democratic Government: A
Comparison of Presidential and Parliamentary Systems," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical
Economics 150/1 (1994): 171-95.
Moe, Terry, 1984. “The New Economics of Organization” American Journal of Political Science. Vol.
28, 4: 739-777.
Moe, Terry. 1990. “Political Institutions: The Neglected Side of the Story.” Journal of Law, Economics,
and Organization, Special Issue.
McCubbins, Mathew, Roger G. Noll, and Barry R. Weingast. 1987. “Administrative Procedures as
Instruments of Political Control.” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organizations 3: 243–77.
McCubbins, Mathew, Roger G. Noll, and Barry R. Weingast. 1989. “Structure and Process, Politics and
Policy: Administrative Arrangements and the Political Control of Agencies.” Virginia Law Review
75: 431–82.
McCubbins, Mathew D., and Thomas Schwartz. 1984. “Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police
Patrols vs. Fire Alarms.” American Journal of Political Science 28: 165–79.
O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1994. “Delegative Democracy” Journal of Democracy. vol.5, 1: 55-70.
O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1999. “Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies.” In Andreas Schedler,
Larry Diamond, and Marc F. Plattner, eds. The Self Restraining State: Power and Accountability in
New Democracies. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Palmer, Matthew. 1995. “Toward an Economics of Comparative Political Organization: Examining
Ministerial Responsibility” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization. 11,1:164-188
54
Matthew S. Shugart, Erika Moreno, and Brian F. Crisp, “The Accountability Deficit in Latin America,” April 20, 2000 draft
Palmer, Matthew. 1995. “Toward an Economics of Comparative Political Organization: Examining
Ministerial Responsibility.” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization. 11, 1: 164-188.
Perez-Liñan, Anibal. 2000. “The Institutional Determinants of Impeachment.” Prepared for delivery at the
2000 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Hyatt Regency, Miami, March 16–18,
2000.
Ramseyer, J. Mark and Frances McCall Rosenbluth. 1993. Japan’s Political Marketplace. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press.
Scully, Timothy. 1995 “Reconstituting Party Politics in Chile.” In Mainwaring and Scully. eds.
Shepsle, Kenneth A. 1986. “Institutional Equilibrium and Equilibrium Institutions.” In Herbert F.
Weisberg, ed., Political Science: The Science of Politics. New York: Agathon Press.
Shugart, Matthew Soberg and John Carey. 1992. Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and
Electoral Dynamics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shugart, Matthew Soberg. 2000. “Extreme Electoral Systems and the Appeal of the Mixed-Member
Alternative” In Matthew Soberg Shugart and Martin Wattenberg, eds.
Shugart, Matthew Soberg, and Stephan Haggard. 2000. “Institutions and Public Policy in Presidential
Systems.” In Haggard and McCubbins, ed.
Shugart, Matthew Soberg and Martin Wattenberg, eds. 2000. Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: The Best
of Both Worlds? Oxford; Oxford University Press.
Steinmo and Thelen. 1992. “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics” In Sven Steinmo,
Kathleen Thelen and Frank Longstreth, eds., Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in
Comparative Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stone, Alec. 1992The Birth of Judicial Politics in France: The Constitutional Council in Comparative
Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.
Strøm, Kaare. 2000. “Accountability in Parliamentary Democracy.” Unpublished.
Taagepera, Rein and Matthew Soberg Shugart. 1989. Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of
Electoral Systems. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Tsebelis, George, and Jeannette Money. 1997. Bicameralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Valenzuela, Arturo. 1978. The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Weingast, Barry R. 1984. “The Congressional–Bureaucratic System: A Principal–Agent Perspective.”
Public Choice 44: 147–92.
Weingast, Barry R., and William Marshall. 1988. “The Industrial Organization of Congress.” Journal of
Political Economy 96: 132–63.
Weldon, Jeffrey. 1997. “Political Sources of Presidencialismo in Mexico.” In Shugart and Mainwaring,
eds.
55