Political accountability of members of Congress must be more than just holding elections. We have elections now without real political accountability.

Cultural definitions of Political Accountability

From Wikipedia a few years ago:

Political accountability is the accountability of the government, civil servants and politicians to the public…

It goes on to say:

Generally, however, voters do not have any direct way of holding elected representatives to account during the term for which they have been elected.

Now, in May 2022 it says:

Political accountability is when a politician makes choices on behalf of the people and the people have the ability to reward or sanction the politician … Accountability occurs when citizens only vote to re-elect representatives who act in their interests, and if representatives then select policies that will help them be re-elected. Governments are ‘accountable’ if voters can discern whether governments are acting in their interest … so that those incumbents who act in the best interest of the citizens win reelection and those who do not lose them.”

So we have to know what our representatives are doing and we must be able to elect new ones if they’re not serving us.

The World Bank has a paper on it:

accountability involves two distinct stages: answerability and enforcement. Answerability refers to the obligation of … public officials to provide information about their decisions and actions and to justify them to the public…

Enforcement suggests that the public … can sanction the offending party or remedy the contravening behavior.

In the US, the enforcement part currently can only happen in elections- we can only sanction officials by not reelecting them. And this is almost impossible because of the cost of effective campaigns, the 2-party system, and the huge incumbent advantage.

The answerability part is almost completely missing. Once in a while, such as during a scandal, the press tries to force answerability. And nowadays we can find out information about some of our representative’s actions through websites, such as GovTrack.us and OpenCongress.org. But these do not get our officials to answer us. For instance, we rarely hear a thorough justification on how a particular vote on a bill was actually in our best interest. Rarely do we even hear know what the majority of voters preferred.

The American Institute in Taiwan sums up how we normally hold political accountability:

The primary political accountability mechanism is free and fair elections.

As above, because of our 2-party duopoly, high cost of campaigns, and the incumbent advantage, plus gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement, we rarely have free and fair elections.

Being answerable, frequently

But this is far different than the accountability that ordinary Americans have in their jobs, where you’re accountable to your manager daily, weekly or monthly. You’re answerable for anything your manager wants to know, frequently.

Real political accountability

In the accountability of your job, your manager has her own ideas about what you should be doing. She gives you instructions, or at least directions, guidance. And she has expectations, her own ideas about what you can accomplish. Guidance from and expectations of voters are missing in the accountability of Congress and the president.

Real accountability is when

• the manager guides the worker and has expectations
• the worker answers the manager’s questions regularly
• the manager judges the worker
• the manager is able to fire the worker

To make real political accountability, we’d also need ways that all constituents could communicate with each other to effectively manage together. We’d need to share guidance, expectations, and evaluations.

What if we expanded our notion of political accountability to include all this, with us, the people, being the manager? What if we could have this kind of accountability with Congress?

Try sleeping on this. We’ll go over it again in the next post.