Accountability and Responsiveness at the Municipal Level by Sandra Breux

Author:Sandra Breux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP

6

Accountability and Local Politics: Contextual Barriers and Cognitive Variety

Anne Mévellec

INTRODUCTION

Some of the questions explored in this book address accountability for decisions, asking “Who decides?” and “Who does what?” The book also examines the accountability of elected officials by asking “To whom are they accountable?” and “What are they accountable for?” These are important issues in the municipal context because they challenge certain preconceived notions. One such notion is the idea that the municipal level, compared to other levels of government, is closest to citizens and that, consequently, local elected officials are under more scrutiny from citizens. However, certain contextual elements invalidate this presupposition. For instance, as discussed in other chapters of this book, municipal electoral participation is relatively weak in Quebec (as well as in other Canadian provinces), with an average voter turnout of nearly 45 per cent (Champagne and Patry 2004; Sancton and Young 2009). Nevertheless, this situation has improved since 2013, when, for the first time, fewer than half of the mayors were elected by acclamation. These figures highlight how the direct relationship between elected officials and the electors affects only a small number of electors. In his definition of the municipality, Vandelli emphasizes that for the average citizen this frontline public institution is “the point of reference for all their problems, needs, expectations and drama. Independent of all the legal jurisdictions attributed to it, a municipality is where individuals address all their social requests and protestations” (2000, 7). The proximity of municipal government prevents neither a lack of interest on the part of citizens nor confusion among the electorate regarding its jurisdiction. In that context, the questions of accountability are of resounding importance.

In this chapter, I propose to address accountability using the municipal political system itself from the dual point of view of the ordinary citizen and the elected official. I will apply Mansbridge’s (2009) conception of a sanctions model on the one hand and a selection model on the other. Both models use the principal–agent perspectives as represented by the elector and elected official. The sanctions model presupposes that the interests of these two parties are divergent and that therefore the monitoring and sanctioning of the behaviour of agents is done by way of an election. In other words, electors evaluate outgoing elected officials in terms of their delivery of public policy and consequently vote to reward or punish them for their performance (Pitkin 1967). The selection model, on the other hand, presumes that the principal and the agent share a certain number of similar objectives. As a result, the struggle for power in this model is determined beforehand, at the moment elected officials are chosen by the electors. The community of interests also allows for a form of accountability that is essentially narrative and that cannot prevent the mechanism of sanctions. Mansbridge also insists that the two models are not mutually exclusive and that the moment of the election is the instrument of both selection and sanction.

Building on this discussion, I then adopt the relevance

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