Accountable democracy: Citizens' impact on public decision making in postdictatorship chile

Using a Santiago, Chile, health group as an ethnographic case study, I propose ‘‘accountable democracy’’ as an alternative normative project to the theory of deliberative democracy outlined by Habermas in Between Facts and Norms. Accountable democracy has at its center the impact of public-sphere opinion formation on decision making by officials in elected governments. [accountability, Chile, democracy, Habermas, Latin America, normative theory, social movements] I n his introduction to Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas McCarthy asks ‘‘is democracy possible?’’ (1989:xii). By this he means, ‘‘Can the public sphere be effectively reconstituted under radically different socioeconomic, political, and cultural conditions?’’ For Habermas (1989), the public sphere is an arena for rational argument leading to consensus; historically the bourgeois public sphere had the capacity to transform the state and its modes of rule. McCarthy’s statement makes it clear that the concept of ‘‘public sphere’’ has been taken as a model for democratic (inter)action. In Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1996a), Habermas develops that idea further by explicitly making deliberation a centerpiece of his normative vision of democracy (see also Habermas 1996b). In this later work, however, the mechanism for the impact of public opinion on governmental decision making is left unclear. In this article, I critically examine Habermas’s normative framework connecting democracy to the practice of deliberation. I suggest that the question of publics’ impact on governmental decision making should not remain peripheral or ambiguous but, rather, should be placed at the center of normative democratic theory. My point is not to discredit deliberation but, instead, to identify it as a necessary but insufficient condition for democracy, which must also entail the impact of public opinion on public policy and law. Presenting an analysis growing out of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Santiago, Chile, in the early 1990s, I propose redirecting normative democratic theory toward notions of accountability, as expressed by the term accountable democracy. For me, this term has two interconnected meanings. First, in an accountable democracy the link between opinion formation in the public sphere and decision making in the elected government is sufficiently direct for policy makers to enact into law and put into practice expressed desires of citizens. In this sense, policy makers are accountable to the people. A second meaning grows directly out of statements and written materials I gathered during field research in JULIA PALEY University of Michigan Accountable democracy: Citizens’ impact on public decision making in postdictatorship Chile American Ethnologist, Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 497 – 513, ISSN 0094-0496, electronic ISSN 1548-1425. A 2004 by the Regents of the University of California (or the society name). All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/ journals/rights.htm. Chile: the notion that in an accountable democracy citizens’ ideas are ‘‘taken into account’’ by lawmakers engaged in policy formation. In both of these senses, the standard for democracy is citizens’ impact on policy and law. My rethinking of the deliberative democracy literature developed through reflection on ‘‘actually existing’’ democratic practices. In postdictatorship Chile, the attempt to generate consensus through conversation—which, in the form of rational discussion, Habermas elevates to a communicative and democratic ideal—was, in practice, used to forestall, rather than facilitate, the impact of public opinion on decision making. In fact, Chilean political elites used a Habermasian language of consensus and debate to exclude nonelite Chileans from influencing public policy. Here the adoption of a discourse-centered operative framework was a mechanism for disarticulating organized groups and diffusing their demands. Citizens and community organizations were thereby faced with the strategic question of how to achieve their goals when the practices of discussion and debate and a language of consensus were used to deter them; they faced the challenge, that is, of determining what sorts of actions to take when the limits of discussion’s effectiveness had been reached. Moreover, foreclosing the Chilean public’s impact on governmental decision making was, in part, actively achieved through the practices and discourses of democracy. In the postdictatorship period, Chilean politicians used public opinion polls as legitimating mechanisms to demonstrate that citizens’ desires had been communicated to public officials who had then put them into effect, even—or especially—when the officials, in fact, had not done so (Paley 2001a). And, as described later in this article, when a health group requested resources to prevent the spread of meningitis, citizens were asked to refrain from pressuring the state to fulfill their demands, in order to preserve democracy. In these two ways, the tools and concepts of contemporary democracy were used to block, rather than enact, public opinion’s influence on governmental decision making. Because of these fissures or lapses in the practice of democracy, I suggest that what is needed is a normative theory with a strategic orientation: one that can move beyond impasses in contemporary democratic practices—including those that use Habermas’s own vocabulary of deliberation, consensus, and debate to limit citizens’ impact on public policy. Implementing this project depends not on following a procedure but, rather, on the contingent, contextualized decisions organized groups generate in the process of analyzing, responding to, and reshaping the political conditions in which they are situated. Because social movements and community organizations articulate normative visions in the process of taking practical action, they are a source not only of empirical evidence but of normative theory, as well. The health group Llareta, described in this article, actively engaged in a process of deliberation, not unlike Habermas’s vision of a public sphere. Yet the health promoters’ deliberation served not as an end in and of itself but, instead, as a process for conducting political analysis, reflecting on experience, and developing strategic action. Their goal was to generate possibilities for transforming relations of power and impacting public decisions that affected their lives. They associated having an impact on those decisions with ‘‘true’’ democracy. In that sense, their activity and vision serve as pointers for articulating an alternative normative account.