Horizontal accountability in new democracies

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 9, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 125-126

  O'Donnell, Guillermo ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 22044432610     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.1998.0051     Document Type: Article

References (6)

1. See esp. Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 221.
2. The attributes that Dahl lists are: 1) elected officials; 2) free and fair elections; 3) inclusive suffrage; 4) the right to run for office; 5) freedom of expression; 6) alternative information; and 7) associational autonomy. In my essay "Illusions About Consolidation," Journal of Democracy 1 (April 1996): 35-36, following several authors cited there, I proposed adding: 8) elected officials - and some appointed ones, such as high-court judges - who cannot be arbitrarily terminated before the end of their constitutionally mandated terms; 9) the freedom of elected officials from severe constraints, vetoes, or exclusions imposed by nonelected actors, especially the armed forces; and 10) an uncontested territory that clearly defines the voting population.
3. I believe that this ambiguity is an important reason for liberalism's primarily defensive character - which endures despite recent efforts to cast it in a more positive, close to republican, light. See, for example, Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
4. hasten to add that this does not preclude that some of the "negative liberties" and constitutional constraints typical of liberalism can have empowering consequences for their individual or institutional carriers, as argued especially by Stephen Holmes in "Precommitment and the Paradox of Democracy," in Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad, eds., Constitutionalism and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 195-240;
5. and Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
6. See, for example, Vincent E. Palermo and Marcos Novaro, Política y poder en el gobierno de Menem (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1996).