Abstract
This paper defends a new and aggressive version of model of accountability. It argues that officials and representatives in a democracy have an obligation to make available to citizens full information about what they have been doing. It is not permissible for them to sit back and see if citizens can find out for themselves what they have been doing, any more than such a posture would be admissible in a commercial agent such as a realtor or an accountant. The paper also does several other things: (1) it develops a contrast between agent-accountability and forensic-accountability; (2) it distinguishes between political uses of agency and political uses of trust in political theory; (3) it develops a layered account of principals in democratic relation of agent-accountability, rejecting reidentification of the people; (4) it develops an account of relation between accountability and elections, emphasizing that elections play an important role in fair settlement among principals as to how they should deal with their agents; (5) it shows that Burkeian representation is not incompatible with agent-accountability; and (6) it uses notion of agent-accountability to illuminate distinction between non-democratic and democratic republics.
Published Version
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