Democratic Accountability and Policy Change: Economic Policy in Fujimori's Peru

Abstract

Ask a political theorist what distinguishes democracy from other systems of government and the answer is likely to include terms like and accountability. For Robert Dahl, continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens [is] a key characteristic of democracy. Citizens' ability to vote leaders out of office is the sharpest difference between dictatorship and democracy and enables the citizens to hold the policymakers accountable for their performance, according to G. Bingham Powell.2 For Philippe Schmitter and Terry Karl, modem political democracy is a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens.'3 Among the mechanisms thought to provide the means of democratic responsiveness and accountability, elections are critical. Politicians use campaigns to try to identify themselves with the policies preferred by a majority of voters.4 Once in office they anticipate the future retrospective judgment of voters at the next election by pursuing the policies they believe most will prefer.5 Under most circumstances these policies will be the same ones that elicited majority support in the previous election. Therefore, as a corollary of the hypothesis that repeated elections cause governments to be responsive to citizens' preferences, repeated elections cause consistency between campaign pronouncements and policy. The advanced industrial democracies offer evidence of mandate responsiveness, by which I mean consistency between campaign promises and government actions. Klingemann, Hofferbert, and Budge show that in ten OECD countries party manifestoes reveal parties' priorities and these priorities shape the policies of parties in office.6 In an analysis of reform governments in Britain, France, and the U.S., Keeler finds that they came to power announcing an intention to mount reform programs and with large electoral victories, mandates for reform, pursued them.7 Yet we know that sometimes party programs and campaign pronouncements are poor predictors of government behavior. Consider the electoral dynamics of economic reform in some new and some not-so-new democracies. In the context of