Promoting Political Accountability through Interactive Political Leadership

Abstract

Abstract The age of governance challenges traditional understandings and methods for holding political decision-makers to account. A hitherto-hegemonic party government approach to political accountability is losing ground to new theoretical perceptions of political accountability, and forty years of government reforms have brought with them a variety of new methods for holding public authorities to account. What unites these theoretical and empirical developments is a redefinition of what political accountability means and how it is to be obtained in a multi-actor governance context where not only governments but also a wide variety of political and social actors play an active and influential role in the policy-making process. Chapter 5 proposes a concept of political learning accountability, and argues that interactive political leadership offers itself as a suitable strategy for promoting the throughput legitimacy of representative democracy by involving citizens and stakeholders in concrete policy-making.