Democratic Accountability, Political Order, and Change: Exploring Accountability Processes in an Era of European Transformation

Accountability regimes are crucial for the legitimacy of political systems and this volume examines democratic accountability regimes as a mechanism by which citizens are supposed to control their elected representatives, non-elected officials, and other power-holders. The author argues that the recent upsurge in accountability-demands in representative democracies are driven by a loss of citizens’ confidence in institutions and leaders and a struggle over the terms of political order and peaceful co-existence, and that making sense of accountability processes requires a re-examination and reassessment of the possibilities and limitations of the key assumptions of mainstream principal-agent approaches. The volume focuses on the interrelations between democratic accountability, political order, and orderly change - how democratic accountability processes are affected by and affect political association and the social basis of political order, political organization, and the institutional basis of order, and political agency and the behavioural basis of order.