Restraining Mayors: Local Councils as Agents of Horizontal Accountability

• In Event: The Contradictory Potential of Accountability Institutions in Latin America

Abstract

Local councils in Latin America often fail to hold mayors accountable, even where they are required and empowered to do so. These failures are especially significant since decentralization has given higher power to these mayors. This paper aims to improve our understanding of subnational horizontal accountability by analyzing the influence of systems of local relationships on local councils’ disposition for horizontal accountability. Five municipalities in Santiago de Chile with diverse socioeconomic and political features are compared using original qualitative data.

The results challenge explanations of accountability based on administrative capacity, socioeconomic characteristics, and partisan alignments. They show, instead, that the configuration of local systems of relationships—comprising councils; mayors and their bureaucracies; and constituencies—have significant effects over a critical factor: councils’ autonomy from the mayor. The analysis shows that when council members are unable to obtain sufficient constituent support, mayors can use their resources and influence to affect council members’ electoral chances and, thus, dissuade them from holding mayors accountable. Constituencies, therefore, also play a significant role in local horizontal accountability by giving council members a chance to be autonomous from their mayors. This autonomy, however, disappears if council members rely on local executives’ aid to obtain constituents’ support.

Author

• Martin Ordonez, UC Santa Cruz