Prosecuting Pluralism: Local Accountability and Political Outsiders in Colombia

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

Abstract

Since the 1990s, many Latin American states have adopted horizontal accountability institutions (AIs) like audit bodies and comptroller generals to monitor officeholders and sanction malfeasance. A growing body of literature identifies a positive relationship between programmatic electoral competition and the neutral investigation and prosecution of wrongdoing. However, AIs have produced a mixed record in promoting democratic accountability. This is due in part to their vulnerability to manipulation by political elites. This paper builds a new theory that takes into account an intervening factor in the relationship between AIs and democratic accountability: conflicts of interest in appointment procedures to local AIs. Using evidence from Colombia, where subnational politics is slowly transitioning from hegemonic control by local elites to more inclusive programmatic competition, we argue that when the process of staffing local AIs is controlled by incumbent elites, programmatic competition increases incentives for AIs to launch partisan investigations against political outsiders who win local office. We then conceptualize three mechanisms by which partisan investigations debilitate these outsiders: 1) policy paralysis, 2) extra-electoral removal of officeholders, and 3) long-term reputational damage. We suggest that rather than mutually reinforcing one another, gains in vertical accountability may trigger decreases in horizontal accountability and vice versa.

Authors

• Will Garrett Freeman, Princeton University

• Juan Diego Prieto Sanabria, Carleton College