When Can Councils Hold Mayors Accountable? Evidence from Chile and Taiwan

• In Event: Power and Politics in Urban Space

Abstract

This paper analyzes horizontal accountability at the urban level—the oversight and sanctioning powers wielded by city councils over mayors—conceiving it as a critical determinant of the quality of democracy, particularly in young democracies with strong authoritarian legacies. Just as at the national level with legislatures and heads of government, institutional arrangements featuring an elected local council and a separately elected mayor presume that the former should oversee the executive and discipline its exercise of power. Yet in practice, councils and council members vary in their ability to call mayors to account. We explain the contingent circumstances that, when they align, provide for meaningful oversight, finding broad parallels in the factors promoting or impeding accountability between Taiwan and Chile. Within an urban politics literature that has concentrated heavily on North America and Europe, we provide a perspective from Third Wave democracies that emphasizes the uneven nature of accountability at the city level.

Usually studied at the national level, horizontal accountability is seen as necessary to prevent the arbitrary use of power, including corruption and misuse of resources, that characterizes illiberal and delegative democracies. Analyzing horizontal accountability at the local level is of particular importance in Latin America and East Asia, given the persistence of subnational undemocratic practices in these regions. Both Chile and Taiwan have extraordinarily “strong mayors,” whose powers within unitary systems trace back to recent regimes in which local executives acted as implementers of authoritarian rule. Democratization has brought decentralization and laws offering accountability mechanisms, such as comptrollers in Chile and interpellation and budget review in Taiwan, as well as more transparency. Mayors, however, have many tools at their disposal with which to co-opt or counter the very agents who are elected to oversee them.

Our core strategy for understanding why councilors sometimes exercise oversight and sometimes do not is to talk to councilors themselves. We aim to understand the political world within which they operate as well as their self-conceptions and motivations. The empirical heart of the paper thus draws on interviews the two authors separately conducted with city council members in Chile and Taiwan. Ordóñez interviewed 23 councilors in the municipalities around Santiago, and Read interviewed 32 councilors in cities around Taiwan, from Keelung to Tainan.

We find that accountability at the city level has distinctive qualities and preconditions, some of which are found in both Chile and Taiwan. Predictably, popular mayors and those who acquire personal control over municipal resources can dodge oversight, sometimes deterring councilors from checking or even questioning them. Yet council members with sources of power not linked to the mayor can stand up to their executives. The basis of this independence can take the form of clientelist ties between councilors and particular constituent communities and groups, or in media exposure that accrues to those who expose scandals or call out mis-steps. It is, curiously, mainly through unofficial channels as much or more than through formal mechanisms of accountability that mayors are called to account.

Authors

• Martin Ordonez, UC Santa Cruz

• Benjamin L. Read, University of California, Santa Cruz