Screening before Sanctioning
| Author | Francisco Herreros |
| Published date | 01 October 2006 |
| Date | 01 October 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885106067281 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Screening before Sanctioning
Elections and the Republican Tradition
Francisco Herreros
Unidad de Políticas Comparadas/CSIC, Madrid
abstract: In modern political science, repeated elections are considered as the
main mechanism of electoral accountability in democracies. More rarely, elections are
considered as ways to select ‘good types’ of politicians. In this article it is argued that
historical republican authors interpreted elections in this last sense. They viewed
elections as a means to select what they often called the ‘natural aristocracy’, virtuous
political leaders who would pursue the common good. This argument is presented in
three steps. First, it is claimed that republican authors did not consider
retrospective accountability as one of the goals of electoral processes. Second, I
present some evidence concerning the distinction in republican authors between two
types of politicians, ‘good’ and ‘bad’. And, finally, I present some republican
arguments about how elections could serve as a device for selecting the ‘good’
politicians.
key words: accountability, agency problems, elections, electoral rules, natural aristocracy,
republican tradition
1. Introduction
In democratic theory, elections have traditionally been considered as a mecha-
nism of accountability, a sanctioning device to induce politicians to do what voters
want.1This view of elections as instruments of accountability faces some impor-
tant problems. Perhaps the most cited in the literature is the asymmetry in
information between voters and politicians. It is a well-proven fact in political sci-
ence that most voters do not pay much attention to politics.2Given that voters do
not have enough information about the government’s performance, they cannot
make a retrospective evaluation of that performance at the end of the term and,
therefore, the government lacks the adequate incentive to act in the interest of the
voters.
An alternative to considering elections as instruments of accountability is to
consider them as a mechanism to select ‘good types’, that is, politicians who will
pursue the interests of their constituents. This conceptualization of elections as a
415
article
Contact address: Francisco Herreros, Unidad de Políticas Comparadas/CSIC, Alfonso
XII 18 5º, Madrid 28014, Spain.
Email: herreros@ceacs.march.es
EJPT
European Journal
of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 5(4)415–435
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885106067281]
selection process has been advanced by Fearon.3In this article, I will argue that
republican authors portrayed elections precisely in this way, as a mechanism for
the selection of good types, whom they usually called the ‘natural aristocracy’.
This view of representation was a combination of screening devices in order to
identify virtuous politicians who will pursue the common good of the republic,
and sanctioning devices to maintain the politician virtuous while in office. But
they did not consider, except in rare occasions, elections as mechanisms of retro-
spective accountability of the politicians’ performance.
The article is structured as follows. In section two, I will present the two
models of elections: as mechanisms of accountability and as mechanisms to select
good types. In section three, I will argue that republican authors did not consider
elections as mechanisms of accountability. In sections four and five, I will present
the argument that republicans considered elections as a way to select good types
of politicians.
2. The Limits of Electoral Accountability
The relation between representatives and constituents can be pictured using an
agency model. In this, the citizens are the principal and the representatives are
their agents. As in all agency models, there are information asymmetries between
principal and agent. Specifically, the agent has private information about the level
of effort he has invested in the implementation of the policies, or about the fore-
seeable consequences of different courses of policies, or both. The principal wants
to make his agent accountable for his behavior and, according to most political
scientists, the main mechanism of accountability is repeated elections. In elec-
tions, the principal makes a retrospective evaluation of his agent’s behavior. If
elections are repeated and politicians have an interest in remaining in power, they
will fulfill the voters’ interests.4The problem with this mechanism of account-
ability is that the threat of an unfavorable evaluation is an adequate incentive for
the contract between agent and principal only if the principal has enough infor-
mation about the behavior of his agent and it is mostly assumed that voters do not
have enough information about the policy process.5 Among other things, it has
been claimed that citizens do not have a consistent understanding of ideological
abstractions,6that they are incapable of recognizing the names of their elected
representatives,7or even that they are incapable of organizing political beliefs
within a coherent framework.8Although there are probably huge differences
between the levels of political information of different groups of individuals, it is
consistently demonstrated that only a small minority of the public pays attention
to politics and is reasonably well informed about politicians and political issues.9
In fact, it is often assumed that this lack of information is, to a great extent,
rational: the investment in gathering and processing political information is
costly and the payoffs of this investment are uncertain (given the low probability
that the formation of well-founded political opinions by the citizen will have
European Journal of Political Theory 5(4)
416
To continue reading
Request your trial