Peter P. Houtzager

Widgets or Watchdogs

Abstract Strengthening ‘social accountability’ is emerging as a key strategy for improving public services and attaining the Millennium Development Goals. Yet current conceptualizations of social accountability have tended to focus on it as ‘mechanisms’ or ‘widgets’, a view which tends to depoliticize the very processes through which poor people make claims. We propose an alternative conceptualization which focuses on disaggregating social accountability actions, and viewing them as part of a long-term ongoing political engagement of social actors with the state. Such a conceptualization can advance understandings of when the poor engage in social accountability and the impact it might have.

Collective action and political authority : Rural workers, church, and state in Brazil

This article explores how new political actors form and reproduce themselves within societies’ most vulnerable sectors, those marginalized from the state’s authoritative decision-making centers. It explores this question in national settings that characterize much of the contemporary world ^ that is, settings marked by high levels of political con£ict over basic parameters of the political system and hence by signi¢cant institutional change. Dominant theories of collective action, such as those rooted in rational choice, political process, and ‘‘new social movements’’ literatures, are based on the experience of relatively stable Western democracies. 1 This article suggests that such theories may not travel well to regions where key background conditions, such as the stability of institutional arrangements that link state and society, do not hold. It develops an approach to collective action that theorizes the impact of high levels of con£ict over national patterns of political authority ^ that is, over the boundaries and nature of the state and national political regime ^ on the formation and reproduction of new political actors.This‘‘authority-centered’’approach understands the interaction between political elites and politically marginalized groups to be central to actor formation. It suggests that this interaction is shaped by historically contingent con¢gurations of three sets of factors: (a) the level of intra-elite con£ict over the pattern of political authority, (b) the relative strength of a group’s social base, and (c) the nature of the structural and political linkages that bind state and society. The analytic value of this approach is nicely illustrated by the formation and reproduction of the Rural Workers’ Union Movement (Movimento Sindical dos Trabalhadores Rurais), the principal political representative of peasants, small farmers, and rural wage laborers in Brazil, during the 1964^1989 period.The rural workers’ movement claimed to

Social movements amidst democratic transitions: Lessons from the Brazilian countryside

Democratic transitions represent unique opportunities in which movements of the poor can coalesce, place their demands on the national agenda, and institutionalise their access to authoritative decision‐making centres. The opportunities and constraints movements of the poor face during transitions, however, remain little understood and under‐theorised. This study develops an analytic approach that links national‐level democratisation processes to the local‐level movement dynamics that make collective action possible, particularly the creation and reproduction of collective identities and organisational structures. The approach theorises how changing elite alliance patterns during transition cycles, and redefinition of institutional linkages that bind state and society, shape the opportunities and constraints movements face at successive stages of democratic transitions. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by examining the new unionism in rural Brazil, in that countrys democratic transition during the 1980s.

The Paradox of Civil Society Representation: Constructing New Forms of Democratic Legitimacy in Brazil

Democratic reforms that strengthen direct citizen participation have been advanced and defended on the terms that they increase the responsiveness and legitimacy of state action. Civil society organisations have in this context become significant de facto, and in many cases de jure, political representatives of the publics on whose behalf they work. Advocacy is an old practice among civil society organisations. What we are seeing today is something new: an increasing importance of these actors as representatives in policy processes that are recognised and on occasion legally authorised by public authorities and/or promoted by bi- and multilateral international agencies. The result is a paradox of civil society representation: distrust and declining legitimacy of the elected representative institutions and the state’s techno-scientific administration have led to democratic reforms in which novel forms of civil-society-driven political representation have emerged that, in general, have weaker claims to democratic legitimacy than elected representative institutions themselves. Unlike political parties and trade unions, most civil organisations lack any clear standard or obligatory mechanisms by which their publics can authorise representation or ensure actors’ accountability and responsiveness.1