Accountability, Electoral

Accountability during the Electoral Campaign

Electoral accountability begins when a relationship is established between the voters and their potential representatives, candidates, and parties. During the electoral campaign, the candidates and the parties have an interest in getting to know what the voters need and want, which preferences and values they have, and which ideals they would promote. In this phase, accountability manifests itself as the most conscious effort by candidates and parties to learn, that is, to take into account what the voters communicate to them. Obviously, there are two limits to this process. First, the voters may not have a very precise idea about their preferences and interests and may not know exactly how to communicate them to the candidates and the parties. Second, the candidates and the parties may discount the preferences and the values of some or several groups of voters or may be unable to introduce them into their predisposed programmatic package and, to a much lesser extent, to their ideological views. On the whole, however, an effort will certainly be made by them to take into account what they have heard and have come to know.

Usually, a difference is drawn between a proportional electoral system used in relatively large constituencies with no possibility of casting a preference vote and plurality-majority electoral systems applied in single-member constituencies. Understandably, in the first case, much or most of the electoral accountability depends on the ability and the willingness of the political parties to take into account what they have heard during the electoral campaign, and much of the electoral accountability will then be projected to the national level. When plurality-majority systems operate in single-member constituencies, individual candidates are the protagonists of electoral accountability (Bruce Cain, John Ferejohn, & Morris Fiorina, 1987). It is up to them to interact with the voters, to learn as well as to explain, to take into account what they have been communicated by the voters, and also to carry that knowledge into the representative assembly. The candidates' ability to learn about the preferences of the voters and to shape them may make a difference in the outcome of the electoral processes and, possibly, in the type of politics and policies proposed and later implemented by their party or governmental coalition.

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