Responsiveness

Meaning

The political meaning of responsiveness is rather faithful to all the foregoing meanings. Responsiveness in political science is closely related to concepts such as “representation,” “accountability,” “delegation,” and “representative government.” Many scholars consider the stable responsiveness of a government to the preferences of its citizens to be a fundamental feature of a representative democracy.

Before disentangling the concept of responsiveness, let us concentrate on the other aforementioned notions and phenomena. Accountability—reads one of the political science dictionaries—has two major meanings, which partly overlap. First, the more common and standard one is that those who hold power are, in a broad sense, stewards and must be able to manifest the fact that they exercise power and fulfill their duties properly. (It is precisely the issue of fulfilling their duties that is at the crux of the concept of responsiveness.) Second, accountability refers to arrangements that secure conformity between the values of a delegating body and the person to whom the powers and responsibilities are delegated. In contemporary democracies, governments are accountable to the people through the process of election. This means that political [Page 2302]accountability confines the use of power and, if need be, sanctions its abuse. Institutionalizing accountability means de facto binding the use of political power to specific, clearly defined, and publicly accepted standards.

The hidden dimension of these relationships pertains to the phenomenon (and concept) of delegation. Governing and political decision making in large entities, such as contemporary democratic states, entails the delegation of authority. The right to make decisions is designated—in agency relationships—to an agent by a principal. However, this task is conditional; it continues only if the principal is satisfied with the deeds of the agent and the former is satisfied when the agent performs in accordance with the principal's wishes and interests. It may be withdrawn, however, if the principal's evaluation is poor. This very conditionality, coupled with the possibility of withdrawal, is the essence of accountability mechanisms. This threat of withdrawal need not materialize; as a confidence procedure, accountability works even when the principal is not trying to replace the agent with an alternative. Yet she or he has the potential and means to do so. Consequently, “governments are accountable”—as the classic volume on the topic puts it—“if voters can discern whether governments are acting in their interests and sanction them appropriately, so that incumbents who act in the best interests of citizens win reelection and those who do not lose them” (Adam Przeworski, Susan C. Stokes, & Bernard Manin, 1999, p. 40). The single macromechanism behind this, approximating the phenomenon of responsiveness, is the one that forces the incumbents to choose policies that enhance their chances of reelection. In the same volume, one finds yet another proposal of a linkage between accountability and responsiveness: “Accountability is … a property of institutional structures, whereas responsiveness is a consequence of interaction within such structures. … Responsiveness is a measure of how much accountability an institutional infrastructure permits” (Przeworski et al., 1999, p. 131).

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