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SUMMARY:What Nigeria can teach us about good governance: how ethnography c
 an be used for political theory - Portia Roelofs\, University of Oxford 
DTSTART:20200302T170000Z
DTEND:20200302T183000Z
UID:TALK138448@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Victoria Jones
DESCRIPTION:Political accountability is typically modelled as the ability 
 of a principal (voters) to sanction or reward agents (politicians) who act
  on their behalf (Besley 2006\, Wantchekon 2017). Whilst this offers a pow
 erful model to explain certain aspects of political behaviour\, case studi
 es from south-west Nigeria suggest that it does not exhaust the ways that 
 voters and politicians actually think about accountability. Rather\, in li
 ne with work from Ghana (Paller 2017) and the UK (Coleman 2005)\, accounta
 bility demands that leaders make themselves ‘accessible’ to their cons
 tituents\, maintaining spaces for direct\, often face-to-face\, communicat
 ion. These empirical insights have normative theoretical implications: the
 y bring us back to intuitive notions of accountability as requiring an aud
 ience (Busuioc & Lodge 2016) (and conversely that evading one’s constitu
 ents – that is being ‘inaccessible’ – is a failure of the duty to 
 be accountable). This idea of accountability as incorporating normative sa
 nction\, relying as it does on relational capacities\, is difficult to acc
 ommodate within principal-agent models which instead focus on material int
 erests and the ultimate sanction of losing office. The disconnect can be t
 raced to the way that the principal-agent model of accountability’s root
 s in liberal theory\, where a long-standing urge to de-personalise power h
 as led to theorists to rely exclusively on institutional constraints (Dunn
  1990). As liberal political theory developed in the West it reacted again
 st ‘interested’ and patrimonial relations\, instead seeking to build p
 olitical systems which had no need for trust (Warren 1990). Such an urge c
 an be seen in the ease with which liberal theory has adopted economistic m
 odels of human behaviour\, with both principals and agents modelled as sim
 ply interest-bearing rational actors. I argue that whilst this may be appr
 opriate for the more systemic and ‘faceless’ (Giddens 1990) aspects of
  modern governance\, it has less traction when it comes to democratic poli
 tics where power really does reside in the fallible individuals who occupy
  public office. Thus the demand that leaders be accessible opens up wider 
 questions of political theory regarding the links between the political an
 d the social (Ekeh 1976).
LOCATION:Seminar Room S1 Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambridge
  CB3 9DT
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