4 - Theorising Accountability as Accessibility

Summary

The previous chapter demonstrated how politicians and voters in southwest Nigeria value accessibility as a form of accountability: in order to be accountable, leaders should maintain spaces for direct face-to-face communication with their constituents. This chapter builds on further empirical examples to give a theoretical account of accountability as accessibility and argues that it helps reveal the ontological limits of dominant scholarly approaches to accountability, namely, principal–agent models. It starts by asking what makes communication an intrinsically valuable part of accountability. Theories stressing the power of communication in the public sphere to confer recognition and dignity on citizens are considered and found to capture part of the lived experience of accessibility. However, they neglect the way accessibility draws on social sanctions to constrain rulers in the context of unequal power relations. A review of the historical roots of the principal–agent models in liberal theory explains why dominant theories struggle to accommodate the sanctioning power of communication. More generally, the assumed desirability of an anonymous and impersonal modern state leads to a neglect of the more socially embedded aspects of governance. In contrast, Yoruba political vocabulary fluently expresses the political importance of social sanction via the concept of olá (social honour).