Pratap Bhanu Mehta's theory of Accountability.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta gave a paper at Arusha, Tanzania, some dozen or so years ago. It is worth glancing at to gain a notion of how full of shit his brain is and, by extension, why his very expensive education was so utterly worthless.

Accountability, Legitimacy and Democracy: A Theoretical Point The notion of accountability is admittedly very complex. At a very prosaic level accountability is often defined as the ability of one actor to demand an explanation of another actor for its actions and reward or punish the actor on the basis of its performance or its explanation (Rubin, 2005; Shepsle, 2000).

One can demand an explanation from anyone or anything- including the neighbor's cat. One's ability to reward or punish is not linked to any process of accountability.

This is a useless definition. It gives neither a necessary or sufficient reason for Accountability to exist. It is a different matter that 'Accountability' may have a protocol bound extensional definition for some juristic, administrative, financial or other purpose.

But this conception of accountability invites some prior questions. First, why do we care about accountability? One can give various answers to this question. At a minimum we care about accountability for prudential reasons: if we could not hold actors whose actions impinge upon our lives accountable it is very unlikely that our core interests, however defined will be protected.

If I can hold someone accountable, I have power over that person. It is very unlikely that most people will have any such power. Thus, for prudential reasons, they may wish to pay taxes to a State which can enforce the judgments of a Court which holds people to account on the basis of complaints against them.

One could care for accountability for moral reasons. The inability to hold actors whose actions affect is a violation of our moral standing and worth as individuals. It places us in relations of asymmetry to other actors in a way that fail to do justice to our equal moral standing.

 This remains the case. What matter's is that those agents have asymmetric power with respect to a Court or other Judicial or Executive authority.

Second, even if we agree that there are many reasons to care about accountability, there is the immense challenge of reconciling competing claims to accountability.

There are no reasons to care about accountability. It is a silly thing to do. What matters is that there's some guy who can and will fuck over any guy who tries to fuck us over. We need to give this guy our loyalty and to pay him for his trouble.

First, there is a question of delineating lines of authority: Who should hold whom accountable and on what terms?

Only a guy who can fuck up another guy and get paid for doing it should hold that other guy accountable. The terms are determined by mechanism design

Even if we had an answer to this question, there is the practical challenge of designing institutions that make accountability an effective notion by instituting a system of credible sanctions and rewards.

One can design anything one likes. One can also pretend that one's design is being implemented. There may be a small reward for so doing. Still, it is a waste of resources and ought to be punished- at least with ridicule.

Any discussion of accountability, especially in democratic societies, misses a good deal if it does not begin with some account of the relationship between two key concepts: democracy and legitimacy.

Nonsense! A discussion which begins with an account of the relationship between Monarchy and Legitimacy, or Spirituality and Sodomy, or Truth and Love, or Justice and Morality is going to be just as big a pile of shite as any other.

In many discussions the relationship between these two concepts remains obscure and often leads to a fundamental confusion over the requirements of good governance.

Fundamental confusion arises when stupid pedants try to shit higher than their arseholes.

Indeed, it is my contention that the fundamental challenge of creating accountable institutions is to bridge the gap between democracy and legitimacy.

There is no such gap. Either a State is a democracy and is recognised as legitimately exercising authority or it isn't. Talking worthless shite won't 'bridge the gap' in a country like Saudi Arabia or North Korea. Mehta admits as much, immediately-

But bridging that gap requires two things. It requires properly designed institutions .... it also requires an appropriate conception of politics, an account of the norms and expectations that citizens bring to their political conduct.

So, to bridge the gap, first we must have a perfectly designed bridge and secondly a perfect citizenry such that no gap exists.

Mehta makes this very clear-

 What do I mean by the gap between democracy and legitimacy? The association of the two concepts is largely contingent. The concept of legitimacy concerns the reasons persons who stand in  particular political and social relations have for accepting those relations. Understood normatively, legitimacy involves an answer to the question: Are political relations in which citizens stand to each other or to those who exercise power over them acceptable to them?

The answer is always no. I should be Prime Minister- nobody else and I'm not afraid to say so. Or, if I am afraid to say so, then the current dispensation is acceptable to me in some sense.

To put it in slightly more utopian terms, the modern understanding of legitimacy is this. Legitimacy obtains when the terms of the political relations, the reasons given for the exercise of political power are mutually acceptable and freely chosen.

This can never be the case. If I vote for X and X does not win, Y does, I have not 'freely chosen' Y. My choice was overridden.  I may agree to a particular voting mechanism because I believe it will yield the result I want. If it doesn't, I have not freely chosen the outcome nor is it 'mutually acceptable'.

Clearly, if this is the 'modern understanding of legitimacy' then it is illegitimate because it is obnoxious to common sense. Moreover, it could license any type of regime whatsoever. It has no content.

Democracy is, in the first instance, a way of constituting and regulating political relations, and the powers they constitute, such that these relations receive popular authorization.

Rubbish! It's about the majority getting to rule the country. A Monarchy or Dictatorship is a way of 'constituting and regulating political relations, and the powers they constitute'. If people are beaten or bribed or brainwashed sufficiently, there will be plenty of not just popular authorization but people literally on their knees presenting their backsides for sodomy or their mouths for fellatio.

In order for this authorization to be meaningful we stipulate certain baseline conditions. The fundamental values of freedom, political equality and publicity enshrined in democratic constitutions describe the conditions under which popular authorization can meaningfully take place.

Very true! Ask the good folk of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Compare their flourishing condition to the miserable slaves one finds in Australia- a country without a constitutional or legislative Bill of Rights.

Giving popular authorization fullest expression through representative institutions is an enormously complicated task and I shall resist the temptation to talk about this matter here. Rather I want to focus on the gap between democracy and legitimacy. Although there is some overlap in the two concepts (they both acknowledge the value of political equality), these are nevertheless separate concepts whose relationship is contingent.

Sheer nonsense! There is no political equality between residents of any democratic country. For a start, voting rights are restricted on the basis of Nationality or are  subject to felony disenfranchisement. Legitimacy either has a juristic, extensional, definition or it is meaningless.

A proper theory of democratic governance will have to connect two things. It will have to connect a political practice, namely popular authorization with a standard of justification, the idea of mutual acceptability.

This is impossible. If all the actions of a democratic government were mutually acceptable, there would be no need for democratic governance. It is extremely unlikely that the actions of democratic governance will be acceptable to every single agent, even if they are wholly inconsequential, because some agents have antaganomic preferences.

To put it bluntly, democracy can be regarded as a source of legitimacy if democracy can be conceived of as routinely producing justifications for policies that all can accept.

In other words, no democracy could have been ab ovo legitimate because it could not have been conceived as routinely doing anything at all- let alone something impossible by definition.

The question is this: why will practices of popular authorization produce modes of governance that all can freely accept?

The thing can't be done. Mehta now admits this

Is it necessary that democracy will produce mutually acceptable justifications?

Absolutely not. If it did it would be useless. Voting would be a waste of time and money. Democracy is only useful if it creates winners or losers.

The challenge for any conception of accountability is to show how practices of popular authorization can be made to produce policies and standards of justification that are mutually acceptable to all citizens.

This is too easily done. Just assume voters are homogeneous and have single peaked preferences and there is no uncertainty, perfect information etc. But, in that case, Democracy would not be needed.

Popular authorization alone cannot bear the burden of legitimizing the exercise of governing power.

No. The Governing power must be able to fuck over anyone who fucks with it.

Indeed, on the account suggested above it is possible that citizens may experience a certain kind of alienation even from a political process where practices of popular authorization are well established, if these practices do not produce outcomes that are mutually acceptable.

D'uh!

There are many ways of explaining the gap between democracy and legitimacy.

There is no gap. You are simply misusing the word legitimacy.

Most of these explanations focus on the ways in which the workings of popular authorization are distorted by the operations of power in any given society.

In other words, they are paranoid bullshit.

On the view the practice of popular authorization does  not, as the ideal would lead us to believe, happen in the context of freedom, equality and publicity. On the contrary, actual democracies work in the context of a good deal of social and economic inequality and manipulation that in turn bears upon democracy itself. Other explanations focus on the ways in which the institutional organization of power within democracies can impede the production of mutually acceptable agreements. There is much truth in these cautionary tales as the empirical study of any functioning democracy will reveal. But these accounts miss out on one important dimension that I would like to stress here. For democracy to realize in political practice the requirements of legitimacy, it is necessary that those participating in democratic politics share common beliefs about the aspiration of democracy: reaching mutually acceptable agreements.

There it is! If Democracy is unnecessary because  everybody is the same, then it couldn't change anything and thus would be 'mutually acceptable' provided it didn't use up any scarce resources on holding elections and so forth.

These shared beliefs about the aims of democracy must shape political conduct.

For example, all political parties must have exactly the same manifesto and make exactly the same speeches and be wholly indistinguishable from each other.

It is important to stress, that there is nothing intrinsic about the practice of democracy to suggest that citizens will in fact share the ambition of reaching mutually acceptable agreements.

It is intrinsic to the practice of democracy that there will be winners and losers. I may want Hilary, you may want Trump. If you win, I lose. This does not mean Trump is acceptable to me nor that Hilary would have been acceptable to you.

The political theory of democratic legitimacy relies on a resource that democracy itself cannot produce or secure: the practical and regulative aim of those engaged in democracy to reach mutually acceptable agreements.

This simply isn't true. Mutually acceptable disagreement or discomfort- maybe. Agreement? Never. Democracy is not about saying- 'tell you what, let Hilary and Donald get married and take turns sitting in the Oval Office.'

How and when do democracies reach the point where citizens orient their conduct according to this regulative ideal of seeking mutually acceptable agreements?

When Democracy ceases to be of any use.

Democracies, like India’s for instance, can be stable for a variety of reasons: for instance, the contingent balance and fragmentation of power amongst different groups may enable practices of popular authorization to take place.

Nonsense! The Law requires Elections. A Dictator fears being shot and elections proceeding over her dead body. Legitimacy means the Army and the Police and so on obeying orders. Elections secure that Legitimacy.

But the fact that a democracy is institutionalized does not entail that citizens share some regulative ideals about democracy.

Because there are no 'regulative ideals' about anything at all.

But this poses a challenge for any conception of accountability. For if citizens themselves are not motivated by the desire to find mutually acceptable agreements, but look upon their relationships competitively, what content can we give to the notion of accountability?

What content does it actually have? The answer is that 'Accountability' is extensionally defined by protocol bound Juristic, Administrative or other such Tribunals, or sources of Executive power, which present focal solutions to particular types of coordination problem.

Any other conception of Accountability or Legitimacy or Secularism or whatever is just worthless bullshit.

I want to emphasize one point here: democracies can be quite stable and flourish because of competition between groups.

They can also collapse because of such competition. Is Mehta capable of writing a single sentence which is not foolish?

But whether these democracies produce social and political relations that are acceptable to all is another matter.

What is wrong with this man? Does he not understand that no Democratically elected leader has ever been 'acceptable to all'?

For accountability to be possible. the practices of citizenship, the ensemble of values by which citizens orient their conduct towards each other, must take on board the desire to find mutually acceptable agreements.

Nonsense. A flourishing democracy can have a large minority whose practice of citizenship does not take any such thing on board. Equally, a democracy where every single citizen has this property would still perish if it could not defend itself from invasion or was not economically viable.

Otherwise the core question of accountability - accountability to who and what terms – cannot be answered.

By you- because you are an idiot.

In short, if citizens do not aspire to live in a world governed by terms that all can freely accept, then it is difficult to give theoretical and practical content to accountability.

So, if the world isn't as you think it should be, you are useless.

. What makes the idea of living in a society governed by mutually acceptable agreements attractive? Here is an abstract sketch of an answer. One contrast that illuminates the intrinsic normative pull of this ideal is that between a world in which all are to some degree dominated by their unregulated association, and one in which all are engaged in the shared project of trying to make each equally free. Here domination (or un freedom) is understood as unjustified pervasive coercion or influence: a person is dominated, politically speaking, when she is affected by the actions of others in significant and pervasive ways for reasons she cannot accept.

A person with antagonomic preferences would feel unjustly dominated no matter what the process or the outcome of any process of Public Reason whose aim is o achieve an equality of freedom which might be considered repugnant precisely for that reason.

A Muth rational agent would also reject this 'abstract sketch' because it features a waste of cognitive and other scarce resources. It is worthy only of the attentions of stupid pedants and rent seeking Credentialized swine.

Domination is dissolved, and freedom achieved, when all who share a social world can accept the way this world is constituted.

Like happens in a Cult. Just drink the Kool-Aid already!

Thus the idea of freedom is closely tied to a conception of social autonomy as the deliberative control of the most significant circumstance of life.

Tied by whom? Some third rate pedant or worthless bureaucrat?

Those who subscribe to this ideal do not want to experience the forces that structure their lives as alien, beyond their control, or arbitrary.

They also don't want to die- like, ever-  or be called a fat fuck.

This goal has been central to the enlightenment conception of the technical control of nature through scientific knowledge.

Because scientific knowledge isn't worthless shite. It is used to make cool stuff- like X-boxes and OLED tvs.

But the exercise of deliberative control over the main circumstances of our lives is also a social task, one that, unlike the technical control of natural forces, can only be achieved through social cooperation with those with whom we share social worlds.

Nonsense! Social cooperation with those with whom we share social worlds means we all get to starve together while braiding each other's hair and kvetching about our periods.

The pursuit of this goal does not require that we completely agree in interests or ideals with those with whom we share the social world, nor does it presuppose that the social world is plastic, malleable or transparent, It does require, however, that we undertake to remake the main orders that organize our social existence so that all can accept their main effects.

By producing nothing- coz some idler will grab it saying their need is greater and OMG my fucking period is really doing a number on me.

This is a social project that has its individual rewards for all concerned, for only through struggling to realize the goal of cooperation can we come to inhabit a social world that does not thwart our efforts to deliberately control the main circumstances of our lives.

Where has this happened? America? Is that what Mehta found at Princeton? What about the UK? Did Maggie Thatcher come to him at Oxford and wipe his bum and offer to suckle him on her titties? It must be India he is talking about.

Another dimension of this contrast is between competition and solidarity as ways of relating to persons with whom one share social worlds. To fail to offer those with whom one is unavoidably linked justifications for actions that significantly affect them is to refuse a basic form of recognition, the recognition of others as independent person who conceive of themselves as free and equal.

Thus, either Mehta expects no one to read him, or his writing to have no significant effect, or else he fails by the standard he has himself set. This is because he has failed to justify his action in writing the above and, what's more failed to justify that act of omission and so on ad infinitum. Thus 'the goal of cooperation' is one he has, by his own showing, disqualified himself from pursuing. He has not accorded a basic form of recognition to bisexual goat-herders in either Arusha or Arunachal Pradesh.

It is instead to treat them in the way one treats a person with whom one stands in a competitive relation. In competitive relations, each party seeks asymmetrical advantages over others that allow the stronger to bypass the consent of the weaker to force them to accept disadvantageous terms of interaction.

This is what Mehta does with his students and other members of his community who- like me- tell him he has shit for brains. Instead of coming immediately to wipe our bums or offer to suckle us on his titties, he gets up on his high horse and starts talking in a posh accent.

.In cooperating with others, on the other hand, we take into account not only our own good but also their assent to our conduct, which perspective centered on our own advantage-a self – centered perspective –with a perspective from which the good of others matters.

This is nonsense. We cooperate with others whom we have never met through the working of the market or through administrative or judicial mechanisms. We have relationships with people who assent to our conduct, we cooperate with strangers who are wholly unconcerned with it.

Social interaction is not treated merely as an opportunity for individual advancement, but as a context where all can gain at once, and, in so doing, perhaps gain social goods different from and even greater than individual goods.

Mehta is talking of personal relationships, not social interaction.

One such good is a sense of solidarity or civic friendship with those with whom one shares the social world. These associates have not been treated as competitors, nor have the consequences of being unavoidable and significantly linked to them merely been ignored. Instead, they have been taken into account as free and equal, independent persons and their agreements have thus been sought. By addressing those with whom we are linked in social interaction with reasons we expect they can willingly accept, willingly, that is, given both the shared goal of cooperating and the specific circumstances of interaction, we aim to shape the character of our relationship. We want them to accept these reasons as a member of a cooperative relationship and from a fellow cooperator. In other words, in offering these reasons we seek to simultaneously recognize others and to secure their recognition of us as co-operators in a social relationship. We want all to consent willingly to the terms of social interaction only because each has good reasons to accept these terms, and “not just the kind of reason one might give to an enemy for wanting to defeat him, which is not intended to give him a reason not to resist.

Mehta is talking boring shite. Nobody wants to have to listen to it. They will give him a wide berth if he persists.  Indeed, in the dozen or more years since he wrote this nonsense, his reputation has greatly declined. By contrast the actions of actual auditors and accountants- including the Indian CAG- have been shown to be highly significant in determining the legitimacy of globalised financial regimes as well as those of National Governments.

Accountancy matters. Talking high falutin' shite does not. There is a lesson here which, as the Mahatma was wont to say, all who run may read.