Balance Accountability And Responsiveness

Contributors provide a fascinating account of how federal countries are confronting the traditional challenges of conflicts over division of fiscal powers while also coping with emerging challenges of globalization and citizen empowerment arising from the information revolution. They analyze how relationships and roles in different orders of government are being reshaped and show how local solutions inspired by global principles help strengthen government accountability and improve the quality of life for citizens.

This book presents case-studies in accountable government and the management of public funds, with particular reference to the multi-party political systems of Botswana, Jamaica, Sri Lanka and Zambia under the Third Republic. Criteria for judging accountability are set out, and the role and influence of political leadership, elections, parties, parliaments, interest groups, the media and external donors are explored. Conclusions take account of the comparisons which are drawn with the experience of single-party regimes in Africa and Asia.

In Canada, the quality of municipal democracy has been questioned due to three crucial factors. First, voter turnout tends to be significantly lower for municipal elections than it is for other levels of government. Second, the re-election rate of incumbent candidates is higher compared to provincial, territorial, and federal elections. Third, corruption and other scandals have tarnished the image of local democracy. Are cities sufficiently capable of responding to crises and representing the interests of their residents? Accountability and Responsiveness at the Municipal Level addresses these issues through qualitative and quantitative analysis, focusing on some of the most important characteristics of the Canadian municipal scene, including the contexts of partisanship and non-partisanship, the careers and daily work of municipal officials, and multilevel governance. This volume also assists directly in the collection and dissemination of data about cities as there is currently no centralized system for capturing and organizing electoral statistics at the municipal level. Municipal democracy in Canada suffers from a representation deficit. Accountability and Responsiveness at the Municipal Level is an important first step in building high-quality comparative information on the politics of Canada’s cities.

There is growing recognition of the need for new approaches to the ways in which donors support accountability, but no broad agreement on what changed practice looks like. This publication aims to provide more clarity on the emerging practice.

This book considers local autonomy, measured as a multidimensional concept, from a cross-country comparative perspective, and examines how variations can be explained and what their consequences are. It fills a gap in the literature by providing a comprehensive study of the different components of local autonomy across a large number of countries, over time. It offers a theoretically saturated concept to measure local autonomy and applies it to 39 countries, including all 28 EU member states together with Albania, Georgia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Macedonia, Moldova, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland Turkey and Ukraine, over a period of 25 years (1990-2014).