BEYOND ACCOUNTABILITY: POLITICAL LEGITIMACY AND DELEGATED WATER GOVERNANCE IN AUSTRALIA

Political Accountability and Fiscal Governance: Evidence from Tanzania and Zambia

Does a government’s source of revenue explain its policy choices? The most common approach contends that policy variation results from differences in political institutions. We argue that a government’s source of revenue also strongly affects its expenditures, independent of political institutions. Using local government budget data from Tanzania and Zambia, we find that local governments devot...

Private Actors and the Legitimacy of Governance Beyond the State

Internet NGOs: Legitimacy and Accountability

As the power and influence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in international debates on social and moral matters increases, questions concerning their legitimacy and accountability become all the more challenging. Some starting points are given for a defensible account of the legitimacy and accountability of internationally operating NGOs. Special attention is given to the use of new inf...

Political Legitimacy and Democracy

The stability and functioning of any kind of political regime—including democratic or representative ones—relies on the combination of the capacity of rulers and government officials to use coercion and the development of political legitimacy. Political legitimacy can be described as people's recognition and acceptance of the validity of the rules of their entire political system and the decisi...

Beyond Principal-agent Governance: Experimentalist Organizations, Learning and Accountability

The success of LPF, like the success of similar populist movements that preceded it in Austria, France, Switzerland and elsewhere, raises grave questions about the legitimacy of democratic inputs to public decision making and the efficacy of public action however decided. At the very least these successes signal an impaired responsiveness of the democratic state to its electorate: a democratic ...