Policies may not be decisive in driving how voters make choices, but policies still matter. Every day, millions of people are affected by the level of tax, the operation of the health system or the rules for allocating welfare benefits. Policies have long-term macro impacts that shape the destiny of whole countries: the divided Germany example discussed in Chapter 5 was a particularly dramatic case. Whether a country has effective or ineffective policies is clearly important. One of the advantages that democracy is meant to have over other types of political system is that it seems to provide a direct route to accountability for bad policies, and therefore as a system it should tend to better ones. This chapter looks at the implications of putting culture and values at the heart of understanding the political system for how we think about accountability. It concludes that accountability is frequently ineffective, and suggests some different ways to try to deliver it that fit better with the implications of a focus on culture and values.

Elections and accountability

Basic democratic theory (what Achen and Bartels, 2016, call the ‘folk theory’) holds that elections provide accountability. Politicians who govern badly will be defeated at the ballot box. Therefore the democratic system provides clear incentives to come up with policies that work and that increase the welfare of citizens. Scrutiny by the press and by legislative institutions such as Parliament and Congress ensure that people can see whether policies are working and therefore make their decision in an informed way.

We have already seen, from the arguments in the last chapter, that accountability for individual policies is very unlikely to work in this way. Public understanding of politics and policy is simply too low and it would not be rational for voters to attempt to become more informed. Voters don't generally know whether or not a policy has worked (whatever ‘worked’ is deemed to mean in the context) and so they can't hold politicians to account appropriately. There may be another option, however, which would make lower demands on the cognitive capacity of the citizenry.