University of Chicago Press

This article focuses on a set of democratic innovations that were introduced in recent years in Latin America that involve the participation of civil society as an active agent of accountability. Participatory innovations are redefining the traditional scenario in which the practice of democratic representation takes place, adding novel arenas and mechanisms to engage actors that traditionally were not actively involved in accountability politics. The proliferation of alternative means for holding governments accountable undermines the traditional view of democratic representation, which continues to view elections as the quintessential mechanism of citizen control. The conventional way of thinking about the role of citizens in the practice of democratic accountability—which was largely modeled around the act of electoral delegation—must be reconceptualized to make room for other mechanisms of citizen control beyond the sporadic act of voting.

American individualist ideology facilitates structural injustice. Through an analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville on individualism, gender domination, and white supremacy in the United States, this essay explains why. The peculiar social cognition of the American individualist desensitizes him to structural injustice. To preserve his faith that his fate lies entirely in his own hands, he blinds himself to the ways social structure constrains personal freedom and independence; the individualist also construes the unjust benefits of social privilege (like those accompanying whiteness and maleness in Jacksonian America) as products of personal ingenuity and character. Democracy in America (1835/40) thus illuminates the elective affinity between American individualism and structural injustice.