From Electoral Democracy to Polyarchy: Participation and Accountability in Serbia

Although the latest Freedom House report ranks Serbia as a free country, it can be argued that it is still closer to electoral democracy than to full polyarchy. There are two areas where shortcomings of democracy in Serbia are most visible: citizen participation and accountability of elected officials. Low voters’ turnout (about 53% during elections for Parliament in 2014) speaks of the former. The latter manifests primarily in the fact that officials, once they are elected, have almost no communication with their constituency, and rarely give account of their activities to citizens. In this paper, I will focus on three experimental projects that aim to mitigate these shortcomings. Carried out by non-governmental organizations, these projects are trying to provide channel for regular two-way communication between citizens and their representatives in local assemblies and national Parliament. Utilizing information technologies such as Internet, projects “Ask your representative” and “My representative” are encouraging people to ask representatives in local assemblies questions, but also trying to raise awareness on the side of elected officials about the need to answer these questions in timely and comprehensive manner. “Open Parliament” project does the same on national level, in addition to their other activities (increasing transparency through making transcripts of parliamentary sessions available, providing statistics and information about ways to influence parliamentary debates, such as petitions etc.). The main aim of this paper is to assess efficiency of these projects and determine if such endeavors could indeed make Serbian democracy closer to full polyarchy.