Participation without accountability: elite-enabling institutions and authoritarian consolidation

Opportunities for non-electoral participation in politics are one of the hallmarks of democracy. However, participatory institutions are better understood as dual-use institutions: they can deepen accountability or sabotage it, depending on their design. This paper argues that whether a participatory institution equips citizens to hold authorities accountable – or instead frees them from that accountability – is conditioned upon two structural features: whether they encourage individual or collective participation and whether they enable primarily vertical or multidirectional information flows. When institutions combine individualized participation with vertical information flows, they are ill-equipped to facilitate the preference aggregation and collective action this capacity requires – even when they deliver genuine participatory benefits to citizens. I term these elite-enabling participatory institutions and illustrate their development through the cases of Russia and Venezuela. These findings have implications for scholarly understanding of authoritarian learning, democratic backsliding, and the conditions under which participatory institutions strengthen or undermine democratic governance.