| Chapter 2: | Pluralistic Accountability |
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Chapter 2
Pluralistic Accountability
The League of Nations
It is an irony of history that the League of Nations, an organization structured according to the principle known today among political scientists as pluralistic accountability, was launched by a man possessed of precisely the opposite conviction: that power ought to be concentrated so as to make possible both effective execution and electoral accountability.
Woodrow Wilson set forth his view of democracy in his doctoral thesis, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (1885), commonly considered his most important work in political science. Raised in Virginia and Georgia, schooled at home by a clergyman father, and imbued over the course of a strict upbringing with a strong conviction of the duties of the individual, Wilson based his political philosophy on the need to hold those exercising government power accountable. In this regard he found the parliamentary system, as it operated in Great Britain, superior to the congressional system in his native country. In Britain, power was assembled in one place, making its exercise transparent. The British people were thus able, in the sovereign exercise of their authority, to hold those wielding power to account for their