People’s Voice in between Elections: Democratic Public Sphere and Accountability of Elected Representatives in Bangladesh

Abstract

A democratic public sphere is conducive to make the elected representatives accountable to the people. Civil liberty, free flow of information, platform for citizens and communication channels consisted in public sphere are significant to create non-electoral vertical accountability of the elected representatives. The state of public sphere, public opinion formation and non-electoral vertical accountability of the elected representatives of Bangladesh have been analyzed in this study to find out the nexus between democratic public sphere and accountability of the elected representatives in Bangladesh. To do this, three objectives have been examined profoundly. The first was to reveal the state of the democratic public sphere in Bangladesh for analyzing to what extent it acts its due role in terms of representative accountability. Secondly it has been assessed whether the democratic public sphere forms public opinion associated with common concern, predominately the issue of corruption, in terms of representative accountability in Bangladesh. And finally it has been explored whether public opinion can convert public issues into representative accountability mechanism in Bangladesh. The study is predominately qualitative in nature using data from both primary and secondary sources. For the validation and reliability of the data and triangulation, four tools i.e. SLR (Secondary Literature Review), KII (Key Informant Interview), FGD (Focus Group Discussion) and QS (Questionnaire Survey) have been used. The study shows that the state of democratic public sphere in Bangladesh is of mediocre type. This situation has been exemplified by the negative impact of the vested interest groups regarding freedom of opinion and expression affecting civil liberty. It is also identified that access to government information is very difficult which influences free flow of information negatively. Poor performance of the media adds to this dysfunctioning as debate creating nature of media coverage and political pressure on media affect the performance of communication channels. Therefore, citizens’ platform cannot become the people’s forum due to the lack of democratic structure and leadership. It is also clear that protecting business interests and self-censorship of media, elite and self evading voice of talk-shows’ participants and lack of authenticity of facebook’s posts and fear of political color of facebook users affect communication channels negatively in terms of public opinion formation. Hence, public sphere produces public opinion only partially. Furthermore, the elected representatives’ negative response to public sphere and seldom behavioral change imply minimal nexus between democratic public sphere and non-electoral vertical accountability of the elected representatives in Bangladesh. Finally, the absence of formal mechanism like deliberative democracy compels public sphere having a “limited” impact on the non -electoral vertical accountability of the elected representatives in Bangladesh.