The concept of accountability politics is defined as the arena of conflict over whether and how those in power are held publicly responsible for their decisions. Explaining accountability requires disentangling states from regimes. This chapter provides the political context for understanding the book's research strategy, which compares rural civil society-state relations across regions, branches, and levels of government, with a special interest in understanding how initiatives for change can scale up, down, and across between the local and regional and the national and transnational. The sub-national comparative method is pursued with institutional ethnography and quantitative indicators, both interpreted through a political economy focus on incentives.
Keywords: electoral competition, state-society relations, authoritarian enclaves, sub-national comparative method, institutional ethnography