Structural Accountability: A Responsibility-Based Framework for Democratic Legitimacy

This work develops a structural theory of democratic accountability by formalizing how responsibility must flow from individual political agents to collective political outcomes. The paper introduces the concept of a responsibility mapping and shows that this mapping collapses when individual‑level responsibility is redirected into non‑responsibility‑bearing organizational structures. Using category‑theoretic tools, the analysis demonstrates that proportional representation systems can, under conditions of evidential doubt concerning an individual agent, absorb personal responsibility into party structures and thereby render accountability invisible or unrecoverable. The framework distinguishes sharply between personal and organizational responsibility and argues that democratic legitimacy requires the visibility of the former whenever public office involves individual judgment, explanation, or misconduct. To preserve this visibility, the paper proposes an integrity‑threshold mechanism that restricts proportional participation when unresolved doubts arise, ensuring that individuals must seek direct electoral validation under conditions where personal responsibility is at issue. The result is a general, system‑independent account of how responsibility, forgiveness, and democratic legitimacy depend on maintaining a non‑degenerate mapping between agents and outcomes.