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Proponents of social service decentralization often claim that transferring service administration to lower levels of government facilitates increases citizen participation and governmental accountability while improving allocative efficiency and equity in service distribution. Using the cases of health and education decentralization in Chile, this article evaluates whether and under what conditions social service decentralization programs are likely to deliver on these promises. It discusses the tensions between equity and efficiency goals and how these may play out given different accountability mechanisms in local public choice, principal‐agent, and real‐world “hybrid” decentralization models. The case studies illustrate the difficulty of balancing the need for central standards and funding with local autonomy, but suggest that accountability mechanisms that emerged following Chile's transition to democracy in 1990 led to improvements in both equity and efficiency in decentralized service administration.

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This essay maps the transformation of security from a symbol of authoritarian government under the Cold War paradigm of National Security into a public good and a policy field acknowledged as legitimate and democratic by politicians and policy experts. Using present-day Argentina as an example, we show how security ideas gain dominance across the political spectrum, displacing and subordinating democratic politics conceived in terms of rights. As institutions increasingly accept security measures and pre-emptive risk management, a securitising discourse – despite its claims to advocate for the ‘citizen’ – trumps governance and the rule of law. Appealing to citizens’ concerns and rights, the new forms of securitisation may yet undermine democratic life.