Accountable Governance

Problems and Promises

Melvin J. Dubnick, H. George Frederickson, Melvin J. Dubnick, H. George Frederickson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317477853
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Public accountability is a hallmark of modern democratic governance and the foundation of the popular performance management movement. Democracy is just an empty exercise if those in power cannot be held accountable in public for their acts and omissions, for their decisions, their policies, and their expenditures.

This book offers a finely detailed and richly informed consideration of accountability in both government and the contemporary world of governance. Twenty-five leading experts cover varying aspects of the accountability movement, including multiple and competing accountabilities, measuring accountability, accountability and democratic legitimacy, and accountability and information technology, and apply them to governments, quasi-governments, non-government organizations, governance organizations, and voluntary organizations. Together they provide the most comprehensive consideration of accountability currently available, with a blend of theoretical, empirical, and applied approaches.

PART I

COMPLEX CHALLENGES

A common theme among those who study accountability mechanisms is the challenges and dilemmas these mechanisms pose for those seeking fulfillment of this promising approach to problems of governance. Accountability mechanisms can be viewed as a collection of tools sharing a common characteristic: they all rely on the use of account-giving relationships to achieve some central objectives of governance. In theory, the major task of accountability is to construct and operationalize a governance system using the appropriate mechanisms found in the accountability toolbox.

Several views of accountability challenges were presented at the Kettering-sponsored sessions. The multiple-accountabilities challenge was initially raised by Romzek and Dubnick in their 1987 examination of the diverse and conflicting expectations that emerged from several major institutional sources (i.e., legal, professional, bureaucratic, and political). In the first chapter Thomas Schillemans and Mark Bovens further elaborate on the multiple-accountability challenge by analyzing five Dutch cases. While finding that such conditions can be dysfunctional in a variety of ways, the authors also recognize the positive aspects of redundancies generated by these seemingly adverse conditions. Perhaps we have more to lose than gain by attempting to resolve the dilemmas posed by the multiplicity of expectations we have for these mechanisms.

Barbara Romzek’s study of accountability in the expanding arena of outsourced and networked social services highlights the contemporary challenges of efforts to construct and sustain an effective system of accountable governance in a public sector where multiple and diverse expectations emerge from a “tangled web” of contractual and networked relationships. Central to her study is the greatly expanded role of contracting, a factor that is even more markedly problematic in the complex environment described by Trevor Brown, Matthew Potoski, and David Van Slyke in their study of the Coast Guard’s Project Deepwater procurement process. While the source of complexity in the social services area is rooted in the relationships among the parties involved, it is the very nature of the “product” (or service) involved in the procurement process that generates the accountability challenges for Deepwater. Both studies help us better understand why the problem of multiple accountabilities in government proves such an elusive objective in a wide range of programs.

While multiple accountabilities pose a challenging context for those engaged in governance, not all demands for accountability are equal weight. Those linked to major regime values are perhaps the most problematic, especially when they are incompatible and create fundamental dilemmas for those being held to account. The tradeoffs between efficiency and equality in both the design and implementation of public policies and programs have been a concern in the United States where both are perceived as core values in historical waves of administrative reform. A similar dilemma faces those who administer the increasingly significant number of global governance organizations (GCOs) that are the focus of Jonathan Koppel’s contribution to this volume. Some of these agencies (e.g., the Universal Postal Union) have been in existence for more than a century; others (e.g., ICANN) are less than two decades old. What they have in common is that today they operate within an international regime that puts a premium on both effectiveness and democratic responsiveness. The challenge of multiple accountabilities in this context requires strategic choices in order to deal with the inherent dilemma emerging from the demands for simultaneous achieving authority and legitimacy in an increasingly dynamic global setting.

1

THE CHALLENGE OF MULTIPLE ACCOUNTABILITY

Does Redundancy Lead to Overload?

THOMAS SCHILLEMANS AND MARK BOVENS

In the early years of World War II, Friedrich and Finer engaged in a seminal dispute on how to organize responsibilities in modern democratic government (Friedrich 1940; Finer 1941). Their dispute is often referred to as one of the defining moments in the development of the concepts of administrative responsibility and political accountability (Romzek 1996, 97; Dubnick 2005, 1). According to Finer, clear lines of command and control are the basis of any democratic system of ministerial responsibility. He thus proposed what has come to be seen as the conventional approach to accountability: democracy is best served by an unambiguous division between politics and administration and a clear hierarchy, with comprehensive goals and substantial sanctions through which unwanted conduct is punished. Friedrich, on the other hand, claimed that, given the obvious growth in size and complexity of contemporary government, the conventional hierarchical system would not suffice to ensure responsible behavior on the part of government. Simply executing already formulated policies was no longer an option, since important aspects of policy making had shifted from the hands of politicians to administrative agencies (Friedrich 1940, 5). This meant that the conventional, unilateral model of political responsibility and administrative accountability no longer fit the evolving reality of public government. In his view, a firm emphasis on professional norms and a sense of individual administrative responsibility, accompanied by additional accountability mechanisms, were now needed.

This aspect of the Friedrich-Finer debate—how to organize accountability in an era of complex government—is more salient than ever. Accountability almost by definition seems to call for simplicity: clear divisions between oversight and execution of tasks, straightforward criteria and measurements for performance, and a logical hierarchy between agents and principals. Yet at the same time the world of public administration employs a growing number of dispersed and complex practices of governance (Day and Klein 1987, 10; Posner 2002, 545). Salamon describes the tension created by this diverse approach as the accountability challenge. “[M] any of the newer tools of public action vest substantial discretionary authority in entities other than those with ultimate responsibility for the results,” he argues. The result is that

Many new forms of governance require others doing the job, with substantial discretion. This poses an accountability challenge: we need to loosen up traditional notions of political accountability, and develop more pluralistic conceptions (2002, 38).

This chapter examines the accountability challenge through the lens of an empirical analysis of Dutch agencies held accountable to a board of commissioners, as well as to a department in a traditional, hierarchical model. First we will review two perspectives on accountability and look at the negative expectations for using a multiple-accountability model. Then we will discuss our empirical analysis of multiple accountability, which was based on qualitative research done on a number of Dutch agencies. Our purpose is to learn what these cases teach us for situations of multiple accountability, generally. Many authors have associated a large number of problems with multiple accountability. Almost by definition, multiple accountability is seen as too much of a good thing or a burdensome overload. However, following others (for example, Braithwaite 1999; Scott 2000), we will argue that the imminent redundancy of multiple accountability also can contribute positively to the good governance of executive agencies.

ACCOUNTABILITY AS A VIRTUE VERSUS ACCOUNTABILITY AS A MECHANISM

Anyone studying accountability will soon discover that the term has many different meanings. Accountability is used as a synonym for many loosely defined political desiderata, such as transparency, equity, democracy, efficiency, responsiveness, responsibility, and integrity (Mulgan 2000, 555; Behn 2001, 3–6; Dubnick 2005). Such shifting meanings may serve the purpose of political spinning, policy rhetoric, or white papers, but they have been a strong impediment to systematic, comparative, scholarly analysis.

Moreover, much of the academic literature on accountability is disconnected, as many authors set out to produce their own specific definition of accountability. Every newly edited volume on accountability—and even worse, each of the individual chapters within these edited volumes—uses its own concepts, conceptualizations, and frames for studying the subject. (Dowdle 2006; Ebrahim and Weisband 2007). Some use the concept of accountability very loosely, while others produce a more narrow definition, but few of these definitions are fully compatible, which makes it very hard to produce cumulative and commensurable research. In addition, few papers move beyond conceptual and theoretical analyses and engage in systematic, comparative empirical research, with the exception of a series of studies in the narrow field of social psychology (Adelberg and Batson 1978; Tetlock et al. 1989; Lerner and Tetlock 1999). The result of this disjointed accountability talk is that accountability seems to be an ever-expanding concept, which “has come to stand as a general term for any mechanism that makes powerful institutions responsive to their particular publics” (Mulgan 2003,8). However, there is a pattern to the expansion.

Particularly, but not exclusively, in American academic and political discourse, accountability is used mainly as a normative concept, as a set of standards for the evaluation of the behavior of public actors. In this type of discourse the adjective “accountable” often is used as in: “We want public officials to be accountable” or “government has to behave in an accountable manner.” In this discourse accountability or, more precisely, being accountable is seen as a virtue or positive feature of organizations or officials. Accountability in this very broad sense is used to positively qualify a state of affairs or the performance of an actor. It comes close to “responsiveness” and “a sense of responsibility,” a willingness to act in a transparent, fair, and equitable way. Accountability, used in an active sense as a virtue, refers to substantive norms for the behavior of actors—in this case public officials or public organizations. Hence, accountability studies in this vein often focus on normative issues or the assessment of the actual and active behavior of public agents (O’Connell 2005, 86; Considine 2002, 22; Koppell 2005).

On the other side of the Atlantic, in British, continental European (as well as Australian) scholarly debates, accountability is often used in a more narrow, descriptive sense. Staying close to its etymological and historical roots, scholars define accountability as a specific social relation or mechanism that involves an obligation to explain and justify conduct (Day and Klein 1987, 57; Scott 2000, 40; Pollitt 2003, 89; Mulgan 2003, 7–14; Bovens 2007. See also Romzek and Dubnick 1998, 6; Lerner and Tetlock 1999, 255). Explanations and justifications of accountability are not made in a void, but vis-à-vis a significant other. This implies a relationship between an actor (the “accountor”), and a forum (the account-holder, or “accountee”; Pollitt 2003, 89). The accounting process usually involves not just the provision of information about conduct and performance, but also the possibility of debate, of questions by the forum and answers by the actor, and eventually of judgment of the actor by the forum. Judgment also implies the imposition of formal or informal sanctions on the actor in case of poor performance or, for that matter, of rewards in case of adequate performance.

Accountability mechanisms normally exhibit three phases (Mulgan 2003; Bovens 2007). In the first phase, the actor renders an account of his conduct and performance to the accountability forum. This may be coined the information phase. In the second phase, the actor and the forum engage in a debate about this account. The forum may ask for additional information, and the actor will answer questions and, if necessary, justify and defend his course of action. This is the debating phase. Then the forum may pass judg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Promises of Accountability Research
• Part I. Complex Challenges
• Part II. Obstacles to Accountability
• Part III. Assessing Accountability
• Part IV. Adapting to Accountability
• Part V. Strategies
• Part VI. Rethinking Accountability
• Conclusion: Taking Stock and Moving Forward
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Name Index
• Subject Index