Accountability Flashcards
Administrative Responsibility in Democratic Government Herman Finer (1941)
Public servants are not decide their own course; they are to be responsible to the elected representatives of the public, and these are to determine the course of action of the public servants to the most minute degree that is technically feasible. There is the dual problem of securing the responsibility of officials (a) through the courts and disciplinary control within the hierarchy of the administrative departments and (b) through the authority exercised over officials by responsible ministers based on sanctions exercised by the representative assembly. Responsibility means that X is accountable for Y to Z and, it may mean an inward sense of moral obligation. Three doctrines: (1) the mastership of the public, in the sense that politicians and employees are working not for the good of the public in the sense of what the public needs, but of the wants of the public as expressed by the public; (2) recognition that this masterships needs institutions and particularly the centrality of an elected organ, for its expression and the exertion of authority; and, (3) the function of the public and of its elected institutions is…the power to exact obedience and orders. Sooner or later there is an abuse of power when external punitive controls are lacking. Responsibility in the sense of an interpersonal, externally sanctioned duty is, then, the dominant consideration for PA.
Accountability: An Ever Expanding Concept Richard Mulgan (2000)
Accountability has a number of features: it is external, in that the account is given to some other person or body outside the person or body being held accountable; it involves social interaction and exchange, in that one side, that calling for the account, seeks answers and rectification while the other side, that being held accountable, responds and accepts sanctions; it implies rights of authority, in that those calling for an account are asserting rights of superior authority….including the rights to demand answers and to impose sanctions. Democratic state - key accountability relationships are those between the citizens and the holders of public office and, within the ranks of office holders, between elected politicians and bureaucrats. Two seminal debates (Finer and Friedrich) over how far public servants should rely on their professionalism and sense of personal morality and how far they should simply be following instructions from their political masters. Friedrich emphasized the inward responsibility of public servants to their professional standards and values and Finer reasserting the primacy of responsibility to external political direction.
Accountability: An Ever Expanding Concept Richard Mulgan (2000)
Professional accountability straddles the line between internal and external accountability. External accountability seeks to investigate and assess actions taken (or not taken) by agents and subordinates and to impose sanctions. Another extension of accountability is its application to various methods of imposing control over public organizations - constructing institutions which will guarantee that public officials are appropriately constrained. A third extension of accountability is to equate it with the responsiveness of public agencies and officials to their political masters and the public (responsiveness). A final extension of accountability is where the term is used to stand for the public dialogue which is seen as an essential part of democracy - political deliberation…is at the heart of accountability. Mulgan asserts that accountability (defined) should be restricted to its assumed core and to place particular emphasis on holding the powerful to account through political and legal channels of external scrutiny and sanctions.
Designing Bureaucratic Accountability
Arthur Lupia and Mathew McCubbins (1994)
Lupia and McCubbins address whether modern representative legislatures have the ability to translate meaningfully the will of the governed into policy choices of the gov’t by investigating the extent to which legislators can use institutional design to adapt to the challenges presented by the complexity of policy making. Designing Bureaucratic Accountability: 1. Design Institutions to Facilitate Learning (fire-alarm oversight vs. direct monitoring); 2. Design Institutions to Influence Bureaucratic Incentives. 3. Making bureaucrats accountable.
What is Bureaucratic Accountability and How can We Measure it?
Michael O’Loughlin (1990)
Bureaucratic accountability relationships involve three basic dimensions: (a) effective communications systems through which bureaucratic explanation and justification of actions and decisions to outside actors occur, (b) outside actor influence over bureaucratic decision making, and (c) discretionary and non-discretionary spheres of decision making. Accountability involves primarily a strategy for managing expectations by public administrators. Four systems of accountability: bureaucratic, legal, professional, and political.
Accountability in the Public Sector: Lessons from the Challenger Tragedy
Barbara S. Romzek and Melvin J. Dubnick (1987)
Four alternative systems of public accountability, each based on variations involving two critical factors: (1) whether the ability to define and control expectations is held by some specified entity inside or outside the agency; and, (2) the degree to control that entity is given over defining those agency’s expectations. Bureaucratic Accountability systems are widely used mechanisms for managing public agency expectations and involves an organized and legitimate relationship between a superior/subordinate, SOPs, and rules/regulations. A Legal Accountability is based on relationships between a controlling party outside the agency and members of the organization. Professional Accountability is by placement of control over organizational activities in the hands of the employee with the expertise or special skills to get the job done. Political Accountability is that between a representative and his/her constituents. Reliance on political and bureaucratic accountability systems produced circumstances which made NASA ill-equipped to contend with the problems that led to the Challenger disaster. PA accountability involves the means by which public agencies and their workers manage the diverse expectations generated within and outside the organization.
Administrative Procedures and the Political Control of the Bureaucracy (1998)
Administrative procedures increase bureaucratic accountability in three principal ways: (1) administrative procedures enfranchise particular constituents, (2) they increase the likelihood that bureaucrats incorporate the preferences of legislators’ favored constituents into agency policies, and (3) they protect the interests of favored constituents over time; as their preferences change, bureaucratic decision making and policy outcomes change as well.
Bureaucracy and Democracy: The Case for More Bureaucracy and Less Democracy
Kenneth J. Meier (1997)
Meier argues the problems in American gov’t are not problems of bureaucracy but problems of governance. The field of PA can be blamed, in part, for the governance problem as PA has helped to reorganize, reform, and reinvent bureaucracy. PA made two mistakes that contributed to the governance problem: (1) in rejecting the P-A dichotomy, PA was unambitious in its territorial claims. PA needs to return to its pre-1950 roots on the P-A dichotomy. (2) the second error of ambition occurred contemporaneously with its declaration of independence from political science. At the height of the behavioral revolution in political science, PA rightly perceived it was unwanted in PS. Bureaucracies perform best and can contribute the most to the policy-making process when (1) they are given clear goals by electoral institutions, (2) they are allocated adequate resources, and (3) they are given the autonomy to apply their expertise to the problem. Our basic problem of governance it that the long running interplay between bureaucracy and expertise on one hand, and responsiveness and democracy on the other hand, has swung too far in in the direction of democracy.
Bureaucracy and Democracy: The Case for More Bureaucracy and Less Democracy
Kenneth J. Meier (1997)
The argument for less democracy is so un-American that nothing less than fundamental political change is required. Some suggested first steps: (1) Redesign our political system to resolve rather than exacerbate conflict. (2) Lengthen the time from for public policy making. (3) Restrict and perhaps even eliminate political appointees (SES limited to career personnel, and political appointees limited to agency heads only). (4) assess rationally the trend in contracting out governmental functions. (5) Evaluate critically the agency’s policies so as to contribute effectively to the policy debate. (6) Bring the institutionalized presidency under the merit system. (7) Replace the current public philosophy of neoclassical economics and its sole value of efficiency. (8) Reorient our education programs from training entry-level civil servants to training policy makers. If PA is about governance, then PA education must deal with both politics and administration.
