DOES PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY WORK? AN ASSESSMENT TOOL

TLDR

Recent efforts to strengthen and design public accountability arrangements are hampered by a lack of a clear yardstick, leading to an impressionistic debate that highlights alleged deficits and overloads in the literature. The study aims to develop a systematic assessment instrument to determine whether public accountability arrangements are effective. The instrument uses a multicriteria assessment framework grounded in democratic, constitutional, and learning perspectives to evaluate accountability arrangements. Applying the tool to the boards of oversight of agencies demonstrates its practical utility for evaluating new accountability arrangements.

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a drive to strengthen existing public accountability arrangements and to design new ones. This prompts the question whether accountability arrangements actually work. In the existing literature, both accountability ‘deficits’ and ‘overloads’ are alleged to exist. However, owing to the lack of a cogent yardstick, the debate tends to be impressionistic and event‐driven. In this article we develop an instrument for systematically assessing public accountability arrangements, drawing on three different normative perspectives. In the democratic perspective, accountability arrangements should effectively link government actions to the ‘democratic chain of delegation’. In the constitutional perspective, it is essential that accountability arrangements prevent or uncover abuses of public authority. In the learning perspective, accountability is a tool to make governments effective in delivering on their promises. We demonstrate the use of our multicriteria assessment tool in an analysis of a new accountability arrangement: the boards of oversight of agencies.