Analysing and Assessing Accountability: A Conceptual Framework†

TL;DR: The concept of accountability is used in a rather narrow sense: a relationship between an actor and a forum, in which the actor has an obligation to explain and to justify his or her conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgement, and the actor may face consequences as discussed by the authors.

Abstract: It has been argued that the EU suffers from serious accountability deficits. But how can we establish the existence of accountability deficits? This article tries to get to grips with the appealing but elusive concept of accountability by asking three types of questions. First a conceptual one: what exactly is meant by accountability? In this article the concept of accountability is used in a rather narrow sense: a relationship between an actor and a forum, in which the actor has an obligation to explain and to justify his or her conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgement, and the actor may face consequences. The second question is analytical: what types of accountability are involved? A series of dimensions of accountability are discerned that can be used to describe the various accountability relations and arrangements that can be found in the different domains of European governance. The third question is evaluative: how should we assess these accountability arrangements? The article provides three evaluative perspectives: a democratic, a constitutional and a learning perspective. Each of these perspectives may produce different types of accountability deficits.

Summary

I Accountability and European Governance

• There has long been a concern that the trend toward European policy making is not being matched by an equally forceful creation of appropriate accountability regimes.
• Its evocative powers make it also a very elusive concept because it can mean many different things to different people, as anyone studying accountability will soon discover.
• Second, and separately, this article aims to develop an evaluative framework that can be used to assess these accountability maps more systematically.
• The article is organised on the basis of three different questions, which provide three types of building blocks for the analysis of accountability and European governance.

A From Accounting to Accountability

• The word ‘accountability’ is Anglo-Norman, not Anglo-Saxon, in origin.
• The Domesday Books listed what was in the king’s realm; moreover, the landowners were all required to swear oaths of fealty to the crown.
• 4 M. J. Dubnick, Seeking Salvation for Accountability, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (2002), pp. 7–9.
• © 2007 The Author448 Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. discourse, ‘accountability’ and ‘accountable’ no longer convey a stuffy image of bookkeeping and financial administration, but they hold strong promises of fair and equitable governance.
• The term ‘has come to stand as a general term for any mechanism that makes powerful institutions responsive to their particular publics’.9.

B Broad and Narrow Accountability

• In contemporary political and scholarly discourse ‘accountability’ often serves as a conceptual umbrella that covers various other distinct concepts, such as transparency, equity, democracy, efficiency, responsiveness, responsibility and integrity.
• Accountability in this broad sense is an essentially contested and contestable concept,14 because there is no general consensus about the standards for accountable behaviour, and because they differ from role to role, time to time, place to place and from speaker to speaker.
• I will not define the concept in such a broad, evaluative sense, but in a much more narrow, sociological sense.

C Accountability as a Social Relation

• This narrow definition of accountability contains a number of elements that need further explanation.
• 18 However, as the authors will see, in many accountability relations, the forums are not principals of the actors, for example courts in cases of legal accountability or professional associations in cases of professional accountability.
• First of all, it is crucial that the actor is obliged to inform the forum about his or her conduct, by providing various sorts of data about the performance of tasks, about outcomes or about procedures.
• In passing a negative judgement, the forum frequently imposes sanctions of some kind on the actor.

D What is not Narrow Accountability?

• Box 1 identifies seven constitutive elements of what I have called narrow accountability.
• To qualify a social relation as a practice of accountability for the purpose of this article, there should be an actor who provides information about his conduct to some forum; there should also be explanation and justification of conduct—and not propaganda, or the provision of information or instructions to the general public.
• It is perfectly sensible to hold actors accountable for their participation in decision-making procedures: members of parliament may scrutinise ministers for their role in European councils; lobby and interest groups may have to account to their members or constituencies for their stand in deliberative processes.
• Moreover, accountability is not only about ex post scrutiny, it is also about prevention and anticipation.

III Types of Accountability

• Public institutions are frequently required to account for their conduct to various forums in a variety of ways.
• This can yield classifications on the basis of, for example, financial, procedural or programmatic accountability.
• This relates largely to the nature of the relationship between the actor and the forum, and in particular to the question of why the actor has an obligation to render account.

A To Whom is Account to be Rendered: The Problem of Many Eyes

• Public organisations and officials operating in a constitutional democracy find themselves confronting at least five different types of forums and hence at least five different kinds of accountability.35 I have deliberately used the words ‘at least’, as this classification is not a limitative one.
• These forums generally demand different kinds of information and apply different criteria as to what constitutes responsible conduct.
• They are therefore likely to pass different judgements on the conduct of the public organisation or the public official.
• Hence, public institutions are not infrequently faced with the problem of many eyes: they are accountable to a plethora of different forums, all of which apply a different set of criteria.

Political Accountability: Elected Representatives, Political Parties, Voters, Media

• Political accountability is an extremely important type of accountability within democracies.
• In parliamentary systems with ministerial accountability, such as the UK, the Netherlands and Germany, public servants and their organisations are accountable to their minister, who must render political account to parliament.
• 39 M. Elchardus, De Dramademocratie (Tielt, 2002); Raad voor Maatschappelijke Ontwikkeling (Council for Social Development), Medialogica:.

Legal Accountability: Courts

• These can be the ‘ordinary’ civil courts, as in Britain, or also specialised administrative courts, as in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
• In some spectacular cases of administrative deviance, such as l’affaire du sang contaminé (the HIV contaminated blood products) in France or the Tangentopoli prosecutions in Italy, public officials have even been summoned before penal courts.
• For European public institutions and EU Member States, the Court of First Instance and the European Court of Justice are additional and increasingly important legal forums.
• 43 Legal accountability will usually be based on specific responsibilities, formally or legally conferred upon authorities.
• Therefore, legal accountability is the most unambiguous type of accountability, as the legal scrutiny will be based on detailed legal standards, prescribed by civil, penal or administrative statutes, or precedent.

Administrative Accountability: Auditors, Inspectors and Controllers

• Next to the courts, a wide range of quasi-legal forums, exercising independent and external administrative and financial supervision and control, has been established in the past decades—some even speak of an ‘audit explosion’.
• These new administrative forums vary from European, national or local ombudsmen and audit offices, to independent supervisory authorities, inspector generals, anti-fraud offices and chartered accountants.
• Also, the mandates of several national auditing offices have been broadened to secure not only the probity and legality of public spending, but also its efficiency and effectiveness.
• These administrative forums exercise regular financial and administrative scrutiny, often on the basis of specific statutes and prescribed norms.
• This type of accountability arrangement can be very important for quangos and other executive public agencies.

Professional Accountability: Professional Peers

• Many public managers are, apart from being general managers, professionals in a more technical sense.
• They have been trained as engineers, doctors, veterinarians, teachers or police officers.
• Professional bodies lay down codes with standards for acceptable practice that are binding for all members.
• How Supreme Audit Institutions Account for Themselves’, (1997) 75(2) Public Administration 313. 47 A. Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (University of Chicago Press, 1988); E. Freidson, Professionalism: The Third Logic (Polity Press, 2001).

Social Accountability: Interest Groups, Charities and Other Stakeholders

• In reaction to a perceived lack of trust in government, there is an urge in many Western democracies for more direct and explicit accountability relations between public agencies, on the one hand, and clients, citizens and civil society, on the other hand.
• 48 Influenced by the debate on corporate social responsibility and corporate governance in business, more attention is being paid to the role of non-governmental organisations, interest groups and customers or clients as relevant ‘stakeholders’, not only in determining policy, but also in rendering account.
• 49 Agencies or individual public managers should feel obliged to account for their performance to the public at large or, at least, to civil interest groups, charities and associations of clients.
• The rise of the internet has given a new dimension to this form of accountability.
• It remains an empirical question to what extent these groups and panels already are full accountability mechanisms, because the possibility of judgement and sanctioning often are lacking.

B Who is the Actor: The Problem of Many Hands

• Accountability forums often face similar problems, but then in reverse.
• This is the problem of many hands.51 Policies pass through many hands before they are actually put into effect.
• Parents, journalists and local councils can easily compare the results of a particular school with similar schools in the region, because quantitative and comparative benchmarks are provided for, but they also have access to the quite extensive qualitative reports.
• 51 D. F. Thompson, ‘Moral Responsibility of Public Officials: The Problem of Many Hands’, (1980) 74 American Political Science Review 905; M. Bovens, The Quest for Responsibility: Accountability and Citizenship in Complex Organisations (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
• Thus, the conduct of an organisation often is the result of the interplay between fatherless traditions and orphaned decisions.

Corporate Accountability: The Organisation as Actor

• Many public organisations are corporate bodies with an independent legal status.
• They can operate as unitary actors and can be held accountable accordingly.
• Most Western countries accept corporate liabilities in civil, administrative and even criminal law.
• Some, such as the UK, France and the Netherlands, accept criminal liabilities for local public bodies, but not for the organs of the state.
• 52 Legal and administrative forums often follow this corporate accountability strategy.

Hierarchical Accountability: One for All

• Processes of calling to account start at the top, with the highest official.
• The rank and file do not appear before external forums but hide behind the broad shoulders of the minister, the commissioner or the director of the agency, who, at least in dealings with the outside world, assumes complete responsibility and takes all the blame.
• The lower echelons can, in turn, be addressed by their superiors regarding questions of internal accountability.
• In the case of hierarchical schemes, processes of calling to account thus take place along the strict lines of the ‘chain of command’ and the middle managers are, in turn, both actor and forum.
• This is the official venue for accountability in most public organisations, and with regard to most types of accountability relationships, with the exception of professional accountability.

Collective Accountability: All for One

• Public organisations are collectives of individual officials.
• This makes quick work of the practical sides of the problem of many hands.
• The major difficulty with collective accountability lies with its moral appropriateness.
• They are not sophisticated enough to do justice to the many differences that are important in the imputation of guilt, shame and blame.
• It makes a substantial difference whether someone, for example in the case of the Eurostat frauds, is the director of Eurostat who ordered secret accounts to be opened, the head of the financial department who condoned the unofficial deposits, or a simple statistician who was just collecting and processing data.

Individual Accountability: Each for Himself

• During the judgement phase, which can involve the imposition of sanctions, hierarchical and collective accountability strategies often run up against moral objections, as a proportional relation between crime and punishment is by no means always evident.
• An individual accountability, in which each individual official is held proportionately liable for his personal contribution to the infamous conduct of the organisation, is from a moral standpoint a far more adequate strategy.
• Under this approach, each individual is judged on the basis of his actual contribution instead of on the basis of his formal position.
• Individual officials will thus find it impossible to hide behind their organisation or minister, while those in charge are not required to shoulder all the blame.
• In the case of medical errors, individual physicians are called to account by the disciplinary tribunal, which attempts to establish precisely the extent to which the physician’s individual performance satisfied professional standards.

C Which Aspect of the Conduct: Financial, Procedural, Product, and So Forth

• In accountability relationships the actor is obliged to explain and provide justification for his conduct.
• There are many aspects to this conduct, making it possible to distinguish a number of accountability relationships on the basis of the aspect that is most dominant.
• 54 This will often concur with the classification made according to type of forum.
• Another 53 See for the collective accountability of the Commission van Gerven, op.

D The Nature of the Obligation: Vertical, Diagonal and Horizontal Accountability

• Very generally speaking, there are two possibilities: in the first place, because he is being forced to, or could be forced to, and, second, because he voluntarily does so.
• In most cases of legal accountability too, the forum has the formal authority to compel the actor to give account, although this is not based on a principal–agent relationship, but on laws and regulations.
• Here, a hierarchical relationship is generally lacking between actor and forum, as are any formal obligations to render account.
• Another form of horizontal accountability, which is mentioned in the literature, is mutual accountability between bodies standing on equal footing.
• The majority of these administrative forums ultimately report to the minister or to parliament and thus derive the requisite informal power from this.

E Mapping Accountability

• This is a dichotomous exercise that follows the logic of either/or.59.
• Do the phenomena in my sample 55 Day and Klein, op, also known as The main question is.

A The Effects of Accountability: Three Perspectives

• Here the authors leave the realm of empirical description and enter the world of evaluation and, ultimately, prescription.
• This is much more a matter of degree and these assessments follow the logic of more-or-less.

The Democratic Perspective: Popular Control

• Public accountability is extremely important from a democratic perspective, as it helps citizens to control those holding public office.
• This is an approach that reaches back to the tenets of Rousseau and Weber, and has been theoretically defined using the principal–agent model.
• The ministers subsequently entrust the execution of their tasks to the many thousands of public servants at the ministries, who proceed to delegate part of their tasks to more or less independent bodies and institutions.
• Each principal in the chain of delegation seeks to monitor the execution of the delegated public tasks by calling the agent to account.
• Hence public accountability is an essential condition for the democratic process, as it provides the people’s representation and the voters with the information needed for judging the propriety and effectiveness of the conduct of the government.

The Constitutional Perspective: Prevention of Corruption and Abuse of Power

• A classic benchmark in the thinking about accountability is found in the liberal tradition of Locke, Montesquieu and the American Federalists,70 to name but a few.
• The main concern underlying this perspective is that of preventing the tyranny of absolute rulers, overly presumptuous, elected leaders or of an expansive and ‘privatised’ executive power.
• The remedy against an overbearing, improper or corrupt government is the organisation of ‘checks and balances’, of institutional countervailing powers.
• Other public institutions, such as an independent judicial power or a Chamber of Audit are put in place next to the voter, parliament and political officials, and given the power to request that account be rendered over particular aspects.
• Good governance arises from a dynamic equilibrium between the various powers of the state.

The Learning Perspective: Enhancing Government Effectiveness

• In the third learning perspective the chief purpose of accountability is entirely different again.
• Accountability is a crucial link in this approach, as it offers a regular mechanism to confront administrators with information about their own functioning and forces them to reflect on the successes and failures of their past policy.
• Public account giving can help to bring a tragic period to an end because it can offer a platform for the victims to voice their grievances, and for the real or reputed perpetrators to account for themselves and to justify or excuse their conduct.
• Cit. note 3 supra, p. 9. © 2007 The Author464 Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Box 3. The Importance of Accountability Direct Democratic control Countervailing powers Improvement/learning Indirect Legitimacy Catharsis.

B Evaluation Frameworks for Accountability

• The three perspectives outlined above offer more systematic frameworks to evaluate the effects of accountability arrangements.
• 79 Strom, ‘Parliamentary Democracy and Delegation’, op. cit. note 18 supra.
• © 2007 The Author 465 Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Box 5. Constitutional Perspective: Accountability and Equilibrium of Power Central idea Accountability is essential in order to withstand the ever-present tendency toward power concentration and abuse of powers in the executive power.
• The existence of these various perspectives makes the evaluation of accountability arrangements a somewhat equivocal exercise.
• © 2007 The Author466 Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. may turn agencies into rule-obsessed bureaucracies.

V Analysing and Assessing Accountability

• This article has tried to get to grips with the appealing but elusive concept of accountability by asking three types of questions, thus providing three types of building blocks for the analysis and assessment of accountability deficits in European governance.
• Three perspectives have been provided for the assessment of accountability relations: a democratic, a constitutional and a learning perspective.
• These building blocks cannot in themselves provide us with definite answers to the question whether there exist accountability deficits in European governance, because, ultimately, the evaluation of accountability arrangements in the EU, to cite Elisabeth Fisher,84 ‘cannot be disentangled from discussion about what is and should be the role and nature of European institutions’.

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Full text

Analysing and Assessing Accountability: A
Conceptual Framework
1
Mark Bovens*
Abstract: It has been argued that the EU suffers from serious accountability deficits. But
how can we establish the existence of accountability deficits? This article tries to get to
grips with the appealing but elusive concept of accountability by asking three types of
questions. First a conceptual one: what exactly is meant by accountability? In this article
the concept of accountability is used in a rather narrow sense: a relationship between
an actor and a forum, in which the actor has an obligation to explain and to justify his
or her conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgement, and the actor may
face consequences. The second question is analytical: what types of accountability are
involved? A series of dimensions of accountability are discerned that can be used to
describe the various accountability relations and arrangements that can be found in the
different domains of European governance. The third question is evaluative: how should we
assess these accountability arrangements? The article provides three evaluative perspec-
tives: a democratic, a constitutional and a learning perspective. Each of these perspectives
may produce different types of accountability deficits.
I Accountability and European Governance
There has long been a concern that the trend toward European policy making is not
being matched by an equally forceful creation of appropriate accountability regimes.
2
Accountability deficits are said to exist and even grow, compromising the legitimacy
of the European polity.
3
But how can we make a more systematic assessment of the
1
An earlier, much longer version of this article was published as EUROGOV paper C-06-01. It built to
some extent on a chapter on public accountability which has been published in E. Ferlie, L. Lynne and
C. Pollitt (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Public Management (Oxford University Press, 2005) and a Dutch
paper which was published in W. Bakker and K. Yesilkagit (eds), Publieke verantwoording (Boom, 2005).
Earlier versions have been presented at Connex team meetings in Leiden, Belfast and Mannheim. I thank
Carol Harlow, Paul ‘t Hart, Peter Mair, Yannis Papadopoulos, Richard Rawlings, Helen Sullivan,
Thomas Schillemans, Marianne van de Steeg and Sonja Puntscher-Riekmann for their valuable comments
on previous versions of this article.
* Professor of Public Administration, Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
2
P. Schmitter, How to Democratize the European Union...AndWhyBother? (Rowman and Littlefield,
2000).
3
T. Bergman and E. Damgaard (eds), Delegation and Accountability in the European Union (Frank Cass,
2000); C. Harlow, Accountability in the European Union (Oxford University Press, 2002); D. Curtin, Mind
the Gap: The Evolving European Union Executive and the Constitution, Third Walter van Gerven Lecture
European Law Journal, Vol. 13, No. 4, July 2007, pp. 447–468.
© 2007 The Author
Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

various accountabilities regarding the exercise of European governance, and establish
whether and where accountability deficits do exist?
Accountability is one of those golden concepts that no one can be against. It is
increasingly used in political discourse and policy documents because it conveys an
image of transparency and trustworthiness. However, its evocative powers make it also
a very elusive concept because it can mean many different things to different people, as
anyone studying accountability will soon discover.
The aim of this article is first to develop a parsimonious analytical framework that
can help to establish more systematically whether organisations or officials, exercising
public authority, are subject to accountability at all. This is basically a mapping
exercise—for example what are the accountabilities, formal and informal, of a particu-
lar European agency? For this purpose we need to establish when a certain practice or
arrangement qualifies as a form of accountability at all. In order to give more colours
to our map, we also want to be able to distinguish several, mutually exclusive, types of
accountability. Second, and separately, this article aims to develop an evaluative frame-
work that can be used to assess these accountability maps more systematically. For this
purpose we need perspectives that can help us to evaluate these accountability arrange-
ments: are the arrangements to hold the agency accountable adequate or not, sufficient
or insufficient, effective or ineffective?
The article is organised on the basis of three different questions, which provide three
types of building blocks for the analysis of accountability and European governance.
First a conceptual question: what exactly is meant by accountability? Then an analyti-
cal one: what types of accountability are involved? The third question is an altogether
different, evaluative question: how should we assess these accountability relations,
arrangements and regimes?
II The Concept of Accountability
A From Accounting to Accountability
The word ‘accountability’ is Anglo-Norman, not Anglo-Saxon, in origin. Historically
and semantically, it is closely related to accounting, in its literal sense of bookkeeping.
According to Dubnick,
4
the roots of the contemporary concept can be traced to the
reign of William I, in the decades after the 1066 Norman conquest of England. In 1085
William required all the property holders in his realm to render a count of what they
possessed. These possessions were assessed and listed by royal agents in the so-called
Domesday Books. This census was not held for taxation purposes alone; it also served
as a means to establish the foundations of royal governance. The Domesday Books
listed what was in the king’s realm; moreover, the landowners were all required to swear
oaths of fealty to the crown. By the early twelfth century, this had evolved into a highly
centralised administrative kingship that was ruled through centralised auditing and
semi-annual account giving.
In the centuries since the reign of William I of England, accountability has slowly
wrestled free from its etymological bondage with accounting. In contemporary political
(Europe Law Publishing, 2004); W. van Gerven, The European Union: A Polity of States and People (Hart,
2005).
4
M. J. Dubnick, Seeking Salvation for Accountability, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the
American Political Science Association (2002), pp. 7–9.
European Law Journal Volume 13
© 2007 The Author
448
Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

discourse, ‘accountability’ and ‘accountable’ no longer convey a stuffy image of
bookkeeping and financial administration, but they hold strong promises of fair and
equitable governance. Moreover, the accounting relationship has almost completely
reversed. ‘Accountability’ does not refer to sovereigns holding their subjects to account,
but to the reverse: it is the authorities themselves who are being held accountable by
their citizens.
Since the late twentieth century, the Anglo-Saxon world in particular has witnessed
a transformation of the traditional bookkeeping function in public administration into
a much broader form of public accountability.
5
This broad shift from financial account-
ing to public accountability ran parallel to the introduction of New Public Manage-
ment by the Thatcher Government in the UK and to the Reinventing Government
reforms initiated by the Clinton-Gore Administration in the USA.
6
The emancipation of ‘accountability’ from its bookkeeping origins is therefore
originally an Anglo-American phenomenon—if only because other languages, such as
French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Dutch or Japanese, have no exact equivalent
and do not (yet) distinguish semantically between ‘responsibility’ and ‘accountability’.
7
However, what started as an instrument to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of
public governance, has gradually become a goal in itself. Accountability has become an
icon for good governance, first in the USA,
8
but increasingly also in the EU. As a
concept, however, ‘accountability’ is rather elusive. The term ‘has come to stand as a
general term for any mechanism that makes powerful institutions responsive to their
particular publics’.
9
It is one of those evocative political words that can be used to patch
up a rambling argument, to evoke an image of trustworthiness, fidelity and justice, or
to hold critics at bay. For anyone reflecting on accountability, it is impossible to
disregard these strong evocative overtones. As an icon, the concept has become less
useful for analytical purposes, and today resembles a dustbin filled with good inten-
tions, loosely defined concepts and vague images of good governance. Nevertheless, we
should heed the summons from Dubnick
10
to save the concept from its advocates and
friends, as he so succinctly puts it.
B Broad and Narrow Accountability
In contemporary political and scholarly discourse ‘accountability’ often serves as a
conceptual umbrella that covers various other distinct concepts, such as transparency,
equity, democracy, efficiency, responsiveness, responsibility and integrity.
11
Parti-
cularly in American scholarly and political discourse, ‘accountability’ often is used
interchangeably with ‘good governance’ or virtuous behaviour. For O’Connell,
12
for
5
Harlow, op. cit. note 3 supra,p.19.
6
C. Pollitt and G. Bouckaert, Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis (Oxford University
Press, 2nd edn, 2005).
7
R. Mulgan, ‘“Accountability”: An Ever Expanding Concept?’ (2000) 78 Public Administration 555;
Harlow, op. cit. note 3 supra, pp. 14–15; Dubnick, op. cit. note 4 supra.
8
Dubnick, op. cit. note 4 supra.
9
R. Mulgan, Holding Power to Account: Accountability in Modern Democracies (Pelgrave, 2003).
10
Dubnick, op. cit. note 4 supra.
11
Ibid; Mulgan, op. cit. note 7 supra, at 555; R. D. Behn, Rethinking Democratic Accountability (Brookings
Institution Press, 2001), pp. 3–6.
12
L. O’Connell, ‘Program Accountability as an Emergent Property: The Role of Stakeholders in a
Program’s Field’, (2005) 65(1) Public Administration Review 86.
July 2007 Analysing and Assessing Accountability
© 2007 The Author
449
Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

example, accountability is present when public services have a high quality, at a low
cost and are performed in a courteous manner. Koppell
13
distinguishes no less than five
different dimensions of accountability—transparency, liability, controllability, respon-
sibility, responsiveness—that are each icons and umbrella concepts themselves. Such
very broad conceptualisations of the concept make it very difficult to establish empiri-
cally whether an official or organisation is subject to accountability, because each of the
various elements needs extensive operationalisation itself and because the various
elements cannot be measured along the same scale. Some dimensions, such as trans-
parency, are instrumental for accountability, but not constitutive of accountability;
others, such as responsiveness, are more evaluative instead of analytical dimensions.
Accountability in this very broad sense is basically an evaluative, not an analytical,
concept. It is used to qualify positively 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 in this broad sense is an essen-
tially contested and contestable concept,
14
because there is no general consensus about
the standards for accountable behaviour, and because they differ from role to role, time
to time, place to place and from speaker to speaker.
15
In this article, I will not define the concept in such a broad, evaluative sense, but in
a much more narrow, sociological sense. ‘Accountability’ is not just another political
catchword; it also refers to concrete practices of account giving. The most concise
description of accountability would be: ‘the obligation to explain and justify conduct’.
This implies a relationship between an actor, the accountor, and a forum, the account-
holder or accountee.
16
I will therefore stay close to its etymological and historical roots
and define accountability as a specific social relation.
17
Accountability is a relationship
between an actor and a forum, in which the actor has an obligation to explain and to justify
his or her conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgement, and the actor may
face consequences.
C Accountability as a Social Relation
This narrow definition of accountability contains a number of elements that need
further explanation. The actor can be either an individual, in our case an official or civil
servant, or an organisation, such as a public institution or an agency. The significant
other, the accountability forum, can be a specific person, such as a superior, a minister
or a journalist, or it can be an agency, such as parliament, a court or the audit office.
13
J. Koppell, ‘Pathologies of Accountability: ICANN and the Challenge of “Multiple Accountabilities
Disorder”’, (2005) 65(1) Public Administration Review 94.
14
See W. B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, in M. Black (ed.), The Importance of Language (Ithaca,
1962), pp. 121–146.
15
See E. Fisher, ‘The European Union in the Age of Accountability’, (2004) 24(1) Oxford Journal of Legal
Studies 495, at 510, for similar observations about the use of ‘accountability’ in the European context.
16
C. Pollitt, The Essential Public Manager (Open University Press/McGraw-Hill, 2003), p. 89.
17
Following, among others, P. Day and R. Klein, Accountabilities: Five Public Services (Tavistock, 1987),
p. 5; B. S. Romzek and M. J. Dubnick, ‘Accountability’, in J. M. Shafritz (ed.), International Encyclopae-
dia of Public Policy and Administration, Vol. 1: A–C (Westview Press, 1998), p. 6; J. S. Lerner and
Ph. E. Tetlock, ‘Accounting for the Effects of Accountability’, (1999) 125 Psychological Bulletin 255;
H. E. McCandless, A Citizen’s Guide to Public Accountability: Changing the Relationship Between Citizens
and Authorities (Trafford, 2001), p. 22; C. Scott, ‘Accountability in the Regulatory State’, (2000) 27(1)
Journal of Law and Society 40; Pollitt, op. cit. note 16 supra, p. 89; Mulgan, op. cit. note 9 supra, pp. 7–14.
European Law Journal Volume 13
© 2007 The Author
450
Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The relationship between the forum and the actor can have the nature of a principal–
agent relation—the forum being the principal, for example parliament, who has del-
egated authority to a minister, the agent, who is held to account himself regularly about
his performance in office. This is often the case with political forms of accountability.
18
However, as we will see, in many accountability relations, the forums are not principals
of the actors, for example courts in cases of legal accountability or professional asso-
ciations in cases of professional accountability.
The obligation that lies upon the actor can be formal or informal. Public officials
often will be under a formal obligation to render account on a regular basis to specific
forums, such as supervisory agencies, courts or auditors. In the wake of administrative
deviance, policy failures or disasters, public officials can be forced to appear in admin-
istrative or penal courts or to testify before parliamentary committees. An example is
former European commissioner Edith Cresson, who was brought before a Belgian
penal court and the European Court of Justice after allegations of nepotism and
corruption were made against her. But the obligation can also be informal, as in the
case of press conferences and informal briefings, or even self-imposed, as in the case of
voluntary audits.
The relationship between the actor and the forum, the actual account giving, usually
consists of at least three elements or stages. First of all, it is crucial that the actor is
obliged to inform the forum about his or her conduct, by providing various sorts of data
about the performance of tasks, about outcomes or about procedures. Often, particu-
larly in the case of failures or incidents, this also involves the provision of explanations
and justifications. Account giving is more than mere propaganda, or the provision of
information or instructions to the general public. The conduct that is to be explained and
justified can vary enormously, from budgetary scrutiny in cases of financial accountabil-
ity, to administrative fairness in cases of legal accountability, or even sexual propriety
when it comes to the political accountability of Anglo-American public officials.
Second, there needs to be a possibility for the forum to interrogate the actor and to
question the adequacy of the information or the legitimacy of the conduct—hence, the
close semantic connection between ‘accountability’ and ‘answerability’.
Third, the forum may pass judgement on the conduct of the actor. It may approve of
an annual account, denounce a policy, or publicly condemn the behaviour of an official
or an agency. In passing a negative judgement, the forum frequently imposes sanctions
of some kind on the actor.
It has been a point of discussion whether the possibility of sanctions is a constitutive
element of accountability.
19
Some would argue that a judgement by the forum, or even
only the stages of reporting, justifying and debating, would be enough to qualify a
relation as an accountability relation. I concur with Mulgan
20
and Strom
21
that the
possibility of sanctions of some kind is a constitutive element of narrow accountability
and that it should be included in the definition. The possibility of sanctions—not the
actual imposition of sanctions—makes the difference between non-committal provi-
sion of information and being held to account.
18
K. Strom, ‘Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies’, (2000) 37 European Journal of
Political Research 261; K. Strom, ‘Parliamentary Democracy and Delegation’, in K. Strom et al. (eds),
Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 55–106.
19
Mulgan, op. cit. note 9 supra, pp. 9–11.
20
Ibid., p. 9.
21
Strom, ‘Parliamentary Democracy and Delegation’, op. cit. note 18 supra,p.62.
July 2007 Analysing and Assessing Accountability
© 2007 The Author
451
Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in "Analysing and assessing accountability: a conceptual framework" ?

This article tries to get to grips with the appealing but elusive concept of accountability by asking three types of questions. In this article the concept of accountability is used in a rather narrow sense: a relationship between an actor and a forum, in which the actor has an obligation to explain and to justify his or her conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgement, and the actor may face consequences. The article provides three evaluative perspectives: a democratic, a constitutional and a learning perspective. An earlier, much longer version of this article was published as EUROGOV paper C-06-01. I thank Carol Harlow, Paul ‘ t Hart, Peter Mair, Yannis Papadopoulos, Richard Rawlings, Helen Sullivan, Thomas Schillemans, Marianne van de Steeg and Sonja Puntscher-Riekmann for their valuable comments on previous versions of this article. Accountability deficits are said to exist and even grow, compromising the legitimacy of the European polity. 

Q2. What is the remedy against an overbearing, improper or corrupt government?

The remedy against an overbearing, improper or corrupt government is the organisation of ‘checks and balances’, of institutional countervailing powers. 

Q3. Why is the legal accountability of increasing importance to public institutions?

In most Western countries, legal accountability is of increasing importance to public institutions as a result of the growing formalisation of social relations,40 or because of the greater trust which is placed in courts than in parliaments. 

Q4. Why is accountability used in political discourse and policy documents?

It is increasingly used in political discourse and policy documents because it conveys an image of transparency and trustworthiness. 

Q5. What is the role of public account giving in bringing a tragic period to an end?

Public account giving can help to bring a tragic period to an end because it can offer a platform for the victims to voice their grievances, and for the real or reputed perpetrators to account for themselves and to justify or excuse their conduct. 

Q6. What are some dimensions of accountability that are more evaluative than analytical?

Some dimensions, such as transparency, are instrumental for accountability, but not constitutive of accountability; others, such as responsiveness, are more evaluative instead of analytical dimensions. 

Q7. What is the effect of accountability on the confidence in public institutions?

Respect for authority is fast dwindling and the confidence in public institutions is under pressure in a number of Western countries. 

Q8. What is the need for accountability relations between public agencies and citizens?

In reaction to a perceived lack of trust in government, there is an urge in many Western democracies for more direct and explicit accountability relations between public agencies, on the one hand, and clients, citizens and civil society, on the other hand. 

Q9. What countries accept criminal liabilities for local public bodies?

such as the UK, France and the Netherlands, accept criminal liabilities for local public bodies, but not for the organs of the state. 

Q10. What are the three perspectives for the assessment of accountability relations?

Three perspectives have been provided for the assessment of accountability relations: a democratic, a constitutional and a learning perspective. 

Q11. What is the official venue for accountability in public organisations?

This is the official venue for accountability in most public organisations, and with regard to most types of accountability relationships, with the exception of professional accountability.