Accountability Political accountability. Political accountability is when a politician makes choices on behalf of the people, and the people have the ability to reward or sanction the politician.
Accountability is a noun that describes accepting responsibility, and it can be personal or very public. A government has accountability for decisions and laws affecting its citizens; an individual has accountability for acts and behaviors. Sometimes, though, taking accountability means admitting you made a mistake.
Public accountability involves the obligation to: provide information about performance; to explain decision making; and to justify conduct. It implies the possibility of debate, of public questions and governmental answers and eventually of judgment by citizens.
Some common synonyms of accountable are amenable, answerable, liable, and responsible. While all these words mean “subject to being held to account,” accountable suggests imminence of retribution for unfulfilled trust or violated obligation. How do amenable and liable relate to one another, in the sense of accountable?
Accountability refers to the acceptance of responsibility for honest and ethical conduct toward others. A company’s accountability extends to its shareholders, employees, and the wider community in which it operates. Accountability also implies a willingness to be judged on performance.
In ethics and governance, accountability is equated with answerability, culpability, liability, and the expectation of account-giving.As in an aspect of governance, it has been central to discussions related to problems in the public sector, nonprofit, private (corporate), and individual contexts. In leadership roles, accountability is the acknowledgment of and assumption of responsibility for actions, products, decisions, and policies such as administration, governance, and implementation, including the obligation to report, justify, and be answerable for resulting consequences.In governance, accountability has expanded beyond the basic definition of “being called to account for one’s actions”. It is frequently described as an account-giving relationship between individuals, e.g. “A is accountable to B when A is obliged to inform B about A’s (past or future) actions and decisions, to justify them, and to suffer punishment in the case of eventual misconduct.”The word accountability derives from the late Latin accomptare (to account), a prefixed form of computare (to calculate), which in turn is derived from putare (to reckon). While the word itself does not appear in English until its use in 13th century Norman England, the concept of account-giving has ancient roots in record-keeping activities related to governance and money-lending systems that first developed in Ancient Egypt Israel, Babylon, Greece, and later Rome.
Political Accountability
Political accountability is when a politician makes choices on behalf of the people, and the people have the ability to reward or sanction the politician. In representative democracies, citizens delegate power to elected officials through periodic elections, and such officials are empowered to represent or act in the citizens’ interest. A challenge is how to see to it that those with such power, who presumably have divergent interests from the citizens, nonetheless act in their best interests. Citizens can rely on rewards or sanctions to reward or threaten politicians who might otherwise act in a manner that is antithetical to the people’s interest. Accountability occurs when citizens only vote to re-elect representatives who act in their interests, and if representatives then select policies that will help them be re-elected. “Governments are ‘accountable’ if voters can discern whether governments are acting in their interest and sanction them appropriately, so that those incumbents who act in the best interest of the citizens win reelection and those who do not lose them.”
Representatives can be held accountable through two mechanisms: electoral replacement and rational anticipation.In electoral replacement, citizens vote to replace representatives who are out of step with their interests. Rational anticipation requires that representatives anticipate the consequences of being out of step with their constituency and then govern in accordance with citizens’ wishes to avoid negative consequences. Accountability can still be achieved even if citizens are not perfectly knowledgeable about their representatives’ actions; as long as representatives believe that they will be held accountable by citizens, they will still be motivated to act in accordance with the citizens’ interests.
Administrative Accountability
Administrative accountability refers to the responsibility and answerability of public officials. and organizations for their actions and decisions. It is a fundamental aspect of good governance. and plays a vital role in ensuring transparency, integrity, and trust in the functioning of public. administration.
Five elements–often referred to as the ‘five Cs’–play a major role in leadership and team accountability. These five Cs are: common purpose, clear expectations, communication and alignment, coaching and collaboration, and consequences and results.
Administrative accountability refers to how public administrators monitor each other through various mechanisms. It includes:
• Program accountability, where different actors within the government demand responsibility for results.
• Hierarchical accountability, where superiors hold subordinates accountable for delegated duties. Administrative accountability involves both answerability, which aligns actions to principals’ goals, and expectation management, where actors handle multiple stakeholder expectations.
Electoral Accountability
Electoral accountability refers to citizens using their vote to sanction or reward politicians.
Some researchers have considered accountability using formal theory, which makes assumptions about the state of the world to draw larger conclusions. Voters can hold representatives accountable through the process of sanctioning—voting the incumbent out of office in response to poor performance. While politicians face a decrease in vote share as a result of poor performance, they are less likely to see an increase in vote share for good performance. Selection—voters choosing candidates based on who will best represent their interests—is another method by which voters hold their representatives accountable.These methods of accountability can occur simultaneously, with voters holding representatives accountable using both sanctioning and selection.These conclusions rely on the assumption that voters do not observe the policy implemented by the incumbent, but do know their own welfare.
While elections provide a mechanism which can theoretically increase government accountability to citizens, they may instead lead to less egalitarian policy outcomes, because those who hold the government accountable tend to be from wealthier segments of society. For example, a study of elected versus appointed property assessors in the state of New York shows that the election of property assessors leads to policies that severely undertax wealthier homes relative to poorer homes.
The concept of accountability is not by itself problematic, or at least it should not be. We say that one person, A, is accountable to another, B, if two conditions are met. First, there is an understanding that A is obliged to act in some way on behalf of B. Second, B is empowered by some formal institutional or perhaps informal rules to sanction or reward A for her activities or performance in this capacity. In this sense, employees are accountable to their employers, CEOs to their boards and their boards to stockholders, department chairs to the departments they represent, and elected politicians to their electorates. In the jargon of economic theory, relations involving accountability are agency relationships in which one party is understood to be an “agent” who makes some choices on behalf of a “principal” who has powers to sanction or reward the agent.
Most interesting questions about accountability in political and economic contexts concern not its definition but rather the understanding of what activities or performance the agent is accountable for, the nature of the principal’s sanctioning or rewarding instruments, and the problem of to what extent a given system of incentives will lead the agent to act on behalf of the principal, that is, to do what the principal would want. In addition, in the case of electoral accountability, additional problems arise from the presence of multiple principals (voters, but perhaps also courts and other elected officials in some cases) rather than a single principal or a collective body that can act as a single principal.
