Jonathan B. Justice

E-Government as an Instrument of Fiscal Accountability and Responsiveness: Do the Best Practitioners Employ the Best Practices?

Fiscal transparency and citizen participation in budgeting processes are widely promoted as means toward the ends of democratic accountability and responsiveness in the allocation and use of public funds. In the past decade, academics and practitioners enthusiastic about e-government have emphasized the potential for using information technology to enhance democratic governance. Putting these two streams of public administration theory and practice together, the authors developed criteria for assessing e-budgeting efforts and applied them to a sample of Web sites operated by state and local governments. Although practitioners are ahead of academics in exploring the potential of e-government for improving fiscal accountability and responsiveness, practice lags behind the relevant basic recommendations of the Government Finance Officers Association. This finding leads to research and practice agendas aimed at enhancing the use of e-government to enhance fiscal transparency and participation.

Accountability and the Evil of Administrative Ethics

Scholars of administrative ethics have recently been attentive to the problem of so-called administrative evil. The authors argue that evil can be understood as a socially constructed category of agents and acts specific to particular circumstances and moral communities, and the authors apply a framework of accountability to reflect the dynamics of that constructed reality. Selected examples of efforts to hold evil actors accountable or otherwise to account for evil acts illustrate a paradox: Responses to so-called evil may themselves be labeled evil in hindsight or by members of other contemporaneous communities. In light of this paradox and attendant ethical dilemmas, the authors argue that conventional ethical and behavioral prescriptions are necessary but insufficient protections against catastrophic mis-, mal-, or nonfeasance in and by organizations.

Private Governments or Public Policy Tools? The Law and Public Policy of New Jersey's Special Improvement Districts

Abstract Business improvement districts (BIDs)—special districts usually governed by business and property owners—have been portrayed by some observers as private governments serving narrow commercial interests and by others as policy tools—instruments employed by states and general-purpose local governments to mobilize resources and advance public purposes. We use data from case law, case studies of local practices, and a statewide survey of New Jerseys BIDs to argue that they can best be understood as genuine public-private partnerships that serve simultaneously as instruments of public policy which advance general public interests and as self-help entities which serve more particular interests.

Fiscal transparency and authentic citizen participation in public budgeting: the role of third-party intermediation

Much of the current U.S. academic literature on participatory budgeting is preoccupied with direct citizen involvement in budget formulation, reflecting a particular normative theory of democracy. In this essay we suggest that U.S. academics can learn from a contemporary international community of practice concerned with “civil-society budget work”-a quasi-grassroots, quasi-pluralist movement with member organizations throughout the developing world-as well as from the budget exhibits mounted by the New York Bureau of Municipal Research at the turn of the last century. The budget-work movement employs third-party intermediation and advocacy, through all phases of the budget cycle. U.S. academics and budget-work practitioners can learn from each other, and this represents an unexploited opportunity for all concerned. We propose a program of locally based action research and trans-local evaluative synthesis.

Governing at arm's length: eroding or enhancing democracy?

Publisher Rights Statement: Checked for eligibility: 12/08/2015. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copy edited version of an article published in Policy and Politics. The definitive publisher-authenticated version [Durose, Catherine; Justice, Jonathan; Skelcher, Chris. Policy & Politics, Volume 43, Number 1, January 2015, pp. 137-153(17)] is available online at: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/tpp/pap/2015/00000043/00000001/art00008?token=0055139ec066720297d76345f7b6e2b467a7363 422c2b6d3f6a4b4b6e6e42576b642738be949b10b1dc09 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/030557314X14029325020059

Social Capital, E-Government, and Fiscal Transparency in the States

Transparency is one requisite of democratic governance. Many American states have implemented online checkbooks and similar forms of fiscal e-transparency, but not universally or with uniformly high quality. This article seeks to explain why. Correlation and regression results support hypotheses that higher-quality implementation responds to lower state levels of social capital, more traditionalistic political cultures, greater perceptions of official corruption, and larger populations.

Accountability and Debt Management: The Case of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) provides transportation infrastructure and services to nearly 15 million residents of two states. In 2002, the MTA violated a strong professional norm of debt management by refinancing

The diffusion of civic technology and open government in the United States

13 billion of long-term debt in a way that increased rather than decreased the cost of repayment. This behavior, heavily influenced by the informal advice of investment bankers, seemed to many observers to confirm the oft-decried tendency of debt-issuing public authorities to sacrifice their accountability to citizens in order to please the bankers and other debt-market participants on whom they depend for financial resources. Yet the MTA’s choice appears on closer examination to have fulfilled the common desires of contemporary fare payers, tax payers, voters, and elected officials to maximize current spending while deferring costs to future tax and fare payers. The MTA case highlights potential conflicts between the professional imperative of democratic accountability and the competing professional norms of cost minimization, sustainability, and intergenerational equity. The fundamental structure of this dilemma is also apparent in other policy arenas with intergenerational implications, such as social security and climate policy, and raises the question of when obedience to market, political, and hierarchical expectations can justify sacrificing professional principles.

Operationalizing Giddens’s Recursive Model of Accountability

Civic technology is a nascent force in the relationship between governments and communities. Elements of the civic technology ecosystem include open data, related information and communications technology (ICT) innovations and the organizational boundary-spanning practices of civic technology. This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of civic technology adoption by local governments in the United States. The research compares the 113 U.S. city governments recognized for their exemplary fiscal year 2012 popular annual financial reports (PAFRs) with the 49 municipalities in the U.S. state of Delaware that operate websites. Results suggest that a long term commitment to citizen involvement in government data and the size of the community are important predictors of adoption.

Smart Cities Are Transparent Cities: The Role of Fiscal Transparency in Smart City Governance

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the accountability studies literature by reporting on an attempt to operationalize a recursive concept of accountability grounded in Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration. The approach developed for this research focused on felt accountability—the subjective experience of being accountable—and on the role of ontological (in)security in shaping accountable actors’ conduct. Case studies of tsunami hazard-mitigation planning in three coastal counties in Oregon provide a preliminary empirical test of the analytic framework. Findings from analysis of documents and semi-structured interviews of local officials involved in mitigation planning confirm the viability of the approach and generate implications for continuing research and for policy and practice. Further development of the approach and framework has the potential to advance richly descriptive and explanatory empirical accountability research and to provide usable insights for the practice of accountability in public organizations.