Mark Bovens

Analysing and Assessing Accountability: A Conceptual Framework

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.

From Street-Level to System-Level Bureaucracies: How Information and Communication Technology is Transforming Administrative Discretion and Constitutional Control

The use of information and communication technology (ICT) is rapidly changing the structure of a number of large, executive public agencies. They used to be machine bureaucracies in which street-level officials exercised ample administrative discretion in dealing with individual clients. In some realms, the street-level bureaucrats have vanished. Instead of street-level bureaucracies, they have become system-level bureaucracies. System analysts and software designers are the key actors in these executive agencies. This article explores the implications of this transformation from the perspective of the constitutional state. Thanks to ICT, the implementation of the law has virtually been perfected. However, some new issues rise: What about the discretionary power of the system-level bureaucrats? How can we guarantee due process and fairness in difficult cases? The article ends with several institutional innovations that may help to embed these system-level bureaucracies in the constitutional state.

Success and Failure in Public Governance

The literature on governmental performance falls into two categories. There is a voluminous literature communicating that what can go wrong does go wrong when we have to deal with government policy and its administration. The other category comprises a long series of writings that express unlimited trust in government and its ability to solve the difficult problems of the real world. But research that tries to strike a balance and approach the difficult analytic challenge of specifying the conditions for success and failure in governance is in short supply. Still, there are those who have moved us part of the way. An example is Steven Kelmans (1987) now classic account of policy making in American government, arguing that the system does, after all, show some quite remarkable strengths that also mark its performance. European contributions, written in a much more government-friendly climate, have on the contrary pointed out that in order to strike a proper balance we must acknowledge that, like market failure, there are pathologies in politics and administration that amount to government failure (Le Grand 1991; Janicke 1986).

Deciphering the Dutch drop: ten explanations for decreasing political trust in The Netherlands

The Netherlands has always been the odd case out regarding trust in public institutions. In the 1980s and 1990s, contrary to international trends, trust in government remained high and even increased. Suddenly, from 2002 onwards, public trust in government declined dramatically. In this article we examine the plausibility of ten explanations, embedded in the international scholarly literature, and explore whether they are empirically supported or rebutted in case of the Dutch drop. We find that because most of the literature concentrates on the cross-national erosion of political support over a long period within Western democracies, explanations tend to focus on gradual, long-term demographic, social, and political trends. Sudden dips in trust levels, however, require different sets of explanatory factors; they are better explained by political or economic contingencies, such as sudden political or economic crises. In the case of the Dutch drop, the most plausible explanation is a combination of an economic decline, combined with high political instability and contestation during the first Balkenende cabinets. As of 2007, with a new cabinet in office, and an economic recovery in place, trust figures are on the rise again. Points for practitioners Sudden dips in public trust in government are better explained by political or economic contingencies, such as political or economic crises, than by a deterioration in government performance or by long-term demographic, social, and political trends. In the case of the sudden drop in trust in The Netherlands, the most plausible explanation is a combination of an economic decline, combined with high political instability and contestation during the first Balkenende cabinets. As of 2007, with a new cabinet in office, and economic recovery in place, trust figures are on the rise again.

Revisiting the study of policy failure

ABSTRACT The analysis of policy failures is, by definition, not a neutral endeavour, since policy fiascos are not neutral events. Moreover, they are often, usually implicitly, but sometimes explicitly, permeated with prosecutorial narratives, blame games and a search for culprits. Fiascos do not just ‘happen’. They are constructed, declared, and argued over in labelling processes that are not necessarily ‘evidence–based’. This presents a challenge for any academic endeavour to identify, analyse and explain policy fiascos. Against this backdrop, we assess the study of policy failure as it stands today, and offer some reflections for its further development.

Frame multiplicity and policy fiascoes: Limits to explanation

The dynamics of intractability, frame multiplicity and intense controversy not only characterize policy formation struggles, as described by Schön and Rein, but also affect the evaluation of policies and government action. Policy analysts play an important part in the politics of policy evaluation. This article demonstrates that they tend to produce very different explanations for controversial, failing policies. Such differing explanations imply different causal attributions, different allocations of blame, and different lessons for future policy-making. Such differences are not random occurrences; they are embedded in the analytical frames that evaluators use to reconstruct policy processes and to explain their outcomes. It is shown that at least three deep-rooted frames can be reconstructed: fiascoes as failures of public problem solving, fiascoes as institutional imbalances, and fiascoes as system artefacts. One of the great epistemological challenges is how to deal with multiple analytical frames. The final part of the article discusses various strategies.

Segregation through Anti-Discrimination: How the Netherlands Got Divided Again

In the autumn of 2003, SV Blerick, a local amateur football club in Limburg, in the south of the Netherlands, made headlines when the news broke that young players with ethnic minority backgrounds were temporarily being barred from becoming members of the club. The club’s chairman explained that it was virtually impossible to get club members from minority backgrounds, or their parents involved with the club as volunteers. Nearly all the work in the club was therefore left to a dwindling number of native Dutch members. If the number of club members from immigrant backgrounds were to increase any further, then it looked likely that the few remaining board and committee members would quit. If that were to happen, the club would fall victim to its own success. At that time, about 30 per cent of the total membership of SV Blerick was from an ethnic minority background–far more than at most other football clubs in the region. In 1997, the club had won the Fair Play Award, precisely because of the large number of players from ethnic minorities.2

Conflicting loyalties: ethical pluralism in administrative life

Modem civil servants experience and often profess multiple loyalties, both internally and externally. Some of these loyalties can be detrimental to organisational objectives, and many of them will cause conflicts between employees and managers. This paper is about the forms of administrative disobedience that can result from these conflicts of loyalties. Central to it is the classic, Weberian question: To whom should an official be loyal in the case of an order which appears wrong to him? The orthodox notion of strict, hierarchical loyalty and its limits are first discussed. Next, four alternatives for redefining administraive loyalty are presented and evaluated; personal responsibility, social responsibility, professional responsibility and public responsibility. In the conclusion, I examine how we can use these alternative redefinitions to retain the objectives behind the orthodox notion even though the orthodox notion itself is no longer acceptable or applicable.