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Voluntary accountability is widely documented. Yet, the concept does not sit comfortably within prevailing frameworks that conceptualize accountability as an obligation. This paper sets out to update our understanding of accountability by explicitly embedding this phenomenon within the broader conceptual structure of public accountability. It demonstrates how the proposed conceptual framework can help us distinguish between voluntary accountability and related, but distinct, concepts, such as transparency. It further illustrates how the framework can help us answer pressing questions about the varying rationales behind voluntary account-giving, the audiences targeted by accounts as well as the consequences of voluntary accountability for democracy.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore the usefulness of popular reporting (PR) in an Italian city as a dialogic accounting tool for promoting citizens’ engagement with digital platforms. This study aims to contribute to the debate on democratic accounting technologies with a focus on PR and digital platforms, using the theoretical lens of dialogic accounting. Design/methodology/approach A longitudinal case study is used to analyse the implementation and evolution of PR in the city of Turin, Italy and explore how the city involved its citizens with digital platforms. Findings This study contributes to the debate on public accountability through dialogic accounting tools. Research limitations/implications Multiple sources (surveys, interviews and interventionist workshops) are used to analyse Turin, Italy as a longitudinal case study. Practical implications This study offers practical reflections for legislators, politicians and public managers who need new knowledge and empirical analysis of the effective implementation of the PR as a tool for dialogue and empowering public accounting to hold continuous dialogue with the citizens. Originality/value PR can be considered a useful dialogic accounting tool for politicians, managers and government experts to encourage citizens’ engagement in a pluralistic society.

As the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) Digital Platforms Inquiry was at pains to point out, social media and search platforms now capture unprecedented shares of Australian media advertising expenditure. However, this loose collection of media forms and the advertising that supports them are some distance from traditional forms of media and advertising. While much has been written about these differences, the nexus between social media and search media forms and their advertising and promotional settlements had received comparatively little attention until the ACCC made it the front and centre of its inquiry. Our concern here is to take up the invitation the ACCC offers: to reorient our scholarly and public discussions of platforms towards the promotional culture of social media and search platforms. We consider the implications for advertiser-supported media, the unique form of advertising they have created and their challenge to public accountability.

In the quest for transparency and accountability in the public sector, several political administrations have initiated public sector reforms to promote accountability and transparency in Nigeria. The paper investigates the impact of political leadership on political accountability and fiscal accountability in Nigeria. It also explains why the problem of lack of accountability has thrived despite the numerous reforms which have been introduced to abate it. Anchored in a documentary/historical research design, the paper observed that the problem of lack of accountability thrives because of legal lapses, weakness of civil society organizations, political patronage and the principle of possessive individualism/primitive capital accumulation that holds the country’s elites are embroiled in. The paper recommends policy learning, adherence to the principles of the constitution and constitutionalism, civil society advocacy, and recall to engender accountability in the Nigerian public sector.

Nuclear power has always been a controversial issue since it was discovered as a source of power for civil use. Despite being a global phenomenon, nuclear power is viewed differently around the world, and consequently, different discourses have had different outcomes. This study does a comparative analysis of nuclear power discourses between India and Russia, two countries of distinct political systems. This study analyses the media coverage and content of the main discourse themes in India’s and Russia’s print media from March 2011 to March 2019. The study finds that in both countries, despite their different political set-ups, nuclear power discourse has a pro-nuclear character.

This present study intends to analyze the factors affecting the performance of the local government of North Sulawesi. The population of this study includes the members of the Regional People’s Representative Assembly and the leaders of Regional Apparatus Organizations managing the Regional Revenue and Expenditure Budget (APBD). Those Regional Apparatus Organizations include Education and Culture Office, Health Office, Regional Revenue Service, Tourism Office, Public Works Office, and Auditor Inspectorate of North Sulawesi Province. The sampling technique used is the saturated sampling technique. Data collection techniques employed consist of an interview, documentation study, and questionnaire dissemination. The analysis is conducted using Partial Least Square (PLS). Based on the analysis, we found that public participation has a significant effect on the transparency of financial management; the internal control system has a significant effect on local government performance; the internal control system has a significant effect on public accountability; the internal control system has a significant effect on the quality of financial reports, and public accountability has a significant effect on the performance of local governments. However, public participation has no significant effect on local government performance; public participation has no significant effect on public accountability; public participation has no significant effect on the quality of financial reports; the internal control system has no significant effect on financial management transparency; financial management transparency has no significant effect on local government performance, and the quality of financial reports has no significant effect on local government performance. This study also reveals that public accountability is the mediating variable between the internal control system and local government performance.

Although journalism and media coverage are known to induce, inform, and affect public accountability processes, little is known about media-covered accountability. This study therefore explores accountability processes of Danish and Flemish agencies as subjects of the news. Drawing on news construction literature, our quantitative content analysis of newspaper coverage ( N = 13,540) focuses on the presence of accountability processes in media coverage and the extent to which organizational characteristics (task, political salience, and size) are related to this phenomenon. Horizontal accountability forums have the highest media presence. Opinions from horizontal forums, vertical forums, and citizens appear less frequently for service-providing organizations.

Public accountability through information disclosure is a pillar of modern education reform efforts. Despite the ubiquity of this approach, we argue that public accountability in education is undertheorized and often predictably unlikely to achieve its intended policy goals. Drawing on examples from an equity-oriented court case in California and the literatures on democratic engagement and parent use of school performance data, we propose a framework for thinking about the design of public accountability systems in education. The framework could provide guidance for policymakers considering new efforts at improving schools through the production and dissemination of educational data.

The thirtieth anniversary of the election of Wayne Goss’s Labor Party to government in Queensland was marked on 2 December 2019. Considered a landmark political event, the 1989 state election saw the once-dominant National Party dispatched from office after thirty-two years of conservative government in this state. The election of an energetic new premier kick-started a period of purposeful public administration reform and public accountability renewal that many have described since as ‘the birth of modern Queensland’. Yet the end of the divisive Bjelke-Petersen era, as Goss’s ascent was characterised, was for some an uneasy time of accelerated transformational change. From these varied perspectives, and through the recorded recollections of public figures and senior administrators of the time, this article looks back at a modern benchmark for ‘historic’ state elections in Queensland.

The increasing interest of legal academia on the doctrine of Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments and its growing enforcement by the judiciary in different jurisdictions has started to normalize a doctrine that was considered controversial and extraordinary. This paper seeks to cast some doubts on the use of this doctrine, especially when the Court that enforces it is the subject of the amendment itself. In the first section it will question the conceptual foundations of the doctrine by recourse to legal theory, focusing not only on the idea of constituent power, but also on those of the rule of law and accountability. In the second section, some comparative cases of unconstitutional constitutional amendments will be analyzed, focusing on those where the judiciary itself was the subject of the amendment. Finally, from a normative and conceptual standpoint, a dialogic approach to the application of the doctrine will be proposed, to mitigate the fact that Constitutional Courts can become an unaccountable accountability-holder.

National parliaments (NPs) are vital to the European Union’s (EU’s) democratic legitimacy. They are tasked with controlling their governments through oversight and scrutiny while providing a deliberative forum by offering policy alternatives, informing, and connecting citizens to the EU. NPs can only provide public accountability if they adequately meet these challenges, ensuring a well-informed citizenry that is able to form and vote according to their preferences on European integration. To do this, Members of Parliament (MPs) need to publicly communicate EU issues and important developments concerning the EU project. Yet, the use of the communicative function of NPs in EU affairs remains underexplored and questions of public accountability unanswered. Against this background, this study aims to shed light on the general salience of the EU in the plenary by adopting a principal-agent framework to analyze the factors that co-vary with the willingness of MPs to discuss the EU. Employing regression analysis on a novel dataset with observations from 17 European NPsincluding over 20,000 plenary protocols from 2006-2019, this study notes a general upwards trend of the emphasis MPs put on the EU over time, driven by critical junctures, most notably, the Lisbon treaty and the Eurozone crisis. The results of this study also indicate that MPs are most consistently responsive to elections and other key EU events. Besides, factors related to authority transfers and EU legislation as well as strategic party incentives determine how much MPs use their communicative function in the plenary. Nevertheless, this study unveils some challenges to the democratic legitimacy of the EU.

Governance researchers have repeatedly discussed how to make public governance more accountable given the relatively ‘thin’ accountability of representative government. Recent decades have seen the growth of new, compensatory forms of accountability. However, these measures do not seem have satisfied the demands for strengthening public sector accountability. Drawing on the concept of social accountability, this article challenges common wisdom in arguing that collaborative governance may enhance public governance accountability, although it also raises new accountability problems that must be tackled. The article develops a heuristic framework for empirical studies of accountability, which improves the impact of collaborative forms of governance.

The purpose of the paper is to provide theoretical and empirical insights into NGO accountability in the context of public sector accounting. We present a case study of two advocacy Italian NGOs which act as informational surrogates in the accountability relationship between local governments and the civic public. We extend the concept of surrogate accountability by integrating accounting education as one of its features. Alongside making data accessible, NGOs in our case explain accounting terms and organise educational events. By doing so, they aim to “repair” the weak information link in the accountability mechanism of local governments.

The leadership and advisory boards of American science agencies are largely organized according to the ideas set forth by an influential scientist, Dr. Vannevar Bush, after World War II. Although American science agencies are publicly funded, only experts control what research is funded and how each agency operates. Wielding his unique position of power after the war, Dr. Vannevar Bush suppressed the ideas of his adversary, Senator Harley Kilgore, resulting in the absence of public accountability and citizen input that defines American science agencies today. We argue that citizens must have a seat at the table in the leadership of science agencies to promote trust in science, reduce inequity, increase efficiency, embrace democratic principles, and address the needs of the American people. By providing a mechanism for non-expert citizens to influence the direction of American science agencies, Congress can now finally rectify the double-cross of Senator Harley Kilgore by Dr. Vannevar Bush.

Numerous politicians and scholars have argued that accountability of public authorities to citizens, clients, and societal actors is needed in the current age of governance. Academic debates about social accountability are however scattered with incompatible conceptualizations, high normative expectations, and sobering findings. This article develops an in-depth framework that provides a comprehensive definition and typology of social accountability. It discusses major empirical challenges to social accountability and multiple behavioral styles within social accountability. By distinguishing consensual and confrontational styles of account-holding and account-giving, this article shows that social accountability could serve multiple purposes that go beyond rosy ideals.

Interactions between horizontal accountability agencies (e.g., anti-corruption agencies [ACAs]) and social accountability actors (e.g., journalists, civil society activists, and complainants/whistleblowers) are recognized as important to horizontal agencies’ performance, but the reason(s) is not clear. This study therefore explores why horizontal accountability agencies need social accountability actors in performing their functions. The study analyses data from 30 key stakeholders in Australia, including ACAs staff members, social accountability actors, and other observers to report on the specific support roles social actors play to ACAs’ activities and operations. Through the conceptual lens of social accountability, evidence show that social actors play four key types of support roles to ACAs’ activities and operations: activate ACAs’ investigations; “amplify” ACAs’ operations; guard ACAs’ activities and operations; and defend ACAs’ independence and powers. These findings support the need for interactions and, also, affirm the potential for research into how these support roles can better be provided for effective anti-corruption outcomes. The research is of value to public accountability agencies in Australia, and internationally.

Against the complex backdrop of a post-modern era, characterised by a renewed emphasis on public accountability, oppositional social and political movements, it has been argued that traditional age...

In this paper I explore the infl uence of the state’s approach to foreigners (migrant or nonmigrant) on the rule of law within the receiving country, limiting my considerations to the problem of protecting the right to privacy. My key argument is that normalizing infringement on the privacy of foreigners, for example due to a certain recurrent ‘state of emergency’, leads to weakening of the execution of privacy protection by means of ground-level regulations. I begin by analyzing the diff erence between the right to privacy and privacy laws, and proceed to make this diff erence clearer by analyzing the foundations of privacy protection in two distinct legal systems, i.e. that of Poland and the USA. Then, I present the similarities and diff erences in treating the foreigners and the citizens of a country using the example of mass surveillance. These observations lead to proposing an answer to the following question: why are foreigners treated diff erently in the context of privacy? Finally, I describe the nature of the aforementioned ‘state of emergency’ and get into more detail on the relationship between security and privacy infringement. The key point of this paper will be made by describing the process of weakening the citizens’ privacy protection by using the regulations and technology developed for the sake of alleviating the ‘state of emergency’ related to the foreigners.

Healthcare professionals who raise concerns about workplace safety or other problems should be praised as heroes and changemakers. However, some whistleblowers face retaliation for speaking out, and the incidence of retaliation cases against these employees has spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article reflects on the role of whistleblowers and their importance to public accountability.

The purpose of parliament is to present a discussion of policy in a fashion that will bring about a consensus that results in collective action. Such a collective action serves the common good of the state, although second-order effects and Pareto optimality is difficult to obtain, if not impossible. Parliament attempts to address the second-best world in a socially optimal fashion. As such accountability and scrutiny are the key tools through which such a body can address the challenges faced by a financial sector faced with profound difficulties. Such accountability is of paramount importance to provide sustainable public trust in parliament.

Cobus de Swardt describes how Transparency International (TI) celebrates whistleblowers by awarding and extensively promoting their actions. TI’s global influence on whistleblowing reforms is documented. These include: the EU Directive that would oblige member governments to protect whistleblowers in all EU countries; and the G20 Principles on Whistleblower Protection. De Swardt illustrates how more than 400 civil society organisations and trade unions adopt essentially TI’s text on the protection of whistleblowers, which is in turn endorsed by the G20 without major changes to TI’s work. During this same period TI’s own internal reforms are in stark contrast to its advise to others: it fails to install checks-and-balances, independent oversight and public accountability in its ethics and complaint mechanisms.

Despite being issued by one of the two main professional associations for museums in the United States, the efficacy and limitations of the American Alliance of Museums’ (AAM) “Standards Regarding Archaeological Material and Ancient Art” remain largely unstudied. Issued in 2008, the AAM’s guidelines establish mechanisms for public accountability: (1) museums should maintain a publicly available collection policy; (2) if a museum acquires an object that does not comply with the guidelines, it should be transparent about why the museum has deemed it appropriate to do so; and (3) museums should make all ownership information for archaeological and ancient material accessible to the public. Over the course of a year, we contacted 67 AAM member museums to survey whether they complied with each mechanism and to what extent. The responses showed that compliance with the AAM’s guidelines is significantly lacking, and transparency is—alarmingly, though unsurprisingly—not a priority in small museums. Using the David Owsley Museum of Art as a case study, this chapter will discuss our findings and the dangers unregulated acquisitions in small museums can pose to cultural heritage preservation and art market integrity.

Over the past two decades, humanitarian conduct has been drifting away from the classical paradigm. This drift is caused by the blurring of boundaries between development aid and humanitarianism and the increasing reliance on digital technologies and data. New humanitarianism, especially in the form of disaster risk reduction, involved government authorities in plans to strengthen their capacity to deal with disasters. Digital humanitarianism now enrolls remote data analytics: GIS capacity, local data and information management experts, and digital volunteers. It harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to strengthen humanitarian agencies and governments’ capacity to anticipate and cope better with crises. In this article, we first trace how the meaning of accountability changed from classical to new and finally to digital humanitarianism. We then describe a recent empirical case of anticipatory humanitarian action in the Philippines. The Red Cross Red Crescent movement designed an artificial intelligence algorithm to trigger the release of funds typically used for humanitarian response in advance of an impending typhoon to start up early actions to mitigate its potential impact. We highlight emerging actors and fora in the accountability relationship of anticipatory humanitarian action as well as the consequences arising from actors’ (mis)conduct. Finally, we reflect on the implications of this new form of algorithmic accountability for classical humanitarianism.

Studies on village governance in Indonesia, especially in the maritime areas since the passage of new village law regulations, have not been so comprehensive in analyzing coastal village governance. This article aims to describe and analyze village governance in enhancing public accountability. The study was conducted by taking the case of coastal villages in South Sulawesi. We have carried out some analyses by identifying issues with institutional mechanisms and civic forums. The results show generally minimal community involvement in the governance of coastal villages and low capacity of the village governments. The practice of coastal village governance shows a tendency to place more emphasis on administrative accountability than public accountability. These two main problems focus on three factors: institutional relations in village governance, the way social organizations work in local communities, and cultures. These three factors differ in practice from one another in how they determine the level of accountability in each village. However, in principle, their main characteristic is a weak presence of good governance in the community and village government in the Indonesian coastal area.

Este artículo explora la relación causal entre liberalización petrolera y controles democráticos. Parte de un análisis neoinstitucional de la política petrolera conjuntamente con el marco analítico del diseño de políticas desde los instrumentos nato (nodalidad, autoridad, tesoro y organización). Con el fin de comprobar la relación hipotética, la investigación concibe la causalidad de una manera realista, utilizando el rastreo de procesos como método para descubrir el mecanismo causal intermedio, junto a una epistemología bayesiana para formalizar los resultados de la investigación. Al final se concluye que dentro de la relación causal existe un mecanismo intermedio, con fuerte presencia del mercado; además, expone el posicionamiento de nuevos sujetos políticos determinantes para mejorar la rendición de cuentas públicas. This article explores the causal relationship between oil liberalization and accountability. It starts from a neo-institutional analysis of public policies after analyzing the oil policy according to NATO instruments under the analytical framework of policy design. In order to detect the hypothetical relationship, the investigation conceives causality in a realistic way, using process tracing as a method to discover the intermediate causal mechanism, together with a Bayesian epistemology that formalizes the research results. In the end it concludes that within the causal relationship there is an intermediate mechanism with a strong market presence. In addition, it exposes the positioning of new determining political subjects to improve public accountability.

This article presents a new typology of institutional logics that is useful for studying public accountability organizations in Zambia. The typology was developed by following the adaptive theory a...

Public organizations are subject to many kinds of control mechanisms and analysts worry that they often suffer from an “accountability overload.” This article argues that such diagnoses are typically set without an adequate demarcation criterion for identifying accountability practices and separating them from other kinds of interaction, such as strategic pursuit of power or reputational standing. In response, the suggestion is that accountability practices should be restricted to procedures that track the mandate of the organization. This requires clarification of how mandates can be seen as more than a mere heap of conflicting considerations. The concept of a “multidimensional mandate” is introduced as a heuristic for thinking about how different perspectives on organizational action can be integrated. The interpretive test for deciding if a procedure qualifies as an accountability practice is whether it is sufficiently sensitive to the intertwinement of the goals and commitments of the organization. Neither account-givers nor account-holders can legitimately refrain from orienting themselves in this broader normative framework.

Drawing from a review of studies and reports on teacher diversity in the Canadian public education sector, in this paper, I argue that the underrepresentation of minority teachers in the public edu...

Although current accountability systems have received a great deal of criticism for being too narrow and too focused on sanctions, relatively little concern has been directed at a related problem: the failure of accountability systems to meaningfully engage the public. Derek Gottlieb and Jack Schneider suggest that a better system would consider the plural and often non-instrumental standards by which communities evaluate their schools. In such a system, state officials, district leaders, teachers, parents, students, and other stakeholders would come together to determine how schools will be evaluated and how to respond to the results of those evaluations.

Nonprofit and public administration scholars have increasingly turned attention to the wide variety of channels by which nonprofit organizations may influence public policy, raising critical questi...

This essay traces the history of refereeing at specialist scientific journals and at funding bodies and shows that it was only in the late twentieth century that peer review came to be seen...

Scholarship on bureaucratic policymaking has long focused on both the use of expertise and public accountability. However, few have considered the degree to which public input affects the use of research in U.S. regulatory impact analyses (RIAs). We examine changes in the research that is cited in RIAs in response to public comments to assess the influence of participation on the use of information for rulemaking. We conduct an in-depth analysis of comments on a major proposed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule to determine whether regulators alter the evidence used based on public input and whether some types of commenters have more influence than others. We analyze the text similarity of comments to scientific research utilized in the RIAs to determine whether regulators iteratively update their rule justification based on scientific information referenced in comments. We find support for seminal subgovernment theories about the relationship between business interests, Congress, and the bureaucracy; in relation to all kinds of commenters, members of Congress and industry groups had the strongest effect on changes in the research used in the RIAs. The article provides one of the first statistical analyses of science exchange between the public and a bureaucratic agency.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to do provide an overview of open government data (OGD) frameworks in six Middle East countries (Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon and Jordan) and to underscore the barriers in using the open data sets. Design/methodology/approach OGD framework offered by Sieber and Johnson (2015) is deployed for the present purpose. Primarily, documentary analysis is being used for substantiating the study and the national portals of the six countries are investigated. Findings In line with the frameworks chosen for this study, OGD initiatives across the six Middle East countries are at an emerging phase. All the six countries qualify for the “data over the wall” model as advanced by Sieber and Johnson (2015), wherein there are basic provisions of “data aggregation.” Furthermore, the data are incomplete and outdated, which serve as barriers in using these data sets for analysis and interpretation. Therefore, there are a number of barriers in using the open data sets. However, there are many prospects for using these data sets which would improve public accountability and transparency in the long run. Practical implications Besides helping in improved decision-making, the governments may be in a better position to appreciate the relevance of adopting a robust OGD initiative in facilitating the economic growth of their country. Social implications This study is relevant for ensuring that citizen engagement is promoted and there is co-creation of public value. Originality/value Hitherto, OGD has been investigated in the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) but the other countries in Middle East have not been investigated. This study selects six countries outside the GCC ambit and investigates the nature and scope of OGD initiatives in each of them apart from underlining the barriers in using the open data sets.

The smart city has become a main prism through which urban futures are viewed. With it comes the promise of big data technology enabling more resource-efficient urban systems and improved governance. Increasingly, however, this technocentric view is being challenged, at least rhetorically, by seeking to place people at the heart of smart city development. Yet, especially in the case of the UK, such development typically takes place within a governance context which marginalises established planning and decision processes, thus arguably weakening public accountability. Moreover, the norms of engagement change in that citizens are assigned more of an entrepreneurial role as co-producers of data-driven information. It becomes necessary, therefore, to reconsider, as well as reinvigorate the place of the public in the future city. This article seeks to do so by making the case, on one hand, for strengthening institutional frameworks and, on the other, advancing a more active role for citizens to become involved in actualising and scrutinising future cities.

На основании анализа большого числа эмпирических исследований, где выявлены последствия мер научной политики, реализуемой во многих странах, в статье показано, что проводимая в России государственная науч- ная политика включает инструменты, препятствующие достижению декла- рируемых в ней целей. Установлено, что лишены научных оснований такие компоненты отечественной научной политики, как механизмы повышения публичной подотчетности науки, намерения финансировать исследования в основном на конкурсной основе, стремления развивать науку преимущест- венно в университетах (силами преподавателей), а также тренд к укрупнению исследовательских организаций.