The rising prominence of “accountability” in public discourse has given rise in turn to a burgeoning of attention given to “accountability” in recent academic scholarship. It has been an object of scholarly debate and analysis in, for example, political science, public administration, international relations, social psychology, constitutional law, and business administration. However, in each of the sub disciplines, scholars analyze concepts of accountability and practices of account-giving unaware of, and still less building on, each other’s achievements. This introductory chapter to (...) the Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability provides a comprehensive overview of the current scholarship on public accountability. In the course of doing that, it will also provide an overview of recent work in accountability across various fields, illustrating some of the important commonalities and differences. It is argued that most researchers use fairly similar and reasonably comparable notions of what constitutes the core of accountability. (shrink)

Drawing on the best scholars in the field from around the world, The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability showcases conceptual and normative as well as the empirical approaches in public accountability studies.

Part I. Concepts and contexts -- Diplomas -- Democracy -- Education as a cleavage -- Part II. Contours -- The education gap in political participation -- The meritocratization of civil society -- Political elites as educational elites -- Part III. Consequences -- The consequences of diploma democracy -- Remedying diploma democracy.

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. (shrink)

Public accountability research has been dominated by studies of accountability deficits. In a sample of over 200 accountability-papers taken from a variety of disciplines, nearly two-thirds focused on various types of deficits—situations in which power-holders are decoupled from adequate accountability mechanisms. The cumulative evidence from two decades of accountability, however, suggests that this problem of absent or deficient accountability may not be as grave as one would expect, given the strong emphasis on it in the literature and in public discourse. (...) The empirical evidence, however, also reveals that the increased focus on accountability has produced considerable collateral damage in terms of excessive costs, red tape, and negative effects on other important public values, such as effectiveness, efficiency, trust, and learning. This suggests that questions about types of accountability and the conditions and contexts in which they are effective should feature more prominently on the agenda of public accountability research. This chapter provides an agenda, a first cut, for research on meaningful accountability. (shrink)