Despite that independent agencies are typically justified in terms of technical efficiency, they inevitably have to make political judgments. How can political reasoning be legitimate in such institutions? This paper starts by investigating the merits of two prominent models. The "avoidance model" asks agency reasoning to stick to empirical facts and as far as possible stay clear of political values. By contrast, the "specification model" recognizes the need for constructive normative work, but confines it to the refinement of given statutes. This paper challenges both models and defends a third alternative. The "public reason model" requires agencies to ground their value judgments in a publicly accessible framework of reasoning, which is here interpreted as their overarching mandate. The paper argues that agency mandates should be conceived as distinct domains of reasoning, and it delineates three institutional virtues that enable agencies to track this domain.

This paper investigates the conditions of political argument with regard to welfare legislation. It connects to the discussion on the role of ideas in political change but develops a new approach by investigating arguments in light of theories of public justification in a democratic society. The paper uses a recent Norwegian law as the case for studying how politicians frame their arguments for "mandatory activation," meaning the policy that requires recipients to participate in work-oriented activities. The paper finds that Norwegian advocates of activation use a "justificatory narrative" that presents the new law as a form of paternalistic concern for the benefit recipients. It is argued that this justification can be understood as shaped by certain basic conditions of political viability.

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.

The increased authority delegated to independent agencies raises questions about the conditions of politically accountable governance, and specifically parliament’s role as a representative institution. Focusing on committee hearings as an accountability mechanism, we ask: How can a parliament employ hearings to ensure that the ends pursued by agencies have a democratic foundation? We propose a model of “mutual attunement” where accountability relations presuppose a process of working-out shared understandings of the ends, means and circumstances of policy needs. We test our argument through a case study assessing the interaction between the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic & Monetary Affairs and the European Securities and Markets Authority. Theoretically, we contribute to discussions on agency accountability and European governance, while providing a novel conceptual model and the first analysis of its kind.

Welfare-to-work programmes have a contested normative foundation. Critics argue that ‘citizen responsibility’ is being promoted to the sacrifice of more important social values, such as solidarity and fairness. This paper seeks to recapture what is valuable in citizen responsibility and to challenge the idea that the concept is intrinsically bound up with detrimental policy strategies. The paper develops a view of the responsible citizen as an appropriate addressee of moral expectations. This view highlights how addressing someone as responsible involves a presumption of reasonableness. Thereafter, the view is applied to conditions of street-level interaction, the design of policy instruments, and political discourse.