Social Accountability Between Consensus and Confrontation: Developing a Theoretical Framework for Societal Accountability Relationships of Public Sector Organizations

Brummel, L.

doi:10.1177/0095399720988529

Cited by 31 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…Social accountability is finally the last type we discern here. Social accountability is a broad concept, in essence denoting the accountability of public administration actors to all sorts of social account holders (Brummel 2021). With social accountability, we refer to forms of accountability in which accountability is rendered toward society at large: general citizens, specific clienteles of public agencies, or specific social groups.…”

Section: Integrating Felt Accountability In Public Administration: Relational and Substantive Aspectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a Public Administration Theory of Felt Accountability

Overman

Schillemans

2021

Public Administration Review

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The literature on public accountability is extensive but overwhelmingly focuses on accountability of organizations. Yet, accountability mechanisms can function properly only when individuals believe that they will be held accountable in the future. This article bridges that gap by translating and extending the psychological concept of “felt accountability” to the public administration scholarship. The particular context of accountability in public organizations requires us to integrate knowledge about (1) the diverse professional roles of public sector employees, (2) the saliency and authority of various and multiple account holders, and (3) the substance of the accountability demands. The current article integrates this contextual knowledge with an individual perspective on accountability. This effort represents an important contribution to public accountability literature, as it allows scholars to properly understand the consequences of psychological insights about accountability for the public sector, and to adequately translate psychological insights and recommendations to a public accountability context.

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Section: Integrating Felt Accountability In Public Administration: Relational and Substantive Aspectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a Public Administration Theory of Felt Accountability

Overman

Schillemans

2021

Public Administration Review

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“…Public accountability is a communicative process between an actor (e.g., a public agency) and a forum, in which the actor gives information about his or her behavior, this information is subjected to discussion (in which either no evaluation can be given, or the organization can be criticized or praised for its behavior), from which consequences can follow (Bovens, 2007). Many empirical studies of public accountability examine the direct information relations (not including the media) between the actor and the forum, following from formal arrangements (Brummel, 2021).…”

Section: Public Accountabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this democratic perspective, the mass media play an important role: “Citizens can hold decisionmakers accountable for their actions only when mass media provide information about policy decisions and their outcomes” (Hasler et al, 2016, p. 137). This democratic perspective on public accountability lies at the roots of many empirical accounts of accountability (Brummel, 2021; Busuioc & Lodge, 2017; Hasler et al, 2016; Schillemans, 2011). If we look at the very essence of what constitutes an accountability process, these studies often conceptualize public accountability as a mechanism, as introduced by Bovens (2007).…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…From the perspective of the chain of delegation, citizens can be considered the ultimate principal. This form of accountability—in which citizens have little to no formal powers to enforce accountability—is labeled social accountability (Brummel, 2021; Klijn & Koppenjan, 2014) or voluntary accountability (Koop, 2014). Although citizen accountability could be categorized as horizontal accountability, we analyze it separately here as covering the perspective of citizens is increasingly practiced by journalists, who depict citizens that express their opinions in the news.…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Exploring Media-Covered Accountability of Public Agencies

Jacobs

Boon

Wonneberger

et al. 2021

Administration & Society

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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.

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“…Similarly, in the experiment presented in Chapter 5, the accountable actors decided to expediate their actions in the face of increasing involvement by their accountability forums and the emergence of conflicting expectations. This may not sound surprising at face value, however, many recent studies in public administration have emphasized the effects of informal, social, horizontal or other forms of non-hierarchical accountability (Brummel, 2021;Romzek et al, 2012;Schillemans, 2011). The experiments in this manuscript underscore the persisting impact of traditional, tougher forms of accountability.…”

Section: Accountability and Decision-making Behavior: Universal And Context-dependent Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Under Watchful Eyes

Aleksovska¹

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As a result, NASA's top managers set up an ambitious launch schedule, which was proving difficult to meet. The political pressure that NASA's top management was experiencing was transmitted down to lower levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy. The middle managers thus felt the burden not only of the expectations of their bureaucratic superiors, but also of the expectations of the agency's political principals. It was in this context that NASA's middle management decided that it was safe to proceed with the planned launch of the shuttle, and not to delay the process by resolving the technical issues the engineers raised. The middle management thus prioritized addressing the expectations stemming from the agency's political and bureaucratic accountability, at the expense of its professional accountability, ultimately leading to the disaster. This influential analysis of the Challenger accident encouraged numerous investigations of the accountability forces operating in the public sector in the decades to come. The simultaneous operation of multiple accountabilities, in particular, has garnered a lot of interest among public administration scholars (for example Koppell, 2005;Romzek & Ingraham, 2000;Schillemans & Bovens, 2011). But while the various accountability mechanisms have been carefully traced and categorized, their consequences on the decision-making behavior of individual public sector actors have been subjected to far less scholarly scrutiny (Schillemans, 2016;Yang, 2012). We thus have far less insight into why NASA's middle management decided to give priority to the demands of their political principals and hierarchical superiors, as opposed to the ones of the technical experts. The decision-making behavior of public sector actors under the pressure of accountability is therefore a central subject of investigation in this dissertation. IntroductionWhile public sector accountability mechanisms primarily operate at the organizational level, their effects reverberate through the various segments and individuals within organizations, as the case of the Challenger tragedy illustrates. Through board meetings, discussions in the media, or contacts with clients, the pressures of accountability expectations are felt by individual public sector managers and employees alike.Felt accountability, as psychologists have dubbed this (Hall et al., 2017), affects one's reasoning about the problem at hand, the calculations of priorities, the willingness to invest additional effort, or to take risks, and subsequently the decisions one makes and the behaviors one performs in the workplace (Lerner & Tetlock, 1999). These individual-level decisions and behaviors in turn shape the organizational outcomes. The meso and macro-level accountability pressures, external to the organization, are thus channeled through the micro-level within the organization, before they return meso or macro-level outcomes (Overman et al., 2020). To understand meso and macro-level outcomes in the public sector, it is therefore crucial to learn how the ind...

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Social Accountability Between Consensus and Confrontation: Developing a Theoretical Framework for Societal Accountability Relationships of Public Sector Organizations

Cited by 31 publications

References 73 publications

Toward a Public Administration Theory of Felt Accountability

Toward a Public Administration Theory of Felt Accountability

Exploring Media-Covered Accountability of Public Agencies

Under Watchful Eyes

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