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Authority Migration and Accountability in Canadian Public Governance
Abstract
In the tradition of democratic theory, elections are recognized as important mechanisms of accountability. However, the migration of public decision-making responsibility away from elected representatives and the emergence of new governance actors necessitate a fuller conceptualization of accountability relationships. As governments pursue partnerships with societal actors and disperse authority across multiple levels, questions of public input and accountability within the democratic governance process arise. In this paper, cases of authority migration in the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Nova Scotia between the years of 1946 and 2005 are used to examine the accountability relationships between new governance actors and both government and society. The existence and relative strength of accountability relationships are evaluated using the rules stipulated in the provincial legislation. Political ideology of governing parties, geographic scale of new jurisdictions and period in time are evaluated as predictors of the strength of the accountability relationship overall.
... Governance process, accountability serves three purposes: to control for the abuse and misuse of public authority; to provide assurance in respect to the use of public resources and adherence to the law; and to promote the continuous improvement in governance and public management (Waterman, 2014). ...
Both good and clean government has raised an issue in the public administration study; one of them in the public service sector is accountability. Accountable become a demand from the public to public official which can be done by the government. Based on the Ombudsman Republic of Indonesia's supervision in eight government agencies of Jambi city, one of them is The Office of Investment and Integrated Licensing Service (DTMPTSP). The results of supervision indicated the service has not well; it is characterized by the absence of service standard; did not follow procedures and long chain service. One example, there were users completed documents for taking Building Permit (IMB), but it more than one month for taking licence. This study aims to describe the aspects of process accountability of service to the users. This study uses descriptive quantitative research, the researcher took the primary data includes survey, interview and observation, secondary data obtained from literature study and documentation. The results showed IMB service was not accountable, it is viewed by the disobedience of providers with applicable regulations, and public official is power oriented and less responsive in accommodating the public interest, less careful in serving the user and not available details of the cost of publishing licence.
Este artigo descreve a percepção dos comitês de uma organização pública federal brasileira sobre implantação da governança pública, sob a perspectiva do seu entendimento conceitual e de possíveis dificuldades e ganhos. Para tanto, aplicou-se um questionário com os membros dos Comitês Estratégico e Tático Operacional, constatando-se que esses estão alinhados à definição de governança estabelecida na legislação vigente. Sobre as dificuldades, destacam-se limitações em aspectos culturais do serviço público e em processo de comunicação. Os possíveis ganhos apontam para melhorias de gestão de um modo geral, de processos e de riscos; melhorias no alcance de resultados; e maior transparência.
There is more coordination in the modern world than is plausibly explained by the classical mechanisms of community, market, hierarchy and their commonly discussed variants. This paper explores modalities of non-market coordination whose application is not constrained by the narrow motivational and cognitive limitations of pure forms of hierarchical and negotiated coordination. The focus is on two varieties of negotiated self-coordination under conditions where actual negotiations are embedded in a pre-existing structural context - either within hierarchical organizations or within self-organizing networks of cooperative relationships. Extrapolating from empirical findings in a variety of settings, it is argued that embeddedness will, at the same time, increase the scope of welfare maximizing `positive coordination' and create conditions under which externalities are inhibited through `negative coordination'. In combination, these mechanisms are able to explain much of the de facto coordination that seems to exist beyond the confines of efficient markets and hierarchies.
Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks distinguish between contrasting visions from various literatures, which they label Type I and Type II multi-level governance. Type I multi-level governance echoes federalist thought, conceiving the dispersion of authority as being limited to a 'limited number of non-overlapping jurisdictional boundaries at a limited number of levels'. In this view, authority is relatively stable and analysis is focused on individual governments rather than specific policies. Type II multi-level governance provides a vision of governance that is 'a complex, fluid, patchwork of innumerable, overlapping jurisdictions'. Here, jurisdictions are often overlapping and tend to be flexible as demands for governance change.
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Although governance is a broad concept, it is also an analyzer which enables us to apprehend changes in ways of exercising power in contemporary societies, and particularly in classical governing techniques. This is because the concept of governance goes beyond the notion of state government and includes the ideas of refoundation and readaptation of the state. Governance thus shows that the state exists in a context of structural interdependence requiring it to renew in depth its modes of action and principles of organization. Although governance is a broad concept, it is also an analyzer which enables us to apprehend changes in ways of exercising power in contemporary societies, and particularly in classical governing techniques. This is because the concept of governance goes beyond the notion of state government and includes the ideas of refoundation and readaptation of the state. Governance thus shows that the state exists in a context of structural interdependence requiring it to renew in depth its modes of action and principles of organization.
Governance, a New State Paradigm ?
Although governance is a broad concept, it is also an analyzer which enables us to apprehend changes in ways of exercising power in contemporary societies, and particularly in classical governing techniques. This is because the concept of governance goes beyond the notion of state government and includes the ideas of refoundation and readaptation of the state. Governance thus shows that the state exists in a context of structural interdependence requiring it to renew in depth its modes of action and principles of organization.
Current changes in governing tasks that face the political systems in liberal democracies require governance to be performed in new ways. Governance can no longer take the form of sovereign rule but must be performed through various forms of metagovernance, regulation of self-regulation. The consequence is a transformation of the role that politicians play in the governance of society that endangers representative democracy aswe knowit but does not necessarily endanger representative democracy as such. A case study of the specific, narrow way in which the newmetagoverning politician role is interpreted and institutionalized in four Danish municipalities suggests that network governance marginalizes politicians and consequently weakens representative democracy. If this weakening of democracy is to be avoided, politicians must strengthen their roles in metagovernance by broadening their leadership repertoire to include framing through institutional design, storytelling, supporting and facilitating, and participating.
This article presents an overview of local government studies and particularly of recent developments. It looks first of all at the changing social and economic factors which influence the operation of local government. Globalization, political and institutional changes, demographic trends—all these structure the environment of local government. The article then looks at the changes in local government, best understood as a movement towards local governance. Finally, the article raises questions about the kinds of local government that would be the most desirable and most appropriate given the changes that are taking place.
The case of Nova Scotia well illustrates the complexities involved in implementing a strategy of regionalization in health care., In 1996, under the leadership of Liberal Premier John Savage, thirty-six local hospital boards were amalgamated into four regional health boards. By 2001, however, Conservative Premier John Hamm had expanded the four regions into nine district health authorities. Both measures were justified by explicit references to cost containment and greater accountability even though the first took numerous units and amalgamated them, while the second took the few units and multiplied them. How can this seeming contradiction be explained, and what does it say about the nature of regionalization as a policy tool for health care? The authors find that neither cost containment nor citizen engagement can explain the system of regionalization which currently informs the health care system in Nova Scotia. Rather, the present form of regionalization exists because it is useful politically in two ways: it maintains the centralization of power that existed previous to the formal decentralization of health care; and it restores the system of representation that existed prior to the implementation of regionalization. The authors conclude that, to understand how regionalization has been implemented, in any given jurisdiction, one must pay close attention to the political context in which strategies of regionalization have been executed.
Guy Peters and Jon Pierre address multi-level governance both as an analytical concept and as a system adopted by decision-makers for its capacity to address the complex governance demands of the modern epoch. In relation to the latter, they consider whether the problem-solving capacity of multi-level governance and the achievement of effective policy outcomes take precedence over democratic input and accountability. This leads to the argument that multi-level governance could be a 'Faustian bargain' in which, 'core values of democratic government are traded for accommodation, consensus and the purported efficiency in governance', or put another way, where 'informal patterns of political coordination could in fact be a strategy for political interests to escape or by-pass regulations put in place explicitly to prevent that from happening'.
This article examines and theorizes neoliberal ideas related to the scale aspects of multilevel governance. It argues that neoliberalism contains a self-conscious normative project for multilevel governance which is consistent across the federal, regional and global levels. It further argues that the underlying logic of this project can be usefully theorized through various critical understandings of the separation of the economic and the political in neoliberalism and, in particular, through Stephen Gill's concept of new constitutionalism. To demonstrate these points, the article draws on the normative work of neoliberal organic intellectuals—including Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan and various neoliberal think tanks—on 'market-preserving federalism' and the more recent extrapolation of these ideas to the regional and global levels.
Contemporary debate over globalization casts its political effects as both revolutionary and contradictory. Globalization, it is claimed, drains political authority from nation-states, long the dominant form of political organization in world politics. The state's monopoly of familiar governance functions erodes as authority migrates down to newly empowered regions, provinces, and municipalities; up to supranational organizations; and laterally to such private firms and transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that acquire previously “public” responsibilities.
In every modern political system, power is shared to a greater or lesser extent between levels of government. These power sharing arrangements are perhaps most explicit in formal federal systems like the United States and Canada, where federal constitutions define the relative powers of central and subnational governments. They may be no less important, however, in unitary democracies and even authoritarian regimes where central governments require local actors to implement policy on the ground and often delegate significant authority to them. Indeed, in any large and complex modern society, effective governance requires some sharing of power between higher levels of government, capable of coordinating many disparate actors and interests, and lower levels of government, capable of responding to local conditions.
Conventional wisdom about the structure of political parties in Canada has emphasized their confederal nature. In other words (and the New Democratic party excepted), parties with identical partisan complexions at the federal and provincial levels are thought to operate in "two political worlds." This paper argues that election campaigns are a key integrating link between parties. How they fight elections reveals extensive cross-level co-operation, particularly through shared activists (local party activists, party staff and party professionals) and technological expertise. This has the effect of shrinking the space between party cousins and forges unity between them. While there are certain obstacles to electoral collaboration, there are also incentives for these parties to work to maintain and strengthen their ties with their partisan cousin at the other level. These findings make an important contribution by directly challenging the notion that Canada's federal system has led to increasingly disentangled political parties.
This article examines the influence of ideology in Canadian politics. The core theory is that political opinions are bound together into ideological clusters by underlying influences that affect simultaneously the opinions of individuals about more than one issue. the central hypothesis is that ideological disagreement between the left and the right is asymmetrical, that is, that leftists and rightists bundle in different ways theft opinions about issues. The analysis draws on evidence from Benoit and Laver's survey of experts (2006) about the policy positions of political parties, the Comparative Manifest Research Project (Budge et al., 2001: Klingemann et al., 2006), and Cross and Young's survey of Canadian political party members (2002). The results of the analysis indicate, first, that Canada's left/right ideological divide is wide by cross-national standards, and, second, that leftists and rightists organize their opinions about the world in different ways.
Optimal jurisdiction size is a cornerstone of government design. A strong tradition in political thought argues that democracy thrives in smaller jurisdictions, but existing studies of the effects of jurisdiction size, mostly cross-sectional in nature, yield ambiguous results due to sorting effects and problems of endogeneity. We focus on internal political efficacy, a psychological condition that many see as necessary for high-quality participatory democracy. We identify a quasiexperiment, a large-scale municipal reform in Denmark, which allows us to estimate a causal effect of jurisdiction size on internal political efficacy. The reform, affecting some municipalities, but not all, was implemented by the central government, and resulted in exogenous, and substantial, changes in municipal population size. Based on survey data collected before and after the reform, we find, using various difference-in-difference and matching estimators, that jurisdiction size has a causal and sizeable detrimental effect on citizens' internal political efficacy.
Over the past decade the federal government has established a number of independent foundations to spend public money on public business. The democratic control that is meant to obtain under the Constitution is not present in the design of these foundations. This article examines the ways in which their organizational design is contrary to the principles of responsible government as well as to the government's own policy on so-called alternative service-delivery structures. The article also discusses how the designers of these foundations relied primarily on results-based reporting instead of the traditional system of ministerial responsibility. The author concludes that these organizational designs are beyond the pale of the Constitution's requirements for democratic control over public administration and suggests measures that may correct these deficiences.Sommaire: Au cours de la demière décennie, le gouvernement fédéeral a mis sur pied un certain nombre de fondations indépendantes visant à consacrer des fonds publics aux affaires publiques. Ces fondations ne comportent pas dans leur conception le contrôle démocratique prévu par la Constitution. Le présent article examine comment leur conception organisationnelle va à l'encontre des principes de gouvemement responsable ainsi que la politique même du gouvernement sur ce qu'on appelle les modes altematifs de prestation de services. L'article examine également la manière dont les concepteurs de ces fondations se sont fiés essentiellement à la reddition de comptes axés sur les résultats plutôt qu'au système traditionnel de respon-sabilité ministérielle. L'auteur conclut que ces conceptions organisationnelles ne repondent pas aux exigences de la Constitution pour ce qui est du contrôle démocratique de l'administration publique et propose des mesures qui pourraient pallier à ces insuffisances.
The next big step in public management research is to move beyond the question of whether management matters to answer the question: does democracy matter? The public management discipline has largely ignored the impact of democratic structure on performance, partly because of limited variation in the constitutional design of public service organizations. Recent growth in the number and types of special purpose governments offers an organizational population with a wider distribution on the democratic structure parameter. Conceptual and methodological advances in delimiting and measuring "democratic performance" as a function of formal structures and informal practices provide an intellectual infrastructure for scholars. Hypotheses are derived in which democratic performance is either a dependent or independent variable. Differences in contextual variables in the United Kingdom and the United States make transatlantic comparative research a worthwhile proposition. A research strategy for generating knowledge on "does democracy matter?" is set out.
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.
Lieske has recently developed a new measure of state culture that appears to be a much better predictor of state performance
than other commonly used measures including per capita income, Sharkansky’s index of Elazar’s typology, and Hero’s index of
racial and ethnic diversity. Here, we show why uni- and multi-dimensional reductions of Elazar’s and Lieske’s typologies and
other measures do not predict and explain the variation in representative indicators of state performance nearly as well.
To lay the groundwork for a more rigorous understanding of state culture, and to integrate it with the work of Hero on diversity
and Putnam on social capital, we also develop and test an evolutionary theory that draws on Marger’s theory of ethnic competition
and Vanhanen’s theory of ethnic nepotism.
This paper approaches the question of the appropriate level of decentralisation of power in government as a problem in the allocation of control rights under incomplete contracts. The model of the paper compares allocations of power to local, central and regional government as alternative means of motivating governments to act in the interests of citizens. Centralisation allows benefits from policy coordination but has costs in terms of diminished accountability, which can be precisely defined as the reduced probability that the welfare of a given region can determine the re-election of the government. The model is extended to allow for conflicts of interest within regions, and externalities between central and local governments in a federation. It is also applied to determining levels of fiscal transfer between localities, and to circumstances where governments may act as Leviathans appropriating resources for their own use.
This paper argues that the EU is not as unique a governance system as the Babylonian
variety of its labels may suggest. Like its member states, the EU features a combination
of different forms of governance that cover the entire range between market and
hierarchy. Unlike at the national level, however, this governance mix entails hardly any
network forms of governance, which systematically involve private actors. The EU is
largely governed by negotiated agreements between inter- and transgovernmental
actors. While business, interest groups or civil society organizations are seldom granted
a real say in EU policy-making, market-based mechanisms of political competition have
gained importance. Thus, the EU is less characterized by network governance but by
inter- and transgovernmental negotiations, on the one hand, and political competition
between member states and regions, on the other. Both operate in shadow of hierarchy
cast by supranational institutions.
The regional arrangements emerging for environmental governance in Australia mark a substantial change in the relationship between the state and civil society. Central to these arrangements is a transfer of responsibilities for natural resource management to regional communities. Although partnerships and other collaborative approaches have been embraced as a more democratic and effective means of addressing Australia's environmental problems, the legitimacy of these arrangements has been given insufficient attention. In particular, as central governments have retained significant influence in the setting of regional priorities and the accreditation of regional plans, there is a need to examine the relationships between 'old' and 'new' forms of governing. This paper critically examines the sources of legitimacy that underpin these relationships by drawing on interviews with regional actors in Central Queensland. This analysis demonstrates the hybrid nature of legitimacy, justified via traditional sources of legitimate authority alongside participatory and deliberative norms. This hybridity underlines the importance of attending to all dimensions of legitimacy in the design of governance arrangements. Residual issues of exclusion, and the discounting of community members' substantive concerns, mean that harnessing the mutuality gains derived from local knowledge and experience remains a core challenge for the legitimacy of environmental governance.