The Public Accountability Review. A Meta-Analysis of Public Accountability Research in Six Academic Disciplines. Working Paper, Utrecht University School of Governance.

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The Public Accountability Review
A Meta-Analysis of Public Accountability Research in Six Academic Disciplines
WORKING PAPER
Thomas Schillemans (t.schillemans_at_uu.nl)
2013, Utrecht University School of Governance

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Contents
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................3
The Analysis................................................................................................................................................6
Analyzing 210 Papers.................................................................................................................................10
Issues: A multitude of Deficit Studies........................................................................................................... 10
Definitions: A Plea for Hyphenation..............................................................................................................13
Theories: Absentees, Rational Agents & Social Contingency..........................................................................15
Research Methods: Mono- and Multi Methodologists.....................................................................................19
Accountable Actors: Individuals, Organizations, Institutions & Systems...........................................................22
What about Accountability? Design, Practices & Fiasco’s...............................................................................23
Conclusions: Some Footholds for Accumulation............................................................................................ 25
References................................................................................................................................................26

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Introduction
Academic convention has it, and rightly so, that prospective authors first need to provide an overview of
their subject, in which they describe and explain the main thoughts, concepts, findings and intellectual
battlefields, before they are allowed to introduce and explain their own contribution. As a reader of other
peoples’ work, and reading with varying purposes, I occasionally exclaim (ever so silently) ‘really?!’ Some
people’s summaries of the field are just quite different from my own take on the subject matter. When you
are in a humble state of mind, you will probably think: ‘Gee, this author is taking insights from the literature
that have failed to grab my attention’. And the humble reader just needs to read up on the subject some
more. However, when you are in a more self-assured mode, and when you are reading on a subject that
has had your academic attention for quite a while, you are sometimes more likely to think: ’This can’t be
right!’ and ‘(s)he is just wrong!’
The academic convention of the literature review is generally upheld in the journals in political science and
public administration. Authors are expected to summarize the findings in their field and need to situate their
own work inside it. However, scholars are in practice allowed a large measure of freedom just in how they
summarize and, more importantly, on what basis. The bottom line strategy seems to be: ‘As long as the
reviewers go along with it, any literature review is fine’. And reviewers (and editors) come in all shades,
sometimes demanding lengthy, descriptive overviews, sometimes demanding fresh ideas, and sometimes
demanding confirmation of pre-existing beliefs. I can remember a couple of reviews where I felt that the
reviewer did not do justice to the existing literature and my own take on it; others have, I may fear, probably
thought the same of my own comments as a reviewer. A good thing, then, that reviewing generally is a
double blind affair!
As literature reviews are mandatory, but as there is no fixed format for it and authors do not need to
account for the way in which they concoct their reviews, we sometimes describe apparently sensible
overviews which suffer in practice from a somewhat tilted, perhaps sometimes even biased, perspective.
On closer scrutiny, some of the claims in literature reviews would probably fall in the face of evidence. We
experienced one of those instances ourselves. In our paper on public accountability in Public Administration
(Bovens et al. 2008), we claimed that the accountability literature sported three different important
normative debates, the third of which was about accountability and learning. Closer scrutiny of the
accountability literature, however, of which this working paper is the end product, revealed that the
accountability literature was much less concerned with learning than we had sensed. Only a very limited set

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of public administration, public management and European governance papers explicitly focused on
accountability and learning (and some of those that did, were actually written by us!). This is something the
critical reader might actually have been able to guess from the conspicuously ‘old’ sources that we were
quoting in that section of the paper. This does not imply that learning is not a valid normative perspective
relating to accountability, as a currently growing body of literature testifies. However, the general claim that
learning was one of the most important perspectives in the literature was in its specific form just inaccurate.
The overview in this working paper of recent accountability studies in different social-scientific disciplines
aims to circumvent precisely those types of errors: generalizations about the state-of-the-art on a subject or
in a field which overemphasize or underestimate some issues because people simply can’t read everything
that is published. This overview aims to provide a solid basis – for myself, my (ex-)Utrecht fellow
accountability researchers but now also for other scholars in the field – for assessing the state of the art of
recent public accountability research. The overview is based, as will be explained in-depth in the next
section, on a systematic assessment of all academic papers focusing explicitly on ‘accountability’ in a
selection of top journals in the past years. By systematically analyzing recurring issues, definitions,
methods, findings, and other important determining factors of research, we are able to truly claim the
veracity of our generalizations about contemporary accountability research. This overview has already
served as a basis for a number of publications (Schillemans 2010; Brandsma & Schillemans 2012; Bovens,
Goodin & Schillemans frth., and Bovens & Schillemans frth.), but the overview as such has not been
published.
In addition, this systematic analysis of recent accountability research also aims to support a second cause.
Another perfectly understandable and often fully warranted, yet at times slightly annoying, habit of many
social scientists is to claim that complex concepts, such as ‘accountability’, can mean many different things
to many different people. This conclusion, as such, is often arguably ‘true’. The objects of political science
and public administration research defy easy, stable and ‘closed’ definitions. As a result, there are many
different varieties of papers where authors primarily aim to further our understanding of this (or another)
essentially contested concept. After reading about accountability for a decade or so, I am sometimes
haunted by the nagging feeling that we, social scientists, may be generally overstating the level of
complexity and diversity of the concepts with which we work and, simultaneously, underestimate the extent
to which we actually agree about them. By failing to see the extent to which we do indeed agree on
important concepts, we also miss out on important opportunities to build on each other’s’ work and insights.

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As a result, and this seems undeniably ‘true’ in public accountability research, there is very little
accumulation of knowledge (see Yang 2011; Bovens et al 2013; Dubnick 2013). The general field looks
very much like a loose concoction of (sudden) stops and (promising) starts.
This working paper aims to provide both an overview of the state of the art of public accountability research
and a stepping stone for accumulative work on public accountability (for this, see also Bovens et al 2013). It
serves this first cause by discussing the fruits of recent scholarship in accountability in six different
disciplines: accountancy, constitutional law, international relations, political science, psychology, and public
administration. What we provide is not an in-depth analysis of the contents of papers in these fields. Rather,
we will be pointing out the recurring themes, issues, methods, definitions and theories across and within the
different disciplines. On the basis of this overview, the issues on which many researchers, beneath all the
apparent and understandable intellectual controversy, agree, are pointed out. This aims to contribute to the
agenda for accumulative accountability research.
Before we commence to discuss our overview of accountability research, we will first describe and explain
our analysis.

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The Analysis1
This paper was inspired by Yang (2011). In his paper he made a conscious attempt to create an overview
of the literature on accountability by comparing the papers on accountability in five major American journals
across a ten year time span. This approach is attractive because of the structural incorporation of every
publication that was good enough to pass the barriers of review, as a proxy for quality, into the major
journals. The approach is also fruitful as accountability is central to the work of many authors but there are
not many authors who are central in the literature on accountability. Many people have written many
interesting things on accountability – the impending overview shows that many different authors find
accountability an important topic: there are almost as many authors as there are papers – but there are
only a few who have been able to set the terms of the general accountability debate. Therefore, an analysis
of the range of the accountability papers is necessary if one wants to see the possible progress on the
related issues. In addition to Yang’s focus on five major journals and only a few evaluative criteria, this
paper is based on a broader range of papers and criteria and takes a broader disciplinary focus.
This meta-analysis is based on a database of academic papers on accountability, covering the arguably
most relevant academic disciplines relating to public accountability. The meta analysis aimed to provide an
overview of the literature on accountability in the different relevant disciplines and to provide an up-to-date
display of some of the main issues, ideas and developments in the current literature.
The analysis necessitated a number of decisions pertaining to selection. Those questions were: what
disciplines?, which journals?, what makes an article count as being about ‘accountability’?, and: what are
relevant questions to be posed about all those articles? We will shortly explain the substance and rationale
of these decisions.
Disciplines. The aim was to analyze papers from those disciplines of most relevance to issues of public
accountability. The six selected areas were public administration, constitutional law, political science,
international relations, accounting & business administration, and social psychology. This selection is to
some extent necessarily arbitrary, as important fields (organization studies, development studies) could not
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1 We thank our research assistants; especially Christoph Ossege (for the first phase of the meta analysis), and also Remco
Smulders (for the second phase of the meta analysis), and Paul den Otter (for his for special attention to definitions) for their
excellent work on the accountability database for the meta-analysis.

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be analyzed. Furthermore, as the boundaries between disciplines are permeable, the selection of some of
the individual journals posed some difficulties that have been handled pragmatically.
Journals. The data base aimed to collect all papers on ‘accountability’ in a selection of the most important
academic journals (based on ISI-ranking) over the past years. This simple idea proved to be a lot more
difficult to realize than was expected. As mentioned before, as disciplinary boundaries are not set in stone,
existing lists of ‘most important journals’, even based on ISI-rankings, were not mutually exclusive, so we
had to make somewhat contingent choices. Furthermore, as our aim was to understand what different
disciplines had to say about accountability, we needed high-ranking journals featuring papers focusing on
‘accountability’. It turned out that some of the initially selected journals featured few, sometimes even no,
papers that were explicitly about ‘accountability’. As a result, we had to include additional journals, although
they were still selected on the basis of impact factors. For constitutional law, accounting, and social
psychology, our eventual selection was also based on the work of the authors roughly writing about these
disciplines in the Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability (see Harlow 2013, Hayne & Salterio 2013, resp.
Patil, Vieider & Tetlock 2013). In total, the articles on accountability in 40 journals have been analyzed (see
below).
Focusing on journals naturally means that books have not been taken into account. Important recent books
on accountability, such as Dowdle 2006, Bovens et al 2010, and Dubnick & Frederickson 2011, have not
been included. This is to some extent a real loss of course. However, many of the contributors to those,
and other, accountability-books have also written papers in top journals in the past years, so at least some
of their work has been incorporated.
‘Accountability?!’ As accountability is a substantive standard by which the actions (or lack thereof) of a
broad variety of public actors is judged, and as accountability has been translated into an enormous array
of institutional mechanisms, the list of potential accountability papers is problematically long. We have
chosen to select only those papers that either had ‘accountability’ in their title or mentioned ‘accountability’
as a key word. As a result, we have selected those papers that explicitly aimed (or at least, suggested) to
make a contribution to our understanding of ‘accountability’. Obviously, this selection will have a bias in the
sense that some highly relevant contributions, for instance about ‘elections’ or ‘audits’, have not been taken
into account. On balance, however, we have at least collected and analyzed all those papers claiming to
focus on ‘accountability’. In total 210 academic papers were collected and analyzed (see the references
section).

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The Analysis. The analysis aimed to provide a comparable overview of the contents of the selected journal
articles. This requires the use of standardized questions to be posed and some fairly crude categorizations.
All papers were analyzed on the same general items: i) definitions of accountability, ii) use of formal
theories, iii) research methods, iv) type of accountability problem that is investigated, v) type of accountable
actor, vi) use of comparative design, vii) the aim of the paper, viii) results (through a quick scan).
The Process. The meta analysis was conducted in two phases. The original database focused on public
administration journals (and some European governance journals, that were collected for another project,
see Bovens et al 2010). By far the most papers in this category come from the public administration
journals. The original database covered a 10-year period, with 114 individual articles (including review
articles) in 17 journals, starting with the highest ranking journals. In the second phase, the approach was
slightly streamlined and the other 5 disciplines were added, however only for the preceding five years and
with a focus on some of the most important journals, carrying at least a number of papers focusing explicitly
on ‘accountability’. The journals and numbers of analyzed articles per discipline are listed below.
The Journals. The following journals have been analyzed.
Public Administration and European Governance: 17 journals, 114 articles. Administration & Society,
Journal of social policy, Local Government Studies, Policy and Politics, Public Administration Review,
Governance, Public Administration, Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, Public
Performance & Management Review, Regulation & Governance, The American Review of Public
Administration, + European Governance journals: European journal of political research, European Union
Politics, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Integration, Journal of European public
policy, West European Politics.
Social Psychology: 4 journals, 16 articles. Journal of personality and social psychology; Personality and
social psychology bulletin; Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes; Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology.
International Relations: 5 journals, 17 articles. International Organization, World Politics, Common Market
Law Review, World Development, Development policy review.
Political science: 4 journals, 20 articles. American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political
Science, American Journal of Political Science, Global Environmental Politics.

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Constitutional law: 5 journals, 19 articles. Harvard Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Modern Law Review,
European Law Journal, European Journal of International Law.
Accounting and business economics: 5 journals, 26 articles. Accounting Review, Accounting Organizations
and Society, Contemporary Accounting Research, Financial Accountability & Management, Management
Accounting Research.

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Analyzing 210 Papers
The analysis of the literature aimed to provide a rough overview of the field. A number of key issues have
been analyzed in all papers and they will be reported here. First of all, we coded the types of issues that
sparked of the research interest of authors. We then turned to definitions: how do people define
accountability? The analysis then focuses on the type of actor being held accountable and, when applicable,
the organizational issues involved. The analysis then turns to the use of formal theories and the use of
methods, including comparative approaches.
Issues: A multitude of Deficit Studies
Many researchers have in the past two decades or so somehow decided that it is relevant and interesting
to study accountability. This begs the question ‘why?’ Why do so many people in different disciplines more
or less suddenly study this concept and, in the process, contribute to the concepts’ ever widening meaning
(see Mulgan 2000) and to its conceptual travels (Flinders 2011)?
The introductions of many academic papers suggest a fairly uniform and rather compelling answer: as the
structures of governance, international relations, and the public-private dichotomy has been transforming
over the last centuries, accountability – where office holders are accountable to those to whom they owe
their office – has become ever more problematic. In a widely cited article on accountability, Kaare Strøm
(2000) has convincingly argued that accountability (theoretically) thrives best when there are direct
hierarchical lines of command in the policy process between the electorate and the agents executing public
policies that are complemented by clear accountability demands that run in the opposite direction. Most
contemporary authors assert or assume that governments traditionally mirrored Strøm’s ideal situation
quite closely, but that the gist of many public management reforms since the late nineteen nineties has
been to effectively thwart the possibilities of central administrations to hold the agents delivering public
services to account. Figure 1 below clarifies how almost all papers in the largest set of public administration
and European governance sample respond to administrative reforms that cut through the direct lines of
command / accountability between the delivery of and the formulation of public policies.

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Almost a third of the papers focus on situations where services are not delivered by bureaucracies or via
established bureaucratic routines, but rather are provided by more or less independent, more or less public
organizations, that are faced with incentives from a (quasi-)market environment. These are all papers on
´decoupled governance’: the service provider / implementing agency / street level bureaucrat has been
(partially) decoupled from the national, local or federal government. A typical example of this type of papers
is Klingner et al’s (2002) analysis of the accountability of child care providers. The authors elucidate how
child care providers are faced by a complex regime of multiple and contradictory accountability
mechanisms, where they are faced by conflicting demands due to the political context of their work, the
administrative traditions of the field and the consequences of recent market reforms.
In a similar vein, almost another third of the papers focus on the consequences of policy networks, notably
the rise of public private partnerships. What ties both types of papers together is that the specific forms of
service delivery – through marketization, privatization, disaggregation or in networks – blurs the strict lines
of command and accountability that Strøm envisioned for the public service and that are said to have
existed in the past. It is then difficult to hold the agent delivering the service accountable for his actions or
accomplishments, because it is partially autonomous and / or only partially responsible for outcomes.
The ‘others’ category of another third of the papers further strengthens the general picture. Again many of
these papers focus on administrative reforms that circumvent the conventional hierarchical and
unidirectional architecture of governments. In this broader category, we for instance find papers on cyber
communities (Dumont & Candler 2005), the autonomous EU president (Gelleny & Anderson 2000),
autonomous congressional staff (Romzek 2000), referendums (Setälä 2006), websites (Welch & Wong
31%
28%
10%
9%
22%
Fig. 1 Issues in Public Administration Journals
Decoupled governance Networks / PPP
Internationalization (incl. EU) (Independent) Regulators
Others

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2001), and political parties (Müller 2000). In all of these papers, Strøm’s idealized direct lines of command
and accountability are challenged, complicated or eroded.
The last group of papers focuses on policy fields where decisions are reached on a supra or international
level, including the EU, and traditional national forms of accountability are by necessity somewhat
compromised. The other last group focuses on the rise of independent (market) regulators, who are
themselves involved in accountability processes but on the other hand also create accountability issues
because of their organizational autonomy.
When we broaden our focus to the other five disciplines, we (mostly) see a confirmation of the above trends.
Many International Relations and Constitutional Law papers on accountability also focus on the
internationalization of politics, administration and regulation. Authors in these fields often start from
(sometimes exemplified) general developments, such as European integration or international forestry
regulation. The accounting and business administration is, in as far as it focuses on public accountability
(and not on private sector accountability, as is most common in this branch of the literature), widely varied.
Some of the articles address general trends such as New Public Management or the growing importance of
information technology and information systems in public administration and public organizations. Others
delve into highly specific and local cases, such as school reforms in New Zealand or the National Health
System in the UK. The impetus of the issues under investigation are in line with the developments in public
administration research.
The political science papers and the social psychology papers stand out in slight contrast to the above
disciplines. They do not stand out by prompting additional salient developments, but, rather, stand out by a
much more thoroughly theoretical focus. In a striking generalization, one could say that social psychologists
focus on research questions emanating from previous research on accountability; very often with a
reference to Tetlock’s seminal work in the field. And political scientists tend to focus on core issues of
democratic theory in general, such as political parties (Bawn & Rosenbluth 2006), meritocracy (McCormick
2006) or coalition government (Maravall 2010). Thus, researchers in these fields seem to be guided more
by disciplinary progress in theory-building than by responses to real-world developments.
All in all, accountability papers (apart from the social psychological papers) are generally forms of
accountability-deficit research (see Mulgan 2013). Nearly two thirds of the papers focus on situations where
the agent or actor has somehow been decoupled from the person or institution authorized to hold him

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accountable. 81 out of 124 papers in the public administration and European governance category focus on
deficits, whereas 52 out of 82 papers from the other disciplines do likewise. Together, this constitutes the
neat figure of 64,5% of accountability deficit papers.
Definitions: A Plea for Hyphenation
A large number of papers start with the statement that accountability is a notoriously complex concept that
has not reached an unequivocal meaning over time; the concept even seems to expand its meaning. In the
academic literature, approximately half of the papers (53%) use formal definitions of accountability (some of
the contents of those definitions have been described above). Particularly scholars of public administration
and political science stand out by defining their central concepts relatively often. Writers in those disciplines
are then trying to refine formal concepts of accountability found in reformed practices of public governance.
It is interesting to note, in view of the notorious conceptual complexity surrounding the concept of
accountability, that the other half of authors abstains from providing a formal definition and, apparently,
assumes that its meaning will be self-evident to their audiences.
When authors proceed to provide formal definitions, they apparently sketch a bewildering variety of
definitions, in part stemming from differing academic ‘role models’ and inspirational texts. Only a few
authors ‘manage’ to feature prominently in the bibliographies of others. On the surface, the definitional
landscape is a true tower of Babel, with bewilderingly contrasting analyses. On closer inspection, however,
the traces of a minimal consensus on accountability are evident.
This minimal consensus on accountability consists of the following observations.
1) Accountability is about providing answers, about answerability, towards others with a legitimate claim in
some agents’ work. 2) Accountability is furthermore a relational concept: it focuses our attention on agents
who perform tasks for others and thus may be held accountable by others. 3) Accountability is retrospective
– ex post – and focuses on the behavior of some agent in general, ranging from performance and results to
financial management, regularity or normative and professional standards. 4) A large number of authors
note that accountability is not a singular moment or situation, but rather refers to a layered process.
Following again (Mulgan 2003) and (Bovens 2007) we could say that accountability consists of three
analytically distinct phases. In the first phase, the agent/accountor/actor renders an account on his conduct
and performance to a significant other. This may be coined the information phase. In the second phase, the

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principal/accountee/forum assesses the – orally or in writing – transmitted information and both parties
often engage in a debate on this account. The principal/accountee/forum may ask for additional information
and pass judgment on the behaviour of the agent/accountor/actor. The agent/accountor/actor will then
answer to questions and if necessary justify and defend his course of action. This is the debating phase.
Finally, the principal/accountee/forum comes to a concluding judgment and decides whether and how to
make use of available sanctions. This is the sanctions or judgment phase.
The above description could be seen as a minimal consensus on the conception of accountability. In total
40% of all papers used base-definitions that lie within this minimal conceptual consensus, which is already
quite a high number. However, once we exclude the papers abstaining from formal definitions, we see that
roughly three quarter of all papers providing formal definitions do so by providing a definition within the
minimal conceptual consensus.
However, after providing a specific definition, people move on in many directions (and some seem to forget
about the definition they have just provided). It was striking to see while reading the papers that quite a few
authors start with some of the above notions of accountability when they set out their definition, but then
proceed in different directions. Quite a bit of this above-minimum conceptual variety is due to the ambition
of a number of authors – including the ones mentioned above – to arrive at a fuller, better or more inclusive
definition of the concept. Apart from that, a lot of the confusion boils down to the fact that authors, implicitly
or explicitly, refer to different dimensions of accountability in their papers. For instance, some authors focus
attention on the accountability documents (annual reports) only where others look more specifically at
institutions (such as inspections), formal mechanisms, specific reporting requirements, the availability of
formal sanctions, or at incidents, frauds and failures. Furthermore, some authors adopt an explicit a priori
and de iure perspective whereas others rather focus on de facto processes and outcomes and a posteriori
evaluations. Finally, some authors look at results or outcomes, some look at the ability of organizations to
provide accounts of their behaviour, some look at the content of accountability and some at the
expectations or requirements.
In light of the bewildering variety of foci under the umbrella of ‘accountability’, it would perhaps help to
hyphenate the term in a similar way that we may for instance speak about native-Americans, Anglo-
Americans, etc. If authors would discriminate more clearly between for instance accountability-mechanisms,
accountability-documents and accountability-requirements, quite a bit (though by no means all) of the
conceptual confusion might actually not be necessary.

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Theories: Absentees, Rational Agents & Social Contingency
Most definitions of accountability are static in nature; they are basically an attempt to outline a common
currency with which to speak meaningfully about political and administrative issues. These conceptual
frameworks allow us to isolate instances of accountability from all other social and administrative
phenomena and they stand at the heart of attempts to evaluate outcomes. They ‘only’ provide a taxonomy
of the most important existing species of accountability mechanisms but do not come with explicit
expectations or hypotheses of what actors will do with these mechanisms or what the likely effects of the
adoption of mechanisms is. The dynamic processes evolving through accountability, the mechanics of
accountability so to speak, are not incorporated in most conceptual frameworks.
Table 1 below provides an indication of the use of formal static definitions of accountability in the different
disciplines and the use of dynamic theories. The table quickly conveys that researchers will slightly more
often than not formally define accountability in their papers. Public administration and political science
scholars stand out by putting more effort into formally defining their central concepts. This can at least
partially be explained by the objectives of many authors in this discipline: they are often trying to refine or
modify their concepts of accountability to make them compatible to the reformed practices of public
governance. The table furthermore also conveys that most disciplines approach accountability from a fairly
non-theoretical perspective; the use and testing of formal theories is not far advanced. The only marked
exception is the discipline of social psychology, where a highly coherent and closely inter-related
community of scholars has been working on the basis of a set of specified theoretical assumptions.
Table 1: Concepts and Theories in Public Accountability Research (N= 210)
Discipline
Statics of Accountability
Percentage of recent papers in our
sample that used a formal definition of
accountability
Dynamics of accountability
Percentage of recent papers in our
sample that explicitly used a theory
Accounting 42% 42%

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International relations 24% 35%
Constitutional and public law 37% 37%
Political Science 50% 40%
Public Administration 60% 26%
Social psychology 44% 75%
Within the different fields of research (omitting constitutional law, with its descriptive and theoretical
tradition), two central theoretical models have been developed. In accounting, IR, political science and
public administration, the rational principal-agent theory has evolved as the most used – and most criticized
– dynamic theory for analyzing accountability. Primarily in social psychology, but with echoes in more
sociological approaches of public accountability, the social contingency model has evolved. Both theoretical
models are based on a relational core and carry substantive expectations about the likely behavior of
parties in an accountability setting, although both models are flexible as well eschewing easy attempts at
ratification or falsification (see Gailmard 2013).
When we move from static definitions to dynamic, hypothesis-generating, theories, it becomes evident that
far fewer authors use those. Approximately one third of the analyzed papers (37%) made use of formal
theories. This outcome was markedly influenced by the psychology-papers, in which a (substantively)
highly cohesive community of scholars has been working on the basis of a close-related set of specified
theoretical assumptions.
The assumption of the rational actor is most visible in the majority of theoretical studies that use agency
theory. Strøm’s (2000, see also Müller 2000; Mattli & Bütthe 2005) articles on accountability and delegation
are without doubt the most important theoretical endeavours in these journals in the past decade. Strøm
consciously models accountability in the ‘democratic chain of delegation’. He stipulates that a modern
representative democracy can be described as a concatenation of principal-agent relationships (Strom
2000). The citizens, who are the primary principals in a democracy, have transferred their sovereignty to
popular representatives, who, in turn, have transferred the drafting and enforcement of laws and policy to
the government. Ministers subsequently entrust policy implementation to their ministries, who proceed to
delegate parts of these tasks to more or less independent bodies and institutions. Public servants at the

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end of this chain of delegation end up spending billions in taxpayers ’ money, using their discretionary
powers to, among many other things, furnish licences and subsidies, distribute benefits, impose fines,
prosecute people, and lock them up if need be. Each principal in the chain of delegation seeks to monitor
the execution of the delegated public tasks by calling the agent to account. At the end of the accountability
chain are the citizens, who pass judgement on the conduct of the government and who indicate their
(dis)pleasure at the ballot box. Hence, public accountability is an essential precondition for the democratic
process to work, since it provides citizens and their representatives with the information needed for judging
the propriety and effectiveness of government conduct (see also Przeworski et al. 1999; Dowdle 2006).
Application of the agency model has the strong advantage that it assigns an ideal type of accountability
relations – Strøm (2000) for instance stipulates that accountability will work best in presidential systems as
the number of delegations is the lowest and relations of delegation and accountability are unidirectional –
practical tips for principals who aim to model the relations with their agents and behavioural assumptions
for principals and agents. The lucidity of the model has inspired more authors to ground their work – albeit
often loosely or partially – in this theory (Auel 2007, Romzek & Johnston 2005, Bardach & Lesser 1996,
Bovens 2007, Bovens et al 2008, Mörth 2007; Whitaker et al 2004). Some others used the model as the
basis for testing hypotheses. Interestingly, however, not one of these tests was a big success and some
others (again with limited success) sought a way out by using stewardship theory.
Breaux et al (2002) for instance tested the applicability of the model in a case of welfare reform and
privatization. They concluded: “[N]ot only is traditional principal-agent theory an insufficient tool for
understanding the complex interrelationship between democratic actors in this particular case” but they also
found that the agency theory-based decision to privatize did not strengthen the welfare work but rather, in
the words of a respondent, “undermin[ed] what we are trying to achieve”. A similar finding was reported by
Lehn (2008). He used the PA-model to assess organizational performance of contracted not for profit
organizations. He then found that the model was only partially applicable to relationships between
governments and contracted not for profits, as these organizations also have relational goals with their
constituencies which are difficult to comprehend and acknowledge on the basis of the strongly performance
oriented model of agency theory. Finally, Kassel (2008) analyzed a complex bidding operation with private
for profit organizations. The situation superficially fit into the agency model – but he finds that the principal
did not behave as was expected (“did not meet essential criteria”). This meant, the principal did not
deliberately hire the best agent, did not have ascertain to have sufficient information in order to tackle the

18
information asymmetry, and the principal did not enforce the terms of the contract2. Kassel suggests that
practitioners should adapt their behaviour to fit with the theory and that this would have prevented the
policy failure investigated. Possibly so. Nevertheless, as the other authors he finds that agency theory
might be suitable as a prescriptive and normative model for accountability, whereas it also in his analysis is
flawed as a descriptive model in the sense of predicting the behaviour of actors in accountability processes.
For some authors (Bundt 2000, Dicke 2002. See also: Whitaker et al 2004), stewardship theory was a
viable alternative to agency theory as it adopts a more inclusive perspective on the relationship between
agent and principal. Stewardship theory has been developed from dissatisfaction with the ingrained
selfishness of agents and the ensuing and inescapable clash of interests between principals and agents in
agency theory. In contrast with the agency model, stewardship theory seeks to understand the conditions
under which agents will not ground their actions in self-interest, but rather take pleasure in serving
collective goals or act as stewards to the interests of their principals (Davis, Schoorman and Donaldson
1997: 24). Stewardship theory seeks to understand the qualities that a good steward should have. In doing
so, it also changes the perspective on the relationship between the principal and the agent/steward.
Whereas agency theory is primarily concerned with the containment of agency losses and costs and the
design of an efficient control system – in 1985 White already postulated that agency essentially is about
control (White, 1985). In contrast stewardship theory focuses on the premises of stewardship. The question
is essence is: under what conditions will stewardship flourish in the execution of delegated or acquired
tasks? The applications by Bundt (2000) and Dicke (2002) are promising, but the results are also mixed.
All in all, the accountability literature is often theory-light as most papers do not explicitly use a deductive
theory, quite some of them actually didn’t define the central concept accountability in the first place. Within
the cluster of theoretical papers there is a clear dominance of agency theory, with some additional rational
approaches such as game theory. The agency model is very suitable to model accountability relations and
also combines very well with the dominant conceptual approaches to accountability that are also founded in
relationships. However, the sparse empirical tests of the model learn that agency theory and stewardship
theory only to a limited degree help explain the behaviour of principals and agents in the investigated

2 These findings are very similar to the conclusions in three recent Utrecht phd’-projects on accountability deficits. The three
authors independently reached the conclusion that agency theory only partially helps describe and explain the behaviour of
accountability forums. The problem is – following these three books – not the problem of a failing agent but the problem of a
failing principal: a principal who does not use sanctions, does not care very much about the delegated task and does not utilize
available accountability mechanisms (See Busuioc 2010; Brandsma 2010; Schillemans 2011).

19
accountability situations. Given the modest results, it was slightly surprising and striking to see that none of
the authors used the broad range of studies on accountability in organization studies, political- and social
psychology (see Lerner & Tetlock 1999 for an overview). This was slightly striking, as their conceptions of
accountability can be combined with the dominant definitions of accountability in public management and
public administration as well as with agency theory. More importantly, this body of literature has been
tested successfully over the past decades and this has rendered many interesting and cumulative findings
that are actually highly relevant to many of the topics in these papers. Nevertheless, none of the authors in
public management and public administration papers in our sample have found this literature to be helpful.
Research Methods: Mono- and Multi Methodologists
There is large variety of methods that are used to research accountability. The table below provides an
indicative overview of the use of different research methods in the different fields. The grey cells indicate
disciplinary preferences, showing how accounting- and public administration scholars will generally use (a
combination of) content analysis and interviews, legal scholars prefer theoretical approaches, a preference
shared with political scientists who, together with international relations scholars, will also seek quantitative
evidence. Social psychologists, to conclude, are known for their experiments and are the most rigorous
mono-methodologists. In comparison, accountancy scholars display the most varied approaches to
studying accountability.
Table 2: Indicative use of research methods in academic disciplines (N= 210)3
Disciplines
Quantitative Experiment Content
analysis
Interviews Observation Theoretical /
Conceptual
Literature
review
Accounting - + ++ ++ + - -
Int. rel. ++ -- - - -- + -

3 As some studies used multiple methods, the percentages per discipline do not necessarily add up to 100.

20
Law - -- -- - -- ++ --
Pol. Sc. ++ -- -- - -- ++ +
Pub admin + -- ++ - +
-
Soc. Psy + ++ -- -- -- -- --
Social psychologists work from a more or less cohesive theoretical and methodological vantage point and
their work is, as a result, although highly varied and specialized, also fairly cohesive. The political science,
international relations and constitutional law disciplines also seem to be anchored in the same theoretical
nations of the ideals and institutions of the democratic state. Most of their work focuses on challenges to
established doctrines of democratic governance and they seek to understand, with a variety of research
methods and often with (partially theoretical objectives) how democracies should ‘cope’ with challenges,
such as for instance internationalization of policies.
The accounting and business administration literature on public accountability is, in contrast markedly more
varied. This should not come as surprise, as this branch of the literature is situated at the cross roads of
administrative and political theory on one hand, and business administration and accounting and auditing
pratices on the other hand. Different authors in these journals develop markedly different approaches to
this disciplinary encounter. As a result, they use a wide variety of research methods and display findings
which, in our limited sample of papers, are only loosely connected.
This loose fit between different research approaches is even more apparent in the public administration
literature on accountability which forms the bulk of our analyses and is our disciplinary ‘home ground’. This
branch of the literature was produced with traditional social scientific research methods on a body of largely
unrelated case studies. Slightly more than half of the papers adopted traditional social science approaches.
They were qualitative, based on interviews and documents, and authors focused on singular and unrelated
cases. As far as we were able to discern, none of these case studies was a specific follow-up on previous
case-work and none of the approaches seemed to replicate an approach that was used earlier for a similar
issue. As a result, many studies generate very interesting results which are awfully difficult to generalize.
Then some 17% of the papers used quantitative data exclusively or in combination with qualitative data
(see also Brandsma & Schillemans 2012). In almost all of these studies, however, accountability was not

21
the central concern in these papers but they generally rather focused on a different construct, incorporating
or adding accountability to some extent. Ashworth (2000) for instance did a statistical content analysis of
local party manifestoes, Heynrich (2002) focused on performance management systems, Gelleny &
Anderson (2000) focused on citizen support for policies, Justice et al (2006) analyzed websites, and Strøm
(1997) analyzed electoral data.
Some potentially interesting research approaches were virtually absent from the public administration
papers. There were hardly any content analyses4, even though information is a crucial element of
accountability, and some authors made claims about the quality of accountability data and there are
sophisticated research methods available to analyze texts. Secondly, there were no anthropological /
ethnographic papers where authors followed accountability processes at close hold, allowing them to
observe what people actually do when they are ‘doing’ accountability rather than relying as most of us do
(ourselves included) on what respondents in formal interviews claim they do. Finally, none of the papers
used the (quasi) experimental methods that have been adopted successfully in the accountability research
in organization studies, HRM, and political- and social psychology. The strength of this last approach is that
it allows the researcher to isolate the accountability moment – the critical external party demanding
answers and explanations from agents – and thus to study the effects and consequences on an individual
level.
To conclude: the accountability research in different fields focus on issues which can be easily related,
although most scholars seem to work from within their own discipline. As a result, the level of accumulation
is limited. With varying research methods, a large body of knowledge is evolving on aspects of
accountability. However, those insights are not often condensed and compared across, or even within,
disciplines. There is also a very low level of explicitly comparative research designs. As a result, the past
decade has seen the ‘production’ of a very large base of knowledge of accountability; but there is probably
hardly anyone who knows what it is that we now, collectively, know.

4 Exceptions were Ashworth (2000) and O’Connoll et al (2008). Their content analyses are however quantitative rather than
qualitative.

22
Accountable Actors: Individuals, Organizations, Institutions & Systems
When we look more closely at the focus of the different papers – and look at who’s accountability is being
analyzed – it becomes evident that the accountability of a huge variety of actors has been studied.
Social psychologists adopt the most stringent micro perspective and study face-to-face accountability
between persons in (quasi-) experimental settings. Those settings are often tilted towards specific
contextual contingencies. Sometimes the accountability relationship focuses on decision-makers,
sometimes on situations of negotiation, sometimes the focus is on intra-organizational control and
accountability, and some studies address group processes and conflicts. The wider psychological
accountability literature features many more of these specific contexts.
In contrast, the political science, international relations and constitutional law papers are more systemic and
more specifically focused on the central actors and institutions in democratic states. In these studies, the
accountability of politicians, national or local governments, bureaucratic entities, and influential third parties,
such as NGO’s, contractual third party collaborators or business elites, is the locus of attention.
Furthermore, particularly in political science and constitutional law, a number of papers discuss
accountability on the level of bureaucratic, international or electoral systems.
The public administration literature somehow occupies a middle ground between systemic and individual
accountability studies and focuses primarily on organizational accountability. The types of organizations
vary widely, between for instance child care providers (Klingner et al 2002 but also Bertelli 2004), the
financial accounting standards boards (Mattli & But the 2005), Monrovian education (Taylor & Shawn 2003),
the census bureau (Phung 2007), to the Kentucky transportation service (O’Connell et al 2008). There were
not many papers focusing on the accountability of individual agents in the large set of papers in this field,
such as politicians, bureaucrats or public managers. This was a slightly unexpected finding, as the search
specifically included some public management journals. But accountability is seldom operationalized vis a
vis individual public managers and most often focuses on the organizational level. Exceptions were an
article on the pressures some bureaucrats experienced in the aftermath of a plane crash (Romzek &
Ingraham 2000), the web of accountabilities of city librarians (Bundt 2000), US local government managers
(Dunn & Legge 2001), and the individual accountability relations of congressional staffers (Romzek 2000).
The business administration and accounting literature, finally, focuses, to the extent that it’s focus is on
public accountability, on the largest variety of types of actors. In this field, there are studies focusing on

23
managers but also on employees. There are studies of governments and bureaucracies, but also of NGO’s,
schools and state-owned enterprises. And, finally, there are some studies specifically pertaining to the
operations, instructions and effects of specialized accountability mechanisms and institutions, such as audit
institutions and audit commissions.
What about Accountability? Design, Practices & Fiasco’s
A final issue to consider is: what is the aim and focus of the different accountability studies. What are,
generally speaking, the overarching concerns in the literature? To this end, a more closer analysis of the
public administration literature is relevant as this foreshadows many, though not all, of the approaches in
the other disciplines.
In this branch of the literature, three sets of recurring themes come to the fore. To begin with, almost half of
the papers looked at issues relating to the design of appropriate systems or mechanisms or processes of
accountability. This is easy to understand, as institutional changes are the driving force behind a large part
of these papers; it is logical that many authors look for ‘fixes’ for the accountability problems that arise
through institutional reforms. These papers for instance focused on reforms in complex networks
(Papadopoulos 2007), the design of contracts (Romzek & Johnston 2005; Dicke 2002), performance
management systems (Heinrich 2002), central bank independence (Elgie 2001, with responses), and
accountability designs more generally for ‘the privatized state’ (Hodge & Coghill 2007).
A second set of papers, the naturally most enjoyable ones to read, focuses on incidents and policy fiasco’s,
such as the aforementioned Ron Brown plane crash (Romzek & Ingraham 2000), the adventures of the
mysterious organization ICANN (Koppell 2005), the inability of the North Irish police to stop the troubles in
the nineteen sixties (Connolly et al 1996), the fall of the European Commission under Santer (Craig 2000),
and telling examples of goal displacement among not for profits (Young 2002).
Finally there is a third set of papers, the most empirical ones in general, that analyze and describe
everyday practices of accountability within organizations. There are for instance papers on managerial
accountability (Page 2005), on how to manage risks with the "help" of performance accountability (Lehn
2008), strategic behaviour in accountability processes (Bundt 2000) and the responses by public managers
to specific signals from accountability (Dunn & Legge 2001).

24
Figure 2 provides an overview.
The focus on design issues, on issues thus about designing appropriate forms of accountability in a context
of institutional transformation, ties the public administration literature in with political science and, notably,
constitutional law research. The empirical developments driving the research agenda are also fairly similar
in these disciplines. They refer to the role of non-governmental actors in policy making, the globalization of
institutions and decision-making, and, in Rhodes’ words, the ‘hollowing out’ of the state through
disaggregation, privatization and decentralization. Revisiting the question of appropriate accountability-
design is a salient question in these circumstances. One could only add that the attention for institutional
bricolage is markedly stronger than the available evaluative and empirical work. As a result, ensuing
institutional reforms may be based on a thinnish basis. Here, the other disciplines could provide valuable
contributions. Social and organizational psychologists have for instance related accountability to political
skills (see Hochwarter et al 2007), group processes (Scholten et al 2007) and decisions about public goods
(DeCremer & Van Dijck 2009). These studies focus on micro-level factors that mediate or affect decisions,
information processing and outcomes of accountability. At the other extreme, some international relations
studies have interestingly compared and analyzed macro effects of accountability. authors in this field for
instance use accountability in order to explain different levels of quality in public services (Facquet & Ali
2009), the effects (or, more precisely, lack thereof) of decentralization (Yilmaz et al 2010) or compliance
with bilateral agreements (Dai 2005).
These are only a few of many available results from research in the different fields. Their interrelatedness
seems to be evident; so, in conclusion, there may be much to win from reading and using research from
different fields.
50%
26%
20%
4%
Fig. 2 Types of Issues in Public Admin- Accountability Research
Design issue Policy Fiasco Routines Others

25
Conclusions: Some Footholds for Accumulation
There has been quite a production of work on accountability by a large number of authors against a
backdrop of ambitious (and ambiguous) administrative transformations over the last decade. Accountability
is almost always addressed in situations of administrative change that may be at odds with the traditional
notions of administrative organization and –accountability. The concept often serves as the critical
companion to administrative change.
The idea of this working paper was to bring insights together from these large and often unconnected
research activities both within and across academic disciplines. Accountability is a notoriously complex
concept as many authors do not fail to point out at the start of their papers. It would be foolish to argue that
it is otherwise. However, from analyzing these papers, we can’t help but conclude that the level of
conceptual confusion might sometimes be exaggerated whilst the contours of a minimal definitional
consensus are actually visible. We coined this the dominant conceptual approach, encompassing Romzek
(2000) and Dubnick’s (2007) much quoted typologies and later additions by Mulgan (2003) and Bovens
(2007). Their relational and phased approaches to accountability combine very well with the agency theory
perspective so forcefully described by Strøm (2000) and they also combine well with the social and political
psychological work on accountability (see Patil et al 2013). It would perhaps be helpful if scholars curtailed
their understandable desire to develop new and encompassing definitions of accountability and rather
acknowledge the dormant conceptual consensus and work from there. Once scholars accept to work with
the (necessarily less than perfect) minimal definitional consensus, it will be possible to study accountability
within a common conceptual framework and in related cases or designs that may lead to generalizable
insights into this salient and fundamental aspect of political life and public administration.
In addition, it would seem perfectly possible to diversify the research techniques used beyond the currently
dominant qualitative designs and to develop a stronger theoretical underpinning of accountability. This
theory could likely be a combination of agency theory with cognitive models from psychological research.
Both theories – as well as the dominant conceptual approach – rest on a relational model of accountability.
The insights from the various disciplines discussed in this working paper tie in together and authors may
benefit from using insights from different fields.
Finally, it would be helpful (certainly across the barriers of languages), to hyphenate accountability, as
some of the apparent confusions seems to be a function of the different aspects of accountability people
describe. It would be helpful for instance, if authors clarified whether they spoke about accountability-

26
expectations, accountability-norms, accountability-processes, accountability-behaviour, accountability-
documents, accountability-mechanisms, or accountability-results.
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