My first paper in a new project on democratic accountability in a world of complex governance has been accepted by Public Performance Management Review. Some of the ideas in this project were presented in my Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professorship Lecture at New York University Law School. A fuller exposition of these ideas will appear in a book, currently under contract with Cambridge University Press.
It will appear in a symposium issue following a wonderful session at last year’s meeting of the American Society of Public Administration in Chicago organized by Kaifeng Yang and Mel Dubnick. Here’s the abstract:
Two critical questions for the study of accountability in contemporary governance can focus attention on the citizen, rather than the official. I begin with the question of whether a citizen can identify a policy worker—that is, the bureaucrat, contractor, or other actor acting in pursuit of a legislated policy goal. I then turn to whether a citizen can evaluate policy work that is done to further a legislated policy goal. Both identification and evaluation prove tricky to assess in a great deal of policy work, leaving accountability an important, but elusive, democratic value. This paper provides a framework for analysts to understand when and why accountability works from a citizen’s perspective and what incentives policy workers and politicians have when it does.
Anthony Michael Bertelli 