KYT102U-INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Chapter 7: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics
Introduction
The widespread maladministration, corruption, and politicization of bureaucracy, almost in all countries, necessitated new measures to control the massive power of bureaucracy and force it to serve the public good. The traditional idea of formal accountability as the legality needed to be revised to handle the ever-increasing bureaucracy. Thus, a broader concept of accountability, transparency, and ethics has been developed within the last several decades.
Accountability, transparency, and ethics are interrelated concepts. In other words, to realize accountability in public administration, we need adequate information about bureaucratic decisions and policies, which requires transparency. In turn, to realize a transparent public bureaucracy, we need bureaucratic ethics internalized by the bureaucracy. Without ethics, transparency would be in danger, and accountability would be inadequate.
Accountability
The concept of accountability first appeared in accounting/bookkeeping historically. The idea goes back to the era of William I in 11th-century England. King William ordered every property owner in England to list his properties. Then, these properties were recorded by royal agents in books called Doomsday Books.
With the rise of the democratic system in the modern era, accountability has gained a new dimension. The democratic government relies on the national will and is responsible to society. Thus, to stay in power, the government has to serve the well-being of society.
In the modern era, in parallel with the growth of the welfare state, accountability of bureaucracy has gained more significance.
Accountability is the instrument that assures the public authority and public resources vested in the government are used for the benefit of the people.
Definition of Public Accountability
Accountability has three components: There must be an accountant, an account holder, and a set of clearly defined rules according to which the accountant is held responsible. In the technical sense, public accountability refers to public offices and officers, whether elected or appointed. Both politicians and administrative personnel are held accountable for their decisions, policy implementations, and behaviors related to public issues. Politicians in a democratic system are held accountable by the people in each election.
This electoral process functions as a process of accountability.
On the other hand, the administrative personnel or the bureaucracy is held accountable by the politicians on behalf of the people as bureaucrats are not elected by the people.
Nevertheless, public accountability is broader than these two practices, and accountability measures are multi- dimensional such as public forums and ombudsmanship. Significantly, the legal system and the courts also have roles in public accountability.
Traditional Form of Public Accountability
The traditional model of accountability is closely related to the Weberian perception of modern bureaucracy and has two dimensions: While politicians are responsible to citizens, bureaucrats are answerable to politicians. The relationship between the bureaucracy and politicians is a linear and hierarchical relationship.
The Weberian model of accountability assumes that “specialization, merit appointment, coordination, hierarchy, standardized procedures, record keeping, accounting, policy directives, and the other elements of bureaucratic control result in both individual and group accountability to agency and program goals.” This perception of accountability is structured by the modern centralized bureaucracy. In other words, accountability is seen as an inevitable function of all these principles. Once the bureaucrats follow those principles, there will not be any mismanagement.
The traditional model of accountability is a relatively more uncomplicated form of accountability, for “it may be easier to apportion responsibility and blame when dealing with more specific policy issues or administrative decisions and when the chain of causes and effects can be more easily isolated from the context of other policies and decisions and the general circumstances of economic and social life.”
The aim of traditional public accountability is to prevent or at least decrease as much as possible corruption and maladministration in the public sector. In the case of mismanagement, accountability becomes a means of punishment.
Critique of Traditional Model of Accountability
With the rise of New Public Management in the 1980s due to the neo-liberal wave, the traditional model of public accountability needed to be revised. As Peters puts it succinctly, “The logic of much of conventional accountability is punishment rather than improvement. The major political benefits of accountability are the exposure of the malfeasance or nonfeasance of political officials rather than the identification of problems in order to rectify them.”
NPM promotes the market model as a better form of governance: “New public management (NPM) stands broadly for the use of private sector management techniques in government and the transfer of government functions to private bodies. The philosophy of NPM is that government should ‘steer’ (decide policy) while private bodies should ‘row’ (deliver services), and that public bodies should be imbued with the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’. Examples of the latter include the use of performance-
related pay, short-term contracts, and open recruitment strategies. NPM is based on assumptions about the inherent inefficiency and unresponsiveness of public bodies” (Heywood, 2013: 367).
NPM, as a liberal approach, requires deregulations, outsourcing, liberalizations, public-private partnership, and contracting out in public administration. All these practices created a much more complex public sector recently. In parallel with the increasing complexity of the public sector, the idea of public accountability also started to change. While the traditional concept emphasized legality, the notion of accountability promoted by NPM emphasized performance in the public sector. Thus, performance-based accountability is the new paradigm of public accountability.
Performance-Based Accountability
Performance-based accountability aims to increase the effectiveness of public programs and, therefore, “make public programs as good as possible.” That is why it is a much more complex form of accountability than the traditional model.
Peters listed eight steps of performance-based accountability:
• Defining Outcomes • Defining Outputs • Developing effective measurement mechanisms • Linking programs to outputs and outcomes • Defining adequate standards • Defining adequate improvement • Defining responsibility • Linking inputs to outputs
Performance-based accountability requires careful planning, which is much more complex than the conventional model.
Peters presents a seven-step blueprint to realize performance-based accountability as follows:
• Thus, it would be much more realistic and applicable if one or a few programs were subjected to performance-based accountability. • At the beginning stage, one indicator should be chosen, and additional performance indicators should be added. • Performance-based accountability should target public programs which “have identifiable and measurable outputs.” • Performance indicators should be flexible. In theory, a selected indicator might seem helpful, but it might not work in practice. Thus, indicators of performance should be revised if necessary. • Performance expectations should be reasonable and practical. • Performance demand should also support the transparency of public programs to help the government’s legitimacy.
• Both the implementation process of performance measurement and the results in a public institution should be shared with other public institutions.
A well-designed and implemented public accountability shows that the government is competent, reliable, and practical and creates trust between the government and society.
Transparency
Transparency is “the process through which public authorities make decisions should be understandable and open; the decisions themselves should be reasoned; as far as possible, the information on which the decisions are based should be available to the public.”
Transparency has several dimensions according to this definition: First, public officers should provide necessary information about their decisions to the public. Second, the idea of transparency is an inevitable result of a democratic system that requires active citizens in the public sphere. Third, transparency prevents corruption and maladministration by avoiding the misuse of bureaucratic authority and sources. Fourth, transparency enhances the legitimacy of the bureaucracy. Fifth, it also creates trust between the bureaucracy and the citizens.
The idea of transparency, from a historical perspective, was first introduced by Sweden. Sweden adopted the Freedom of the Press Act in 1766. This act includes the idea of transparency. Then, Denmark and other Nordic Countries adopted the principle of transparency into their constitutional system after the Second World War.
The United States is also one of the pioneering countries making the first reforms for open public administration. The USA adopted the Administration Procedures Act (APA) in 1946 and the Freedom of Information and the Government in the Sunshine Act in 1976. All these regulations aimed to create an open, transparent, and more democratic public sector.
Traditional Idea of Bureaucratic Secrecy
The traditional bureaucracy indeed relies on the principle of secrecy. That is why the principle of transparency is a relatively new idea. The Weberian paradigm of bureaucracy limits accountability with legislative and judicial responsibility, which is called “the principle of legality.” This conventional paradigm does not include transparency but implies the principle of secrecy.
Max Weber argued that “a preoccupation with secrecy is an inherent characteristic of administrative institutions.” According to Weber, bureaucratic secrecy stems from two different sources: The functional necessity of bureaucratic issues and the bureaucratic obsession with secrecy. The first one is a legitimate concern, yet the second one is not legitimate, for it stems from the bureaucracy’s tendency to increase its power and privileges.
The conventional bureaucracy tries to escape outside control and increase its power by concealing or manipulating information. Thus, this form of bureaucratic secrecy has nothing to do with the effectiveness or public interests; instead, it tends to avoid accountability and accumulate power for power concentration.
Democracy and Transparency
Recent discussions in democratic thought emphasize the “democratic deficit” in contemporary representative democracies. The idea of democratic deficit argues that holding bureaucracy in particular and the government, in general, accountable requires transparency in governmental activities and legality. Traditional bureaucratic accountability is limited to legality, which provides ample scope for bureaucratic secrecy. In turn, bureaucratic secrecy creates opportunities for corruption, bribery, maladministration, and misuse of public authority and sources. To prevent all these problems and increase the quality of the democratic system, transparency is a vital ingredient of democratic systems without which citizens cannot asses the bureaucratic and political governance and whether they are for the benefit of the society.
The idea of transparency requires “open public administration.” In other words, “What governments do in” taking decisions and implementing them “should be open to public knowledge and scrutiny.”
In a democratic system, democratic control of public institutions by the people stems from the idea of national sovereignty. In other words, citizens have the right to scrutinize public institutions and whether they act for the benefit of the public. The people need sufficient information from a transparent public administration to realize this function. Without transparency, people cannot perform this democratic function.
Ethics
Ethics is another significant dimension of contemporary public administration. Accountability, transparency, and ethics are all interrelated. Without ethics, transparency would be in danger, and accountability would be inadequate.
Ethics is defined in general as a “system or code of conduct based on universal moral duties and obligations which indicate how one should behave; it deals with the ability to distinguish good from evil, right from wrong and propriety from impropriety.” In other words, ethical values are guidelines directing individual behavior and decisions by the universal normative principles in all of the domains of society.
Ethical values such as fairness, honesty, or caring are “concerned with the notion of moral duty; they reflect attitudes about what is right, good, or proper rather than what is pleasurable, useful, or desirable.” On the other hand, professional ethics is a narrower term. Each professional field could have its specific values and
attributes besides general requirements of ethics in the broader sense. Professional ethics is about norms, values, and attributes desirable in the personnel of both public and private institutions.
Ethics in public administration is one of the rising topics recently, especially with the rise of public concern about maladministration, widespread corruption, the politicization of bureaucracy, and the democratic deficit. These concerns have led scholars to work on ethics in public bureaucracy.
Ethics and Bureaucracy
According to Goss, there are two “dominant traditions or paradigms for public administration ethics – bureaucratic ethos and democratic ethos” in democratic societies. The bureaucratic ethos, as the professional ethics of the bureaucracy, includes efficiency, expertise, accountability, efficacy, and loyalty. The democratic ethos has three components: Citizenship, public interests, and social equity. Based on these two ethos, bureaucratic values can be listed as impartiality, objectivity, consistency, predictability, reliability, courage, fairness, truthfulness, tolerance, fidelity to law, rhetorical ability, open- mindedness, benevolence, self-discipline, civility, respect for others, trustworthiness, public-spiritedness, sense of justice, and prudence.
Once the bureaucracy internalizes these ethical values through education and training, bureaucrats will act voluntarily to address transparency and accountability.
Recent Developments in Accountability, Transparency, And Ethics
According to Armstrong, from a global perspective, three stages could be determined in developing principles of accountability, transparency, and ethics. The first stage was from the late 1980s to the 1990s. In the first stage, bureaucratic problems such as corruption, bribery, and maladministration became hottopics of public debate in many countries and international institutions. As a result, Transparency International was established in 1993.
The second stage covers the era between the mid-1990s and 2003. In this stage, international standards were developed by many conventions such as “the Organization of American States (OAS) Inter-American Convention Against Corruption (1996), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Convention Against Bribery (1997), Council of Europe’s Criminal and Civil Conventions (1999), African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption (2003) and the UN Convention Against Corruption (2003).”
The third stage is the current stage, and its focus is to implement all those standards to fight against corruption, bribery, and maladministration. According to Armstrong, this current stage is “the most daunting one for public administration, as successful implementation and enforcement require introducing new or significant
modifications to existing institutions and their organizational cultures. Thus all actors—government, private sector, and civil society—face this challenge at all levels—international, national and sub-national.”
As we look at the different regions of the World and countries, we see that even consolidated democracies have significant problems implementing these principles.
OECD countries are developed and wealthy countries primarily located in western Europe and North America. The OECD countries have introduced many regulations to increase the quality of public administration. They adopted the Anti- Bribery Convention in 1997 to fight against foreign official bribery. They also introduced “the Principles for Managing Ethics in the Public Service in 1998 and issued Guidelines for Managing Conflict-of- Interest in the Public Sector in 2003” (Armstrong, 2005: 4). These countries practice periodic reviews of implementation policies of ethics, transparency, and accountability.
The European Union creates a strong stimulus for its member states and candidate states to develop an effective public administration. The Copenhagen Criteria impose many regulations on member and candidate states to realize ethics, transparency, and accountability.
The Arab countries introduced Good Governance for Development in Arab Countries in 2005 to promote ethics, transparency, and accountability in the public sector.
Some of the best examples of institutional development implementing these principles are in several Asian and Pacific countries such as Hong Kong and Singapore. They have well-developed and effective legal regulations and institutions “that serve as a model for other countries” (Armstrong, 2005: 6). In 2000, 36 Asian and Pacific countries adopted the Anti-Corruption Action Plan for Asia and the Pacific.
In 2001 the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) was adopted. Since there are many widespread problems in Africa, such as corruption, weak state institutions, politicized bureaucracy, political instability, and weak civil society, it is a complex problem to institutionalize the principle of ethics, transparency, and accountability in the short term. Yet, the current practices in this field indicate that positive contributions are possible. For African development, transparency, accountability, and ethics are essential requirements.