Hi and welcome to Module three in this module, we'll be discussing the issue of accountability building on our previous two modules,
which have explored the ethical and the structural components of public administration.
So last week in the last module,
rather we left off and our discussion on morality with some rather difficult questions and perhaps even more difficult expectations,
moral action and administration if we're following Waldo.
Occurs within a field of overlapping and sometimes conflicting obligations, obligations to family and self,
obligations to one's profession, to organizational norms, broader obligations to the nation and obligations to democratic values.
Unfortunately, it's not always clear how one should act in a given situation if we simply view actions from the outside,
meaning we we view the actions of individuals as spectators.
And this brings us to the problem of administrative evil and how important a
consideration it actually is because it shows us how the structure of administration,
which we talked about in the context of bureaucracy, can produce a more systematic approach to both good and bad outcomes.
In effect, it's a neutral instrument to be used for the purpose of large scale change.
But Ahrens, of course, brings us back around from that impersonal framework that we inherited,
from bureaucracy to questions more implicitly personal, in particular,
the question of responsibility and following Hannah aren't we must view any given action,
even actions that are conducted within the realm of impersonal bureaucracy to be questions of responsibility and thus intrinsically personal.
To understand this, I want you to recall the distinction we made between temptation and obligation.
The idea being that one is only tempted to act, never obliged or obligated to do so.
It is up to an individual to determine the rightness, the goodness, the wrongness, the badness of any given action.
And nevertheless,
we have to live with the consequences when faced with actions or activities that we deem unsatisfactory or unreliable on a moral basis,
and we choose not to act within an organizational realm.
We must bear the consequences, the formal consequences of not acting.
Any responsible administrator, the point that Orange makes and this is also implicit within Waldo as well.
A responsible administrator is always personally responsible.
Meaning that he or she is willing to endure the consequences of those personal moral obligations.
So to really appreciate this, we contrasted in disgust. Kim Davis and Ed Snowden and their actions,
which they believe they were taking in a sincere way on the basis of what was right and the necessity of enduring the consequences of those actions.
So we talked a little bit a lot about responsibility last week, implicitly when we discussed the questions of evil, especially in the context of.
But today and in this lecture, in the next couple of lectures, we're going to speak about accountability.
So what does it mean to speak about accountability and is there a distinction between accountability and responsibility?
Is accountability a different way of thinking about responsibility, or is accountability a modern displacement of responsibility?
Formalization of what we might think of simply as obligation?
So this does indeed remain an open question.
Theoretically speaking, in the field of public administration, public policy and especially within politics,
the questions of accountability continue to be widely debated and disputed
because of how important it seems to be to the values of our political system,
alongside the implicit role that it has in controlling actions and following basic rules and laws.
So this does indeed remain an open question.
But one way into thinking about it is to recall the fact that within the realm of bureaucracy and administration,
we are speaking about what we call social action. We're not necessarily speaking about individual action.
And this is where we get into some of these difficulties with evil and morality, right?
So as we go through this series of lectures in this module, I want you to keep in mind a couple of important questions.
Think about how the use of accountability in our language may have changed.
And in reality, as you'll see in Graphic one, which is available, the use of accountability has become far more frequent.
It's risen rather dramatically, especially in the middle of the 20th century and this rise in the use of accountability,
meaning how frequently it's used in books and in speeches and in other printed materials.
The frequency of its use, this increased frequency and its use coincides very much with the rise of the administrative state itself,
which really began to take shape after the leadership in the United States of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his presidency,
and especially and after World War Two, with the scaling up of many federal agencies and responsibilities of the government to the people.
So the other thing we have to think about is how accountability reflects values of modernity.
These are the values that we discussed in the first module concerning labor and his recognition, his acknowledgment, his observation.
One might say that this is a new set of social constraints that we live with a set of social
constraints that is not based upon tradition or anything metaphysical or appeals to God,
but a secular system of constraints and restraints that is based upon impersonal arrangements of control in many respects.
So how does accountability reflect those types of values?
So as I mentioned, Graphic One gives you a general idea of the way that accountability has increased in frequency over the past roughly,
let's say, 80 years. And if you look at the graphic, you'll also see that it coincides, as I mentioned with administrative state,
which isn't in the graphic, but also with the decline in discussions or relative decline in discussions of responsibility.
That's not to say, as the graphic displays,
it's not to say that accountability has fully displaced responsibility in our minds or in our thoughts or in our ideas.
But it certainly shows that responsibility seems to have dwindled in in relative importance in our language and our usage of it.
So to grasp this, I want to turn to the question that is kind of implicit within accountability, which is a relational question.
What I mean is that it's a question about how two parties relate to each other.
Because, again, we're not talking about the personal or about individual action.
And so consequently, we have to include the fact that actions under which accountability is discussed are under which we discuss accountability.
They take place in the context of what we might simply refer to as expectations,
meaning we expect a person to act in a way that aligns with the expressed values of the group or what you might call social expectations.
Now, it's not simply about expectations, of course,
because the matter of accountability is about not just that we expect someone to act in a particular way,
but also, and most importantly, perhaps about how to get a person to act in that way,
how to get a person to act according to those social expectations.
And in this respect, we've got a kind of before the deed way of thinking about accountability.
And after the deed way of thinking about accountability or what I refer to as prefect on accountability and post facto accountability.
And we'll get to that in just a few moments. But before we do, I want to explore a little bit more this relational idea of accountability,
because really what we're talking about is one party expecting another party to do something,
but also that one party is strategically conditioning the context of action so that a person will act as expected or intended.
They're creating conditions that as as reasonably as possible, guarantee that certain actions are taken.
And so accountability is in many respects, formalized by what is known as the principal agent problem.
It's also sometimes called the agency dilemma.
The problem in the principal Asian issue is that you have one person or entity, and we'll call this person the agent.
Who's acting on behalf of or making decisions that impact another person or entity in this case, we'll call the person the principal.
So this situation where you've got one individual, the agent acting on behalf of or within, with the potential to impact a principal,
the situation becomes a problem or a dilemma when agents are motivated to act on
their own specific interests that do not align with the interests of the principals.
So what we've got is what we call a misalignment of incentives.
So when we talk about the principal agent problem, we are referring to strategies of people with different goals and motivations.
The dilemma is that the agent, the person acting, does not share the motivations and the goals of the principal.
So what would you expect a principal to do in that case?
So remember, it's in the interest of the principal to get the agent to act in a way that aligns with the principles,
objectives or goals or intentions. And the problem is that the agent may have alternative objectives or alternative incentives
that do not motivate him or her to act in a way that aligns with the principles,
goals and objectives. So if we approach this from the perspective of the principal instead of the agent, then what we have is one party,
the principal who wants this other party, the agent, to act in a certain and definite way.
But the agent has incentives in place to behave out of accordance with those expectations.
Now, the common example here is an employee and an employer. An employee will try to do the least work possible and still get paid.
We call this commonly shirking. The employer wants the employee to achieve the highest level of efficiency that is feasible.
So this is a simple example where the employee and the employer have different goals.
The employee to do the least amount of work for the dollar and the employer to get the most production for the dollar.
I went in a couple of weeks,
we're going to talk about this in a in a more direct way when we get to questions of management within public administration.
And we'll talk about motivation. We'll talk about incentives and management.
But right now, I want to focus upon the question of accountability as it relates to this relationship and this relationship.
How does an employer then hold an employee accountable, as we commonly say?
This is a common phrase that we hear very frequently that an employer or an employee,
an employee must be held accountable, an employer must hold an employee accountable.
Right. So in order to hold the employee accountable, an employer might do a few things,
such as evaluate the workers production and then determine the pay structure according to that.
So we might tie the amount that someone gets in in their payment to how much they actually produce.
That's one way to hold an employee accountable. We can also as the employer institute performance metrics,
and these are ways of measuring how well the employee delivers value in a comparative sense.
Right. So what we would do is then measure the performance of an employee and then do the evaluations after the
fact and determine whether or not that employee is satisfactorily achieving what the employer desires.
The employer can also tie that payment directly to production, as mentioned, like commissions and sales contracts.
The point is that the employer and the employee are in what we call a contest of motivations,
a contest of motivations, and it is incumbent upon the principle here.
To ensure in a way that is most feasible, that the agent's motivations align with the needs of the principal.
So in this case, we're talking about in a way, is to see the the idea of accountability as being an instrument of a principal of a principal actor.
So if we bring this over into the public sector,
one of the most challenging questions to resolve is what we would call the question of sovereignty and representation.
Right, as we have seen through the eyes of Wilson.
That with this shift in notions of sovereignty away from an individual monarch, a single mind into what Wilson called the multitudinous monarch,
meaning democracy and in simple terms, we've got a problem where you've got many different desires or objectives.
What we might call the public will that must guide and determine the actions and activities of representatives what we might think of as the agents.
So in this case, this multitudinous monarch that the DeMoss is the principal and you've got agents who have been elected
to represent those individuals or represent the public well who are now acting on behalf of it.
So in effect, what Wilson is trying to work out is the matter of who decides on these key matters that affect the general public good,
who acts on matters that have material importance, meaning that they have an impact on others.
And so out of this question, Wilson builds us this world of administration and this world of administration
creates this group of actors who presumably are now acting on behalf of the public.
And Wilson is quite clear on the matter of who knows and who understands more in this relationship.
He states quite clearly the superiority of what he calls the reformers or what we might think of as
simply the administrators in terms of knowing what is the best approach or the best thing to do,
what is in the public interest, though it is not done, of course, without some kind of meddling from the public itself.
And Wilson himself describes the public as a kind of meddlesome necessity.
So in theoretical terms, what we have here is a situation of what we would call asymmetric information because the problem is that the agent,
the reformers, they have more information about matters than the principal.
They simply put, they know more than the public does about the actions, the activities and the possibilities of work within government itself.
And this puts the agent in a superior position. And it also virtually guarantees that the principal is going to have great difficulty
ensuring that the agent is acting in the principals best interest for a variety of reasons,
among them the fact that the principal has great difficulty observing how the agent acts.
So just to give you a little bit of of a precursor,
what we're talking about here is the very problem that is at the heart of the Friedrich in the final debate,
which is that you've got so apparent experts who are acting within the government who quite simply
know more about what it is they must do and how to achieve the goals that have been set forth.
Then the nominal at least principle, which is the public.
And so we've got a problem here where the public doesn't even quite understand
the work that is required to achieve the goals that are in its interest.
So to put this in a straightforward language, we're concerned with ensuring that the public sector workers are fulfilling the interests of the public.
And this is the basic outline of what we mean when we generally refer to accountability.
We are not again simply talking about representation of elected officials.
So that's the classic way of thinking about democratic accountability.
It's sort of the way of thinking about democratic accountability and the liberal philosophy sense of John Stuart Mill, for example.
But that is not the issue of accountability in modern times or in modern discourse.
It is a complicated matter, not least of all, because of the myriad things that are now being done by public sector workers on behalf of the public.
The more that we ask of public sector workers, the more requirements that are placed upon them,
the more difficult it becomes to set up systems of control or accountability.
The people in the public agencies or the administrators are quite simply, not necessarily directly accountable to the public, even by design.
This is something that Wilson himself acknowledges. We often then rely upon that classic accountable figure.
The elected representative to serve as a kind of mediating agent or a mediating actor who oversees the administrator or the reformer,
and the expectation is not only that the public sector workers are acting on behalf of the public.
But also that the representative is doing so. So we've got two levels of representation here.
We've got the representation within the bureaucracy and we've got the representation within the political sphere of elected officials,
and each of these is and is expected to be accountable to the public.
And that leaves the primary sense of accountability of the administrator. And the bureaucrat to that of the representative.
What I mean, and we see this in the Frederick and final debate is that because the public cannot.
In any cohesive way or coherent way, grasp the necessities of the actions taken by administrators,
we rely upon our representatives to do so through various committees and oversight.
But as your readings showed.
That is not necessarily that easy, because the representatives themselves may not fully grasp the necessity of work with an administration.
Now, this becomes especially important when we talk about what are called street level bureaucrats.
A street level bureaucrat is an agent who makes decisions on the ground without direct oversight.
But they're also often best positioned to make needed contextual decisions.
A street level bureaucrat we often describe as being a person who has direct face to face interaction with the public itself.
The classic example of street level bureaucrats is a police officer and a classic example of street level bureaucrat.
Bureaucracy and problems of discretion is whether a police officer gives a ticket or not.
Many people have had these types of experiences when they've been pulled over.
It is up in many respects to the police officer to determine whether or not he or she will write a ticket
for whatever perceived wrongdoing you have committed when you have been pulled over by a police officer.
But it's a much more important concept than just that type of trivial situation because
street level bureaucrats make decisions when there are not rules to dictate how to behave.
And this is very important when you think of getting pulled over if you broke the rule.
You get the ticket right. If you are speeding, you improve your speed speeding. You get the ticket.
If you ran a stop sign, you get the ticket. Of course, you know this is ignoring many of the ways that police officers may abuse that power.
But let's not.
Let's set that aside for just a moment because I want to focus right now on those situations where there are not rules that dictate how to behave,
because these are especially important concerns within public safety.
And these are some of the problems that come about when we want to hold, for example,
police officers or other street level bureaucrats accountable for their actions
because they present very serious problems for questions of accountability.
Because whether we're simply concerned with something like wasteful spending or with justice being served or fairness being ensured.
What we're talking fundamentally about is a design and an arrangement in society that
makes sure that agents who are acting on behalf of the principals in this case,
the public itself are doing so in a way that guarantees alignment with the public good.
The issue is about how far we then will have to go in order to try to control those agents before the agent acts.
As well as an admission that this kind of control is also of limited effect,
that there will be times when we cannot control how a person acts and then still must
respond with systems of accountability when we perceive some kind of wrongdoing.
So there must be consequences for misdeeds as well.
This requires after the fact recourse in determining how well some agent's actions align with principals desires and objectives.
So what I'm describing in simple terms here is that we can have as many rules and policies in place that tell a police officer how to act.
What types of procedures they must follow.
But when they act in ways that appear or must be investigated for having violated what we think of as justice or fairness or the public good,
there has to be a consequence associated with it. And this is the language of accountability.
This is the language of principal and agents. This is the language of representation in a very strictly speaking sense.
So in the next lecture, we're going to explore a kind of typology of accountability that helps us to distinguish between the systems of control
and those systems of consequence by looking particularly at how different systems of accountability are designed,
based upon before the action or after the action activity.
In his second lecture on accountability, we're going to focus upon a basic typology of accountability,
and it's a heuristic for understanding the different forms and types of bureaucracy, excuse me, of accountability that we have become accustomed to.
And so if you would look at graphic, too, in the graphics document that's available on Moodle,
you'll see a simple two by two matrix where vertically you've got internal and external.
And this is referring basically to the organization itself.
And horizontally, you've got prefect and and post Factom,
which is basically just referring to before the deed or after the deed, or before the act or after the act.
And so with this two by two matrix,
we'll be able to explore the different ways that accountability is considered and also designed into our social systems.
So we're going to start with the most obvious one for us at this point, which is the bureaucratic or bureaucracy type accountability.
And the reason we're going to start with this one is because of its reliance upon the structural components that were already quite familiar with.
Because in this case, what we're referring to is a rule based system of accountability being that there are rules that are legible,
that are known and that are enforceable.
And so these and forcibly enforceable and known rules are ways that we guarantee and an agent acts in the interests of the principal.
And this is mostly a prefect and more before the act type of type accountability, because what we're really talking about are procedures,
rules in terms of procedures that tell people how to behave within the organization.
So we should be very familiar with this from our discussion of ethics in the previous module.
Because in that case, what we were talking about were individuals who in many respects could find themselves defending their actions because
those actions were prescribed by the bureaucracy that thus they were acting in accordance with the stated social goals.
And if you think of these stated social goals as being expressed through the rules of the bureaucracy itself.
So in that case, what you've got is a system where there are clearly assigned roles,
and we should know this from the ideal type that Faber describes of bureaucracy.
Individuals know what their roles are within the organization itself, and they know how to act and behave and thus out of this.
They are granted authority over whatever, whatever designated space they have been granted,
and we might also think of them as being responsible only to the fulfillment of the roles that have been designed into their activities.
So when we talk about authority and responsibility,
we're basically referring to how these individuals have been essentially prescribed their actions and their activities.
And so built built into this from a structural standpoint,
is the simple oversight what Labor calls Mona ocracy or monochromatic systems where there are single agency heads.
And ultimately, what this means is that there is one person in charge of whatever the activities are, ultimately speaking.
Now, of course, this leads to some strange pathologies.
Among them is the the scapegoat type system, where you've got individuals who, well,
simply put, something goes wrong within the organization and someone has to be blamed.
And because the organization is presumed to have been designed for whatever activity it's supposed to achieve.
And so when things do go wrong, someone has to have done wrong or acted wrong, and so they tend to be scapegoated.
Now again, what you're talking about here is a kind of performance where you're simply doing what you should be doing,
where you have you have a very clear idea of what your designated tasks are.
And so accountability in this situation is ensured within the structure of the organization.
The structure itself provides the accountability for it.
So that gives us an idea of the kind of prefect internal typology type of accountability.
Now let's look at the internal but post facto meaning after the deed,
because here what we're going to learn about is a movement that really took off in the 1990s and is still in very many respects,
even three decades later. A big feature within our government, which is what we call a new public management.
So here we're talking about a kind of client accountability and in this case,
the client you might think of as the principal and you're thinking of the the public itself as as having an
opportunity to make decisions about the best ways that it that the organization itself satisfies public,
the public interest.
And so what you see with the rise of this type of client accountability is a situation of flexible discretion where results are what matter.
And consequently, it becomes a kind of market oriented the logic for organizational activities.
So to really get this, I want to introduce this notion of new public management.
New public management, as I mentioned, emerged in the early 1990s, mostly in the U.S. and in Great Britain,
but very prominently here in the U.S. under the Clinton administration. There was a general belief across all parties that government was broken.
You might say. And there was bipartisan support for government scaling down its operations.
So some of you may be aware of Reagan's declaration that government is not a solution, but it is the problem.
And then Clinton came after Bush and declared that the era of big government was over.
And the bottom line here is that there was widespread agreement that the kind of large scale,
systematic bureaucratic system of government that had been inherited from the new deal was no longer working,
that it had actually itself become a problem within society and that who was not able to satisfy the interests of the public.
So how to solve this? Well, obviously you can't use the logic of bureaucracy, which would be rules and procedures.
So they began to talk about this notion of making government results oriented.
Government would function in a kind of market like environment where the governmental agencies would be in potential
competition with other private and nonprofit organizations to deliver services and deliver goods to the to the public itself.
So what's important here is to keep in mind that we are talking about a public that is being served.
That is that is receiving services. And so because the public is receiving services,
the logic of the new public management movement was that you could probably have it
function similar to what we see in the market itself in the marketplace itself,
which is that individuals have choice and they can choose where to get the services that they so desire.
And the government itself could discover efficiencies through that same type of arrangement.
So you saw a lot of contracting out of services agencies themselves began to resemble private corporations.
We saw this, especially with the US Post Office, the Postal Service.
You began to see more intra governmental competitions, meaning there was some duplication and what agencies were doing,
and that the agency that showed over a period of time that it was the most competent
at certain activities would then essentially take over those types of tasks.
So agencies were put in competition with each other and also with other non-governmental organizations.
So the idea here is that government needed to be customer driven.
And in that sense,
what we're what we're referring to is a kind of after the fact type type of accountability because the agencies are granted a kind of discretion,
what some called a creativity in how to deliver services and then the public was allowed or permitted or
even encouraged to find those places and areas where it could satisfy whatever the public interest was.
So what role did this leave for government? Well, government itself was no longer going to be the one who's driving or who was the force behind
many of these activities that more and more you saw privatization of certain activities,
you saw a lot of contracting out, as I mentioned. And so government was thought to be in the business of what they called steering and not really.
And so they're using a metaphor here of like being in a boat, right?
And you're not doing all the work of of rowing, the boat and all, you know,
putting all the energy into rowing the boat that instead what you're doing is you're providing the direction that you want these groups to go,
that you want these agencies to go. So you're steering, you're not rowing,
but you're ensuring through the government and through the representatives
within the government at all levels that these public goods are being pursued,
that we're going in the right direction. You might say. And so you saw a lot more deregulation taking place under new public management.
And you also saw what we call employee empowerment,
meaning that employees themselves were provided with a certain amount of discretion on how to achieve agency goals.
So what you see here with this type of client accountability is you you have a very clear expression that the traditional approach,
that bureaucratic form of accountability where you have rules and procedures in place that dictate
what needs to be done was believed to be too restrictive and not really all that feasible,
mostly because at the scale that the government was now providing services, you needed some sort of flexibility.
So there was an opposition then to a very strict control system and oversight through hierarchy.
Instead, the most oversight that you would get is that steering mechanism that the Legislature could provide,
where the Legislature just provides a kind of direction that it wants the executive agencies to pursue.
Now, in this case, where you're talking about with this market oriented design of new public management is a different kind of accountability
because accountability now is ensured through results and outcomes through what we might think of as customer satisfaction.
And so where agencies are not satisfying the cost?
In this case, the public they are there have to be light ways that that is signaled back to the agency itself so the agency can change its behavior,
can change its operations, can change its approaches to the calls that have been set for it.
Now these two types of accountability a bureaucracy and client based those are.
These are what we might consider to be internal to the organization or intrinsic to the organization.
So it allows the organization to act from within, around whatever it needs to do to achieve its goals and stated goals.
So, of course, rules can be changed, procedures can be changed. We would see that happening within a bureaucratic framework.
And at the same time, the client accountability is a recognition of the importance of discretion and employee empowerment to make decisions
and be creative in order to achieve goals and achieve those things that have been set for the agency itself.
Now we're going to pay attention a little bit more to the external aspects of accountability.
And these are what we would think of as coming from not within the executive agencies, not within the the public administration itself.
These are those areas outside of the agencies. And of course, the most conventional way of thinking about this is through the laws in the courts.
So a legal system of control or a prefect legal system and then political institutions like the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993,
which comes kind of after the fact which and also mirrors the client based way of thinking about accountability.
So if you look to start off with with this idea of the political perspective on accountability of this external kind,
you can see that there's some agreement with new public management about rules and control.
Basically, that there was that these strict rule systems were insufficient to ensuring the results that the public wanted.
And so instead, you know, even if you put in systems of transparency and systems of oversight,
you aren't going to necessarily get the results that you want from a public perspective.
So many, many legislators worked together to create what we were now kind of conventionally think of as our accountability systems.
The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 set up systems that require systems for
requiring how agencies respond and respond to public to public questions to public inquiry.
But also they had to set up procedures for showing results in their operations.
And it was about, you know, showing and demonstrating high levels of performance.
You started seeing a lot of regular submissions of results oriented reports.
So agencies had to put out these performance metrics, these performance reports.
And you saw that there was some connection between performance and how much an agency would receive.
So this was a way of connecting a kind of control system, the budgetary control with performance itself.
And then on a broader on a broader sense, in a broader sense, you began to see more push for rotation of office within agencies.
You started seeing more of a push for protections by encouraging people to go public, meaning to expose wrongdoing and whistleblower policies.
And what this does,
and the reason why it's an important way of thinking of accountability is it undermines this criterion of loyalty in the managerial sense.
You know, where agencies are willing to protect themselves by covering up wrongdoing in order to guarantee the survival of the agency.
Instead, you started to see with this kind of political perspective on accountability, a push towards transparency.
So what you saw with this type of accountability is a dilution of power where you're
demanding of agencies to demonstrate that they are actually doing in an efficient way.
The things that they are required to do or have been asked to do.
And then on the legal side, you have this is more of the ethical and the fairness question that comes up,
which is that from the outside, you design systems that have an overarching system of obligation on the agencies.
So of course,
the simplest way of thinking about this is that every person who serves at the agency serves under the under the under allegiance to the Constitution.
But you know, beyond that,
you start to see that bureaucrats are assumed to adopt these values of the state to the values of the regime itself as an ethic of behavior.
You start to, you know, you are required to abide by the rule of law.
You have a responsibility to the rule of law. You've got certain moral foundations for how you act within these agencies.
You start to hear a lot more talk in the late 1990s about the importance of guaranteeing that bureaucrats are acting according to honor,
benevolence and justice.
And the ways to achieve that are through these laws and through signals to the bureaucrats of how they exist under the same umbrella of of justice,
fairness and allegiance to the values of the state constitutional allegiances.
This aspect of accountability, the legal perspective of accountability is perhaps the most fungible.
And it's also the the least apparent on a theoretical level,
because largely what it appeals to is a kind of ethical framework for bureaucratic action.
And really, what I want you to pay a lot of attention to are the internal components of accountability, bureaucracy and client based.
And then, to a lesser extent, some of those political institutions that are designed in order to guarantee results.
So in the next lecture, what we're going to do is then explore one of the debates that gave much of the force and frame
to these questions of accountability as they developed in the latter part of the 20th century,
a debate between Carl Friedrich and Hermann Feiner nominally on questions of responsibility.
But what they really became were questions of what we now call accountability.
We've been focused upon this question of accountability in the context of the public sector.
And of course, there's a there's an obvious reason for that, not that there isn't accountability within the private sector,
but that the kind of accountability we're talking about is specifically problematic within the public sector because
of the expectation and the demands of legitimacy for acting on behalf of the public and the public interest.
So accountability, as I think we've come to understand that is in large part based in some kind of intentional design,
whether it's a design through laws and rules or design through systems of
performance and measurement and after the fact delivery of performance metrics.
We design these laws and control system with the hope of ensuring that actors behave on behalf of the public in particular,
that actors behave in accordance with the public interest.
So it's not uncommon for any discussion about accountability to include some notion of ethics.
And we'll talk a little bit about that towards the end when we get to Dennis Thompson.
But before we do that,
we need to appreciate how the problems and the problematic nature of accountability was understood and continues to be understood within this,
this public and political demand. And to do that, we're going to look at a debate between Carl Friedrich and Hermann Feiner.
So just to kind of give you a general idea of what we're talking about here,
the core thesis of Carl Friedrich is that the modern democratic state with its
technological entitlements and the need for creativity is simply not fit for a top-down,
rule based accountability structure, a kind of formal bureaucratic system.
And in fact, we want to offer individuals some kind of discretion in order to give them the opportunity and the flexibility
to discover new and perhaps even better ways for achieving the goals that satisfy the public interest.
So you may hear this as a kind of precursor to new public management where discretion is prioritized and the public has an
opportunity in kind of client relationship to determine whether or not it likes or is satisfied with what it has been done.
Now fine or on the other hand, it comes from the position that all officials within a bureaucracy are what he
calls bureau officials are not in any way answerable to the public itself.
And this presents a major problem because these bureau officials are accountable to a principal.
But in this case, the principle is a legislature and that the Legislature itself is an agent of the sovereign.
And we alluded to this in one of the previous lectures when I distinguished between the problem of accountability
of bureau officials or bureaucracy and the problem of accountability when it comes to representation.
And that essentially what we have now is a new kind of way of thinking about accountability that's brought upon us by the demand
of having some system of control in place to guarantee that the bureaucracy satisfies the public interest in the public good.
So in this sense, bureaucrats are mediated agents, and the media tour is the Legislature itself.
So it is only reasonable to expect that bureaucrats are managed through rules and procedures of control.
This is the best way, as Feiner puts it, of setting up the type of accountability system that is conducive to the functionality of bureaucracy.
Because he says that the relying upon motivation and duty to the public.
These are ingredients of good service, but they require public and political control and direction.
So to really understand this debate, it's important to appreciate the context in which the debate is being conducted.
The administrative state is at this time a new kind of state talking about the middle of the 20th century,
and it's a new kind of state that functions independent of tradition and on the basis of rules and impersonal order.
So in addition to this, the state has also absorbed many of the responsibilities that had previously been achieved within communities,
and it has attempted to universalize the availability of social services.
So we begin to see this in other countries around universal health care, but also here in the United States.
We start to see more policies around housing, more policies around social services,
around opportunities for people to get out of poverty and to raise themselves up through the assistance of the state.
At least that's the mantra. That's the idea. So this condition arose, of course,
out of necessity because it arose at the point when the Great Depression had begun to compromise order had compromised individuals livelihoods,
the livelihoods of families as well as the mantra of progress.
And so it was through the administrative state that this challenge to civilization was conquered.
So in its wake of this new organizational form taking place within the political arena was this new political
organizational form that interweaves technological advancements with political and social demands,
and the the government began to have a wider and a more prominent role in the lives of the public and also became a center of social advancement.
People working for the government were no longer simply political agents or even primarily political agents,
but they were also technical experts, technical experts that delivered public goods to a multifarious public with sometimes competing demands.
And as such, the problem was no longer a matter of political design,
where officials answered to a single head of state, but also a technical and an organizational one.
So this introduction brings us to the debate, and we're going to start with Frederik,
because Friedrich is the one who poses the central core question,
which is how do we secure administrative responsibility now that we here refers to the demos,
the people and administrative responsibility is a way of asking whether or not we can
or of asking about the responsibility of those individuals within the administration,
but most importantly of the administration in an abstract sense and how we ensure that this apparatus
itself is responsible and responsible to someone ultimately that someone being the public itself.
So Frederick approaches this problem in recognition that these are new political and new social conditions.
And so he rejects the notion that the avoidance of wrongdoing is the equivalent of what we now call accountability.
So it's not just a matter of making sure that people don't do wrong, but it's also a matter of ensuring that they actually do right.
And this is a very important distinction for Friedrich because he doesn't believe that simply avoiding wrongdoing is sufficient for
ensuring administrative responsibility that the new demands of the state and of government are about doing what is right as well,
meaning taking a positive step towards benefiting the public.
So what he's looking at here is not just a an idealized form of the state, but the actual conditions in which this kind of state exists.
And what he points to is that this is obviously a problem, as he puts it, of sovereignty.
Because he says, quote, it would be easy to show that the officials of a 17th century prince were more responsible,
i.e. answerable to him, their sovereign than the officials of any modern democracy.
So what he's pointing out is the same kind of problem that Wilson addressed early early on in 1887,
when Wilson points out that, you know, this new kind of sovereign presents design problems for government itself.
Now what Friedrich says is kind of similar to Wilson's point, because with Friedrich says,
is that we need to create space for technical skill and creativity because these
are required characteristics and required of by the demands of the public itself.
Because as the government itself is more and more more and more and more devoted to providing services to the public,
we also find that we need to be able to do so in ways that align with the increasing technical skills that this demands.
So traditional managerial forms that we had inherited from past political organizations are simply not good designs for modern problems,
because, as Friedrich puts it, you cannot enforce responsibility.
So those systems of rules and procedures, which are systems of prefect of enforcement, are not available to us.
They are not they're not feasible. Instead, as Friedrich puts it, we have to elicit responsibility.
And that's this is the problem, as Friedrich sees it,
is that our new organizational forms require individuals basically of honor who are responsible to the public itself.
And that's the only solution as far as Friedrich is concerned. We need greater levels of discretion for these individuals because simply put,
they know how to achieve whatever the goals are that are set forth because they have a technical expertize that the public itself doesn't possess,
and most importantly, that elected officials perhaps do not possess.
So he talks about the importance of discretion, the importance, the importance of morale and work rules,
and that there has to be a kind of well-ordered mediation and arbitration, but that individuals within public sector jobs have no right to strike.
They have no right to stop working because of the necessity of their role.
Right. So the point that Friedrich is raising is that at this point in history,
we have a system of government that is so complex that it requires discretion,
despite the fact that that very political system also demands a kind of limited
government and control of the public over the over the government itself.
And this is where Feiner comes in. Because Feiner is what we might consider a top down traditionalist, and he puts it very starkly and simply,
he's he simply points out that public officials are servants and their courses of action must be determined by elected representatives.
And the reason why he points this out is that Friedrich not only believes that the public would
have difficulty knowing and understanding what the demands upon these technical experts are,
but also the elected officials. There is no reason to believe that these elected officials possess the requisite skills,
the requisite technical skills to grasp the demands of the job on these new administrators, these technical experts.
But Feiner rejects that, and he says very simply that to the most minute degree, that is technically feasible.
There has to be a system of control put in place. So this is the point at which Feiner introduces to us the now new conception of accountability,
because this is the only point at which accountability is discussed within these essays,
Feiner says that X is accountable for Y to Z, and this is what he defines as political responsibility.
And what he's talking about here is that control form of accountability that we discussed.
He's saying that x, meaning that this is the public servant,
the bureaucrat the bureau official is accountable for doing a task y to the political representative z.
And this is the core of any type of responsible administration.
So in answer to Friedrichs question, how do we secure administrative responsibility?
Friedrich would say we secure it by eliciting responsibility from those administrative officials and finally rejects that wholeheartedly.
He simply says, No, you cannot. To the greatest degree that you can,
you must set up external and internal systems of control to ensure to guarantee that those individuals are achieving what is demanded of them.
And so what finer speaks about is what he calls a moral obligation.
So here's that word again, that word obligation. Right? That Viner is saying each of these officials must follow and abide.
So what Feiner is saying is that if we don't have these systems in place,
then there is no guarantee that the bureaucracy will pursue the public interest.
We need to have punitive controls in place because if we don't, then the likelihood is that we will see what Feiner calls non-citizens,
meaning we simply they simply do not do what it is that they need to do malfeasance,
which is that they do it poorly or they do bad in general and rather importantly, over since, meaning they do it wisely, wastefully they achieve.
They set out to do their tasks in a way that is wasteful, and that doesn't even necessarily that doesn't use the resources properly.
And so what finer does is he rejects this reliance upon moral responsibility that's
been advocated by Friedrich and advocates for this procedural accountability,
that system of control. So what's nice about these to the these two figures is that they they provide very clear political theoretical context
to the point that I made about new public management or client accountability and bureaucratic accountability.
So clearly, Feiner comes down on the side of bureaucratic accountability,
the need for procedural rules in place, the need for a systems of control to guarantee outcomes.
Friedrich comes down further on the side of client accountability, advocating for this and the importance of discretion.
And to be perfectly honest with you, neither one of them wins the debate.
They both have essentially laid the groundwork or sort of set the set outline for how we think about accountability in the modern sense.
Because amidst this discussion between Feiner and Friedrich is an account about the applicability and fit of ethics and administration.
So now let's try to connect this with our previous discussion in Module two,
because FINA's contention is that moral responsibility or what he calls a public ethic does not work in the public sector for structural reasons.
Finders pointing out that you can't just simply rely upon moral responsibility
in the public sector because the organizational type is not conducive to it.
So the two really appreciate this.
You have to understand the point that's made by Dennis Thompson and your other reading and Dennis Thompson's essay is about,
as he puts it, the possibility of administrative ethics. Because for Dennis Dennis Thompson,
one could argue that both Friedrich and Feiner that both of their concerns stemmed from a concern for accountability
in the system of controls and rules that are instituted to ensure that things are done in the interest of the public,
right? So that is that accountability must be thought of as possibly as a system that guarantees that the public interest is satisfied.
But what this obscures is the question of ethics itself, because both Friedrich and Feiner,
they refer to morality, they refer to ethics, they refer to responsibility. But ultimately, it's really just an alignment of goals.
It's that it's back to that principal agent problem that we talked about at the
beginning where the principle is the public and the agent is the servant or,
in this case, the bureau official.
So Dennis Thompson directly addresses this problem, this issue within his article, the possibility of administrative ethics,
because what he says is that there are two obstacles to administrative ethics and
these two are obstacles are an ethic of neutrality and an ethic of structure.
So the ethic of neutrality, according to Thompson,
suggests that administrators are not expected to even hold moral principles in their roles as bureau officials.
They're instead expected to serve the organization. So, in fact.
These bureau officials are morally obliged to fulfill the mission of the organization
because of this promise of neutrality and follow the orders that are required to do so.
The ethic of structure suggests that bureau officials are only responsible for
the duties that are assigned to them and are legally liable to their own office.
So essentially, what Thompson's two obstacles are showing is how rooted this notion is of bureau officials in dehumanization.
Because each of these ethics,
the ethic of neutrality and the ethic of structure suggests that the official lacks agency that it's simply a matter of design.
And this is where many of these problems of accountability stem is in that same problem that we discussed in Module two that Walter points out,
which is that despite our best attempts,
organizations are made up of people and these people have obligations and morals,
but they're asked to suspend those things in their roles within the bureaucracy itself.
So again, Thompson's, two obstacles are rooted in that notion that bureau officials are dehumanized because each
suggests that these officials are not acting under their own power with their own agency.
They do not have the requisite agency to be held responsible for the acts that they undertake because those acts are not their own.
They are the organizations. So for Dennis Thompson, this is another way of expressing or not for Dennis Thompson,
but Dennis Thompson is expressing in another way this notion of administrative evil that we discussed.
So obviously, there are many problems with this.
And even Thompson notes noted the unacceptability of appealing to office to absolve one of responsibility is the basis of our discussion last week,
right, which is that I was only fulfilling my duties. I was only fulfilling my roles.
I was only following the rules. And as Hannah Arendt points out, this is not a defense, it's a childish defense at that.
Right. The issue remains the extent to which we can actually call someone within these spaces responsible.
But by allowing them to have this discretion in this agency,
are we then allowing them the possibility of violating the public interest of acting against what the public has determined is right?
Because it's not necessarily the case that their own moral obligations will align with what has been determined to be the public interest?
So to conclude this development of accountability in our political discourse,
it certainly aligns with the emergence and the development of administration,
especially this idea of the administrative state,
because it emerges due to the pressing need to reconcile democratic values of power with the realities of executing democratic wants and needs.
So what we've done is we've created this notion of accountability,
which in a lot of ways has begun to replace notions of responsibility due to the reality
that these are not necessarily agents who are acting under systems of moral responsibility.
And we've placed priority on systems of control, on systems of consequence.
So like performance metrics. But this has left us with the problem is struggling with matters of ethics and responsibility.
It has also shaped a lot of how we think about public problems, and it's infected our senses of expectations.
As we've discussed, the tendency is to place blame on someone when things go awry, as things tend to do.
And when we call for accountability, we we should sometimes pause for a moment to ask What is it that we're calling for?
What is it that we're requiring? And especially where this we is the collective principle representing the public good itself.
Are we when we call for a greater levels of accountability, seeking more impersonal systems of control and thus a less responsible administrator?
Typically, we are whether that system is titled bureaucracy or the market,
because we know that each of these systems, whether it is before the before the Act or after the Act.
Each of these systems share that same core value of dehumanization.
And what's evident in the rise of the discourse of accountability is that it is an attempt to dehumanize responsibility.