Rethinking Democratic Accountability

by Behn, Robert D.

• ISBN13: 9780815708629
• ISBN10: 0815708629
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-03-01
• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Summary

Traditionally, American government has created detailed, formal procedures to ensure that its agencies and employees are accountable for finances and fairness. Now in the interest of improved performance, we are asking our front-line workers to be more responsive, we are urging our middle managers to be innovative, and we are exhorting our public executives to be entrepreneurial. Yet what is the theory of democratic accountability that empowers public employees to exercise such discretion while still ensuring that we remain a government of laws? How can government be responsive to the needs of individual citizens and still remain accountable to the entire polity? In Rethinking Democratic Accountability, Robert D. Behn examines the ambiguities, contradictions, and inadequacies in our current systems of accountability for finances, fairness, and performance. Weaving wry observations with political theory, Behn suggests a new model of accountability --with "compacts of collective, mutual responsibility" --to address new paradigms for public management.

Author Biography

Robert D. Behn is a visiting professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and director of the Governors Center at Duke University.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
What Do We Mean by Accountability, Anyway?	1	(21)
Performance and the New Public Management	22	(18)
The Traditional Public Administration Paradigm of Accountability	40	(22)
The Questions of Democratic Accountability	62	(19)
Discretion and Trust	81	(22)
Retrospective Accountability for Performance	103	(17)
A New Compact of Mutual, Collective Responsibility	120	(21)
The Cooperation Challenge	141	(14)
Fostering Cooperation with Conventions and Norms	155	(21)
Evolving a Charter Agency	176	(20)
360-Degree Accountability for Performance	196	(23)
Notes	219	(92)
Index	311