Melvin J. Dubnick

Dubnick, Melvin. and Justice, Jonathan.
"Accounting for Accountability" (PDF)
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the The American Political Science Association Hilton Chicago and the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL, 2004-09-02/04

Abstract: Accountability is often presented as a means by which to achieve the collective and individual goods of democracy, justice, administrative performance, and ethical conduct in governance. Treating this presumption as a collection of testable hypotheses rather than as a self-evident truth leads to an interest in operationalizing and measuring accountability. Accountability is, however, a conceptually and empirically slippery word, subject to a host of competing definitions, interpretations, understandings, and rhetorical usages. One solution is to turn from accountability-the-word to accountability-the-concept. Consideration of the complexity of the conceptual space of accountability as well as its historical contingency suggests that the development of a meaningful empirical program for accountability research requires explicitly locating specific measures and their organizing analytical frameworks within maps of the conceptual space and historical ontology of accountability as a mode of governance. Once this is done, it becomes feasible to propose meaningful empirical research programs for investigating accountability as a mode of governance by understanding the location of measurable elements of accountability systems within analytic frameworks and conceptual space.