Accountability through mutual attunement: How can parliamentary hearings connect the elected and the unelected?
Published date | 01 July 2023 |
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0952076720977606 |
Author | Andreas Eriksen,Alexander Katsaitis |
Date | 01 July 2023 |
Article
Accountability through
mutual attunement: How
can parliamentary
hearings connect the
elected and the
unelected?
Andreas Eriksen
ARENA-Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo,
Oslo, Norway
Alexander Katsaitis
Department of Government, London School of Economics
and Political Science, London, UK
Abstract
The increased authority delegated to independent agencies raises questions about the
conditions of politically accountable governance, and specifically parliament’s role as a
representative institution. Focusing on committee hearings as an accountability mech-
anism, we ask: How can a parliament employ hearings to ensure that the ends pursued
by agencies have a democratic foundation? We propose a model of “mutual
attunement” where accountability relations presuppose a process of working-out
shared understandings of the ends, means and circumstances of policy needs. We
test our argument through a case study assessing the interaction between the
European Parliament’s Committee on Economic & Monetary Affairs and the
European Securities and Markets Authority. Theoretically, we contribute to discussions
on agency accountability and European governance, while providing a novel conceptual
model and the first analysis of its kind.
Corresponding author:
Alexander Katsaitis, Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science,
Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: a.katsaitis@lse.ac.uk
Public Policy and Administration
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0952076720977606
journals.sagepub.com/home/ppa
2023, Vol. 38(3) 352–373
Eriksen and Katsaitis 353
Keywords
Accountability, financial regulation, independent agencies, parliamentary hearings, prin-
cipal-agent theory
Introduction
Independent agencies wield public authority at arm’s length from elected repre-
sentatives and partisan politics. The principles of democratic legitimacy, however,
require that public authority is politically accountable to elected representatives.
How can a parliament employ hearings to ensure that the ends pursued by agencies
have a democratic foundation?
On the standard view, accountability presupposes a certain division of labour.
Political bodies, like parliaments, choose the ends of policy; the role of indepen-
dent agencies is to provide expertise regarding empirical consequences and to
implement the adopted policy (Richardson, 2002; Vibert, 2007). Accountability
can then be conceptualized in terms of a principal-agent relationship, where safe-
guards are institutionalized ex ante and performance control is exercised ex post.
On this account, independent agency expertise cannot be used to frame the
political mandate itself, it is rather restricted to identifying empirical constraints:
“expertise acts as a kind of external filter on the deliberations of other parts of the
division of labour such as politicians and ordinary citizens” (Christiano, 2012: 42).
In line with this, traditional principal-agent frameworks expect mechanisms such
as written questions directed to agencies, agencies’ annual parliamentary reports,
and budgetary control to be used by the political actors as a source of technical
information or reports on performance (Bach and Fleischer, 2012; van Rijsbergen
and Foster, 2017). In a slogan, it is about the means of policy, not its ends.
In this article, we aim to contest the common conceptualization that ties
accountability to a strict division of political labour. We will focus on hearings
as a mechanism that can serve accountability interests through what we call
“mutual attunement.” In order for there to be a coherent mandate for independent
agencies to comply with, there has to be a shared space of understanding. Ex post
control measures cannot truly serve accountability unless the performance indica-
tors are grounded in a sufficiently substantive justificatory relationship, which will
be described in terms of an “authority of connection”.
Insofar as hearings are governed by the aim of mutual attunement, we expect to
observe three conditions. First, instead of a hierarchy where the principal sets ends
and the agent reasons about the means, there will be reciprocal reasoning about
ends. Second, there will an active interaction between actors where they construc-
tively engage with questions and comments raised during the deliberation, rather
than a passive statement of positions. Third, we expect to see a forward-looking
outlook on policy that discusses potential future regulatory spaces, rather than a
backward-looking account of the agency’s actions.
To continue reading
Request your trial