Managerial and political accountability: the widening gap in the organization of welfare
| Date | 01 September 2007 |
| Published date | 01 September 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852307081147 |
| Author | Paola Mattei |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Managerial and political accountability: the widening gap in
the organization of welfare
Paola Mattei
Abstract
This article revisits the assumption that the welfare delivery state does not fit into
the vertical or hierarchical model of political accountability in light of its recent
organizational arrangements. Although a distinction in any analytical framework
between managerial and political accountability bears some fruit, the replacement
of the latter with the former is contestable and misleading. In contrast to the
claims that managerial accountability is a technical and neutral exercise in the
application of politics-free criteria, and, as such, it more readily fits the complexity
of the 21st-century welfare state, this article suggests that the new organization-
al arrangements of state schools and hospitals indicate that traditional forms of
accountability to elected officials have not withered. The process of developing
new welfare state organizational arrangements cannot be divorced from funda-
mental institutional questions about each democracy. By empirically investigating
the effects of the introduction of managerialism on democratic accountability in
Britain and Germany, the article aims to further our understanding of the link
between the managerial and political dimensions of accountability in the welfare
delivery state.
Points for practitioners
Social policy practitioners, including secondary school teachers, and nurses and
doctors in public hospitals, are accountable to their peers through a mechanism
that is fundamentally different from the hierarchical form of accountability.
Professional accountability is essentially a horizontal and internal type of control.
Managerialism has challenged clinical and pedagogical autonomy in many ways,
lowering the morale of practitioners, who have traditionally perceived their func-
Paola Mattei is at the Transformations of the State Research Centre, University of Bremen, Germany.
Copyright © 2007 IIAS, SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
Vol 73(3):365–387 [DOI:10.1177/0020852307081147]
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
tion well beyond the achievement of objective targets and performance outputs.
Yet, it is easier to dismiss such managerial attempts and overlook the fact that
public managers are themselves part of the same medical and teaching profes-
sion with which they often share common interests. However, there is an impor-
tant distinction to be made between professional and managerial functions,
namely that public managers in a democratic and representative government are
accountable also to elected officials through external mechanisms of control. One
of the key challenges for public managers, thus, is the acknowledgement of what
managerial accountability entails and also in practice what it may exclude, when
aimed at replacing political accountability. This may run against the very founda-
tions of the welfare state. Social policy practitioners are inextricably located at the
heart of a complex web of political mechanisms of accountability, which make the
welfare delivery state one of the greatest contributors to our democratic institu-
tions, and far from being only a machinery for satisfying material needs.
Keywords: accountability, Britain, democracy, Germany, hospital care, public
schooling, welfare reforms
Introduction
The mechanism of political accountability operates precisely in the opposite direction
to that of delegation to regulatory agencies of broad decision-making powers. This
gives rise to the classic public law problems of accountability and process (Harlow
and Rawlings, 1997), especially when the regulatory process is informal, discretionary
and rather closed. As Mulgan has argued (2000: 555), the core sense of accounta-
bility entails three main features: external scrutiny, social exchange, and rights of
authority. As for the third feature, accountability thus implies that those calling for an
account are asserting rights of superior authority over those who are accountable,
such as demanding answers and imposing sanctions. This feature pertains to the
relationship between elected politicians and bureaucrats. In a democratic state, the
traditional definition of ‘political’ accountability refers to the hierarchical and pyrami-
dal mechanisms by which public servants are accountable to the ministers, who
answer in turn to parliament and elected politicians for their actions (Strom, 2000;
Strom et al., 2003; Bovens, 2006). Political accountability is, thus, inextricably inter-
woven with notions of legitimate authority and its delegation, although too often in
the most recent scholarly stretching of the original concept to include policy networks
and governance accountability, this feature is often downplayed (Kickert, 1993; Scott,
2000).
New Public Management (NPM) has undermined the old traditional definition of
accountability by strengthening the growing importance of ex post result-oriented
accountability to the detriment of input and process-oriented accountability based on
ex ante controls (Verhoest et al., 2005). The widespread process of autonomization
of agencies from ministerial accountability has underpinned clearly its hierarchical and
pyramidal mechanisms. In many cases, new autonomous public bodies lack a clear
governance structure and the appointment of boards remains an untransparent
process. This article looks at the reshaping of the relationship between traditional
366 International Review of Administrative Sciences 73(3)
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