The concept of political accountability

Abstract

The current essay does not set out to relate the concept to the history of thought. Its pretense is more limited. It aims at reconstructing the meaning of the concept as we currently use it. In essence, it claims that the notion of political accountability carries two basic connotations ─answerability, the obligation of public officials to inform about and to explain what they are doing, and enforcement, the capacity of accounting agencies to impose sanctions on powerholders who have violated their public duties. This two-dimensional structure of meaning makes the concept a broad and inclusive one which within its wide and loose boundaries embraces (or at least overlaps with) lots of other terms -such as surveillance, monitoring, oversight, control, checks, restraint, public exposure, and punishmentthat we employ otherwise to describe efforts to render the exercise of power a ruleguided enterprise.