Accountability as a Bureaucratic Minefield: Lessons from a Comparative Study

Abstract

The large and growing literature on accountability highlights a variety of mechanisms by which bureaucrats may be held accountable as regards their role in the policy-making process. This paper looks at accountability mechanisms from the bureaucrat's perspective using material gathered for a study of bureaucratic roles in rulemaking in Sweden, Germany, the United States, France, the United Kingdom and the European Union. It asks to which of the mechanisms for securing public accountability for executive decisions do bureaucrats pay particular attention when helping develop policy: where are the minefields they feel they have to negotiate? The most important of the minefields is political executive approval. It shapes the way the other mechanisms (group opinion, the legislative and judicial branches of government) are negotiated. Thus ‘ministerial responsibility’ and its equivalents in the other countries remain crucial features of systems of administrative accountability.

Acknowledgements

The research on which this paper was based was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council RES-000-22-1451. I also thank the government officials who participated in this study. Jan Meyer-Sahling (Nottingham), Martin Lodge (LSE) and Scott Greer (University of Michigan) and two anonymous referees provided valuable comments on drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. The study is incomplete; two more regulations remain to be included. Moreover, the regulations were not selected primarily to explore accountability but rather as a means of examining wider aspects of bureaucratic involvement in policy work. The regulations were not randomly selected, not least because many randomly selected regulations would yield no insight into bureaucratic roles in policy-making as they would include, for instance, the large number of UK regulations covering road markings in defined stretches of road or French arrêtés naming members to serve on a minor committee. Selection was first made on a reading through a regulation for evidence of some policy issue, however minor, being at stake. The regulations were further selected on the basis of getting a spread, where appropriate, of different (constitutional–legal) forms of regulation, of different ministries/departments issuing them and, above all, that they were recent (to make interviews possible). In the event, the choice was not nearly as large as the absolute number of regulations, in some countries well into the thousands, would suggest. The numbers covered in each country vary for the most part because of the unpredictability of the availability of permission for interviews. The material included as quotations in this paper come from the 96 officials who were involved in writing the regulations, mainly five or more ranks from the very top of the organisational hierarchy of the ministry or agency.

2. Arguably the process of law-making has become progressively more hierarchical in the past decades: compare Kent's (1979) account of the informal relationships that develop between the lawyers drafting (primary) legislation and senior civil servants and politicians in the 1930s through to the 1950s with the less direct and hierarchically mediated relationships between bill teams of middle ranking officials and lawyers in the twenty-first century.