Working Paper 33.9: Abstract

The Simple Analytics of Accountability

In this paper, the author offers a schematic that distinguishes the actors, interactions, and dynamics of various accountability relationships.   A number of distinctions including those between responsibility and accountability, moral and legal accountability claims, and socially or governmentally generated demand for accountability are offered to assist those working on accountability policies or strategies and who may be struggling with generic conceptions of accountability that conflate all of these elements.