Download or read book Political Accountability written by Antonino Palumbo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 826 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political accountability forms a cornerstone of modern democracy: it directs the political system towards the public interest and allows the exercise of the principles of autonomy and self-determination that lie at the core of democratic politics. Sadly, existing democracies, with their large, centralized bureaucracies, have evolved in ways that progressively undermine the ability of citizens to keep their representatives accountable and political regimes responsive. Far from reversing this trend, the neoliberal reforms introduced since the 1980s have increased that accountability gap. Globalization and the alleged passage from 'government' to 'governance' have aggravated the problem further. The notion of accountability that survives these changes is a problematic form of auditing carried out by a constellation of quangos, autonomous agencies and NGOs whose own accountability is problematic. This volume collects the main contributions to current debates on political accountability. It explores the challenges traditional conventions of accountability face today at the domestic, trans- and international levels and indicates the distinctive solutions those challenges require.
Download or read book Political Accountability and Responsibility in the Government written by Cory Contini and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 11 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay from the year 2008 in the subject Organisation and administration - Miscellaneous, grade: B+, Ottawa University, course: Understanding Politics, language: English, abstract: History has proven, and will continue to prove, that in a democratic society such as Canada, the ultimate mechanism to ensure accountability is democracy. And through the critique of accountability and responsibility, one may find the true bearer of power: public citizens. The government has to be accountable to its citizens because the power is ultimately delegated by them, through voting. To sustain this power, the public must continuously ensure that governments are being responsible and accountable, for anything less is undemocratic.
Download or read book Making Politics Work for Development written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.
Download or read book Elections and Democracy written by J. J. A. Thomassen and published by Oxford University Press (UK). This book was released on 2014 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Elections and Democracy' is based on data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, spanning 36 countries. It considers the majoritarian and consensus models of democracy and how their embodiment in institutional structures influence vote choice, political participation and satisfaction within a functioning democracy.
Download or read book The Culture of Accountability written by Gianfranco Pasquino and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important book explores the cultural conditions that favour political accountability. It examines the channels through which accountability can be secured and the role that accountability plays in ensuring good governance. In addition to problematizing the notion of accountability, the book suggests that it is the product of three different—albeit, related—processes: taking account of voters’ preferences, keeping account of voters’ preferences, and giving account of one’s performance in office. It further explores the relationship between accountability and political culture by analyzing the relationship between accountability and religion, religious denomination, familism, civicness, secularism and postmaterialism, revealing that the level of accountability is influenced by the diffusion of post-material values and by the level of civicness in a given country. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students, and practitioners in governance, the political economy of institutions and development, democracy, and more broadly to political science, international relations, political theory, comparative politics, sociology, and cultural studies.
Download or read book Democracy Accountability and Representation written by Adam Przeworski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-13 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 6 Party Government and Responsiveness: James A. Stimson
Download or read book Rights Resources and the Politics of Accountability written by Peter Newell and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 2006-05 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With examples drawn from a wide range of economic and industrial sectors, and from both South and North, this title presents a topical exploration of struggles for accountability in development projects.
Download or read book Accountability Reconsidered written by Charles M. Cameron and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-16 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last two decades have witnessed a substantial change in the media environment, growing polarization of the two dominant parties, and increasing inequality of wealth and income. These profound changes necessitate updating our understanding of political accountability. Accountability Reconsidered examines how political accountability functions in the US today given the dramatic changes in voting behavior, media, congressional dynamics, and relations between branches. With particular attention to policymaking, this volume uses original research to analyze micro-foundations of voter behavior, examining its implications for incentives and offering insight into the accountability relationships among voters, interest groups, legislators, and government bureaucracy. Combining contributions from leading experts who write about the political system synoptically with those who focus on specific elements, Accountability Reconsidered brings together distinct perspectives to focus on the effect of the informational environment on government officials, bridging up-to-date knowledge about accountability mechanisms with our overall understanding of political accountability.
Download or read book The Impression of Influence written by Justin Grimmer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-23 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constituents often fail to hold their representatives accountable for federal spending decisions—even though those very choices have a pervasive influence on American life. Why does this happen? Breaking new ground in the study of representation, The Impression of Influence demonstrates how legislators skillfully inform constituents with strategic communication and how this facilitates or undermines accountability. Using a massive collection of Congressional texts and innovative experiments and methods, the book shows how legislators create an impression of influence through credit claiming messages. Anticipating constituents' reactions, legislators claim credit for programs that elicit a positive response, making constituents believe their legislator is effectively representing their district. This spurs legislators to create and defend projects popular with their constituents. Yet legislators claim credit for much more—they announce projects long before they begin, deceptively imply they deserve credit for expenditures they had little role in securing, and boast about minuscule projects. Unfortunately, legislators get away with seeking credit broadly because constituents evaluate the actions that are reported, rather than the size of the expenditures. The Impression of Influence raises critical questions about how citizens hold their political representatives accountable and when deception is allowable in a democracy.
Download or read book Media Coverage and Political Accountability written by David Strömberg and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This chapter investigates how media coverage filters information and how this affects political accountability and policy. I first present a baseline model of media coverage and its affect political accountability. The model is used to discuss the welfare consequences of private provision of news. It shows how media regulation and public broadcasting may correct market failures, notably the under-provision of news. The model also supplies an array of testable implications, used to organize the existing empirical work. The key empirical questions are: what drives media coverage of politics; how does this coverage influence the information levels and the voting behavior of the general public, the actions and selection of politicians and government policy?
Download or read book Clarity of Responsibility Accountability and Corruption written by Leslie A. Schwindt-Bayer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corruption is a significant problem for democracies throughout the world. Even the most democratic countries constantly face the threat of corruption and the consequences of it at the polls. Why are some governments more corrupt than others, even after considering cultural, social, and political characteristics? In Clarity of Responsibility, Accountability, and Corruption, the authors argue that clarity of responsibility is critical for reducing corruption in democracies. The authors provide a number of empirical tests of this argument, including a cross-national time-series statistical analysis to show that the higher the level of clarity the lower the perceived corruption levels. Using survey and experimental data, the authors show that clarity causes voters to punish incumbents for corruption. Preliminary tests further indicate that elites respond to these electoral incentives and are more likely to combat corruption when clarity is high.
Download or read book Democratic Accountability written by Leif Lewin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is common for political leaders to claim they have no control over bad outcomes. Indeed, they often cite the arguments of political theorists and public intellectuals as to why: history rushes onward oblivious of human will; force and violence overcome political aims; globalization undermines the actions of national leaders; the bureaucracy sabotages their intentions; bad outcomes are often the unintended result of actions. In Democratic Accountability, Leif Lewin examines these reasons and argues that they are unconvincing. He makes his case by describing and analyzing counterexamples in seven cases, including the prevention of a communist takeover in Europe after World War II, the European Union's preventing another European war, and Margaret Thatcher's taming of the bureaucracy in Britain. In a staunch defense of the possibility for meaningful and profound democratic decision making, Lewin finds that, in fact, not only do political leaders exert a good measure of control and therefore can be assigned responsibility, but the meaning of the functioning democracy is that the people hold their leaders accountable.
Download or read book Votes and Budgets written by John Healey and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents case-studies in accountable government and the management of public funds, with particular reference to the multi-party political systems of Botswana, Jamaica, Sri Lanka and Zambia under the Third Republic. Criteria for judging accountability are set out, and the role and influence of political leadership, elections, parties, parliaments, interest groups, the media and external donors are explored. Conclusions take account of the comparisons which are drawn with the experience of single-party regimes in Africa and Asia.
Download or read book Social Media and Political Accountability written by Andrea Ceron and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-06-29 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book illustrates how social media platforms enable us to understand everyday politics and evaluates the extent to which they can foster accountability, transparency and responsiveness. The first part focuses on accountability and tests whether the offline behavior of politicians is consistent with their online declarations, showing that textual analysis of politicians’ messages is useful to explain phenomena such as endorsements, party splits and appointments to cabinet. The second part concerns responsiveness. By means of sentiment analysis, it investigates the shape of the interaction between citizens and politicians determining whether politicians’ behavior is influenced by the pressure exerted on social media both on policy and non-policy issues. Finally, the book evaluates whether a responsive behavior is successful in restoring online political trust, narrowing the gap between voters and political elites. The book will be of use to students, scholars and practitioners interested in party organization, intra-party politics, legislative politics, social media analysis and political communication, as well as politicians themselves.
Download or read book Democratic Governance and Economic Performance written by Dino Falaschetti and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-06-02 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conventional wisdom warns that unaccountable political and business agents can enrich a few at the expense of many. But logically extending this wisdom implies that associated principals – voters, consumers, shareholders – will favor themselves over the greater good when ‘rules of the game’ instead create too much accountability. Democratic Governance and Economic Performance rigorously develops this hypothesis, and finds statistical evidence and case study illustrations that democratic institutions at various governance levels (e.g., federal, state, corporation) have facilitated opportunistic gains for electoral, consumer, and shareholder principals. To be sure, this conclusion does not dismiss the potential for democratic governance to productively reduce agency costs. Rather, it suggests that policy makers, lawyers, and managers can improve governance by weighing the agency benefits of increased accountability against the distributional costs of favoring principal stakeholders over more general economic opportunities. Carefully considering the fundamentals that give rise to this tradeoff should interest students and scholars working at the intersection of social science and the law, and can help professionals improve their own performance in policy, legal, and business settings.
Download or read book Impersonal Influence written by Diana C. Mutz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-28 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People's perceptions of the attitudes and experiences of mass collectives are an increasingly important force in contemporary political life. In Impersonal Influence, Mutz goes beyond simply providing examples of how impersonal influence matters in the political process to provide a micro-level understanding of why information about distant and impersonal others often influence people's political attitudes and behaviors. Impersonal Influence is worthy of attention both from the standpoint of its impact on contemporary politics, and because of its potential to expand the boundaries of our understanding of social influence processes, and media's relation to them. The book's conclusions do not exonerate media from the effects of inaccurate portrayals of collective experience or opinion, but they suggest that the ways in which people are influenced by these perceptions are in themselves, not so much deleterious to democracy as absolutely necessary to promoting accountability in a large scale society.
Download or read book Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability written by Vincent L. Hutchings and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of public opinion research over the past several decades suggests that the American voters are woefully uninformed about politics and thus unable to fulfill their democratic obligations. Arguing that this perception is faulty, Vincent Hutchings shows that, under the right political conditions, voters are surprisingly well informed on the issues that they care about and use their knowledge to hold politicians accountable. Though Hutchings is not the first political scientist to contend that the American public is more politically engaged than it is often given credit for, previous scholarship--which has typically examined individual and environmental factors in isolation--has produced only limited evidence of an attentive electorate. Analyzing broad survey data as well as the content of numerous Senate and gubernatorial campaigns involving such issues as race, labor, abortion, and defense, Hutchings demonstrates that voters are politically engaged when politicians and the media discuss the issues that the voters perceive as important. Hutchings finds that the media--while far from ideal--do provide the populace with information regarding the responsiveness of elected representatives and that groups of voters do monitor this information when "their" issues receive attention. Thus, while the electorate may be generally uninformed about and uninterested in public policy, a complex interaction of individual motivation, group identification, and political circumstance leads citizens concerned about particular issues to obtain knowledge about their political leaders and use that information at the ballot box.
