Download or read book Transparency and Accountability in Science and Politics written by K. Andersson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-07-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the role of scientists in policy making and the idea of deliberative democracy. The author argues that awareness must increase among both politicians and the citizens who elect them. We must revitalise the decision-making processes in representative democracy. The book proposes new institutional structures.
Download or read book Transparency in Politics and the Media written by Nigel Bowles and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly governments around the world are experimenting with initiatives in transparency or 'open government'. These involve a variety of measures including the announcement of more user-friendly government websites, greater access to government data, the extension of freedom of information legislation and broader attempts to involve the public in government decision making. However, the role of the media in these initiatives has not hitherto been examined. This volume analyses the challenges and opportunities presented to journalists as they attempt to hold governments accountable in an era of professed transparency. In examining how transparency and open government initiatives have affected the accountability role of the press in the US and the UK, it also explores how policies in these two countries could change in the future to help journalists hold governments more accountable. This volume will be essential reading for all practising journalists, for students of journalism or politics, and for policymakers.
Download or read book Reclaiming Accountability written by Heidi Kitrosser and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have long treated government accountability as a birthright. However, accountability is frequently tossed about in a rhetorically effective but substantively empty way. We often feel that those in government “work for us” and therefore must “answer to us,” but fail to grapple with the conditions under which we can really assess how accountable our government is. This is especially true with respect to matters of secrecy and transparency in government as, while we routinely voice support for transparency and accountability, we too often tolerate secrecy when associated with “national security.” The government plainly needs to keep some information secret, and there are ways to reconcile secrecy with accountability. In Reclaiming Accountability, unchecked secrecy is the primary concern as insufficient checking breeds unnecessary, even counterproductive, secrecy and is also deeply antithetical to accountability. Heidi Kitrosser shows how, for all of its influence, “presidentialism” badly misreads the Constitution. The book first explains presidentialism and its major component parts – “supremacy” and “unitary executive theory.” It then details how supremacy and unitary executive theory manifest themselves as arguments for a broad presidential power to control information. The descriptive elements lay the groundwork for Kitrosser's two normative arguments. The first is that the Constitution situates the presidency within a substantive accountability framework that entails substantial congressional and judicial leeway to impose and enforce external and internal checks on presidential power to foster transparency and accountability. And, closely related, the second argument is that supremacy and unitary executive theory misread the Constitution.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook Public Accountability written by Mark Bovens and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the best scholars in the field from around the world, this handbook showcases conceptual and normative as well as the empirical approaches in public accountability studies.
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 278 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 Zero Accountability written by Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Natural Resources U.s. House of Rep and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quality research benefits the country when it is sound, reliable, authentically peer-reviewed, paired with transparent access to data, and available to policy makers. Science is not science at all when outcomes are manipulated to reach ends predesigned by government employees carrying the federal mantle. Egregious examples around the nation highlight the devastating impacts to jobs and human safety caused by unaccountable federal bureaucracies that often engage in delay and denial. There is not a level playing field between agents of the federal government and private individuals, small businesses, or even local governments. The federal government's regulations and enforcement tools often enables it to outspend and outwait any possibility that outcomes inconsistent with their agenda will ultimately prevail in a dispute. Recent concerning examples suggest that the Department of the Interior has tolerated and failed to address, what one United States Senator called "abuse of science" within its sub-agencies' actions, and that employees were "emboldened" to "fabricate the science" to justify their purposes. Even more troubling, some employees were apparently rewarded for this behavior. Federal employees should be discouraged, not encouraged from engaging in "advocacy."
Download or read book Government Transparency written by T. Erkkilä and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-09-17 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transparency has become a global concept of responsible government. This book argues that the transnational discourse of transparency promotes potentially contradictory policy ideas that can lead to unintended consequences. It critically examines whether or not increased transparency really leads to increased democratic accountability.
Download or read book Full Disclosure written by Archon Fung and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book The Illusion of Accountability written by Justin H. Kirkland and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-25 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does open governance strengthen democracy? The Illusion of Accountability contends that it does not. Leveraging a wealth of data from decades of legislative politics in the American states, the book assesses the causes and consequences of 'open meetings laws,' which require public access to proceedings in state legislatures. The work traces the roots of these laws back to the founding constitutions of some states and analyzes the waves of adoptions and exemptions to open meetings that occurred in the twentieth century. The book then examines the effects of these transparency laws on a host of politically consequential outcomes both inside and outside the legislature. This analysis consistently finds that open meetings do not influence legislators' behavior or citizens' capacity to alter that behavior. Instead, a link between transparent legislatures and an expanded system of organized interests is established. This illuminating work concludes that transparency reform only creates the illusion of accountability in state government.
Download or read book Information Democracy and Autocracy written by James R. Hollyer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-27 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advocates for economic development often call for greater transparency. But what does transparency really mean? What are its consequences? This breakthrough book demonstrates how information impacts major political phenomena, including mass protest, the survival of dictatorships, democratic stability, as well as economic performance. The book introduces a new measure of a specific facet of transparency: the dissemination of economic data. Analysis shows that democracies make economic data more available than do similarly developed autocracies. Transparency attracts investment and makes democracies more resilient to breakdown. But transparency has a dubious consequence under autocracy: political instability. Mass-unrest becomes more likely, and transparency can facilitate democratic transition - but most often a new despotic regime displaces the old. Autocratic leaders may also turn these threats to their advantage, using the risk of mass-unrest that transparency portends to unify the ruling elite. Policy-makers must recognize the trade-offs transparency entails.
Download or read book Open Budgets written by Sanjeev Khagram and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Brookings Institution Press and Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation publication Decisions about "who gets what, when, and how" are perhaps the most important that any government must make. So it should not be remarkable that around the world, public officials responsible for public budgeting are facing demands—from their own citizenry, other government officials, economic actors, and increasingly from international sources—to make their patterns of spending more transparent and their processes more participatory. Surprisingly, rigorous analysis of the causes and consequences of fiscal transparency is thin at best. Open Budgets seeks to fill this gap in existing knowledge by answering a few broad questions: How and why do improvements in fiscal transparency and participation come about? How are they sustained over time? When and how do increased fiscal transparency and participation lead to improved government responsiveness and accountability? Contributors: Steven Friedman (Rhodes University/University of Johannesburg); Jorge Antonio Alves (Queens College, CUNY) and Patrick Heller (Brown University); Jong-sung You (University of California—San Diego) and Wonhee Lee (Hankyung National University); John M. Ackerman (National Autonomous University of Mexico and Mexican Law Review); Aaron Schneider (University of Denver) and Annabella España-Najéra (California State University–Fresno); Barak D. Hoffman (Georgetown University); Jonathan Warren and Huong Nguyen (University of Washington); Linda Beck (University of Maine–Farmington and Columbia University), E. H. Seydou Nourou Toure (Institut Fondamental de l'Afrique Noire), and Aliou Faye (Senegal Ministry of the Economy and Finance).
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 236 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 Transparency in Politics and the Media written by Nigel Bowles and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly governments around the world are experimenting with initiatives in transparency or 'open government'. These involve a variety of measures including the announcement of more user-friendly government websites, greater access to government data, the extension of freedom of information legislation and broader attempts to involve the public in government decision making. However, the role of the media in these initiatives has not hitherto been examined. This volume analyses the challenges and opportunities presented to journalists as they attempt to hold governments accountable in an era of professed transparency. In examining how transparency and open government initiatives have affected the accountability role of the press in the US and the UK, it also explores how policies in these two countries could change in the future to help journalists hold governments more accountable. This volume will be essential reading for all practising journalists, for students of journalism or politics, and for policymakers.
Download or read book Fostering Integrity in Research written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2018-01-13 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The integrity of knowledge that emerges from research is based on individual and collective adherence to core values of objectivity, honesty, openness, fairness, accountability, and stewardship. Integrity in science means that the organizations in which research is conducted encourage those involved to exemplify these values in every step of the research process. Understanding the dynamics that support â€" or distort â€" practices that uphold the integrity of research by all participants ensures that the research enterprise advances knowledge. The 1992 report Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process evaluated issues related to scientific responsibility and the conduct of research. It provided a valuable service in describing and analyzing a very complicated set of issues, and has served as a crucial basis for thinking about research integrity for more than two decades. However, as experience has accumulated with various forms of research misconduct, detrimental research practices, and other forms of misconduct, as subsequent empirical research has revealed more about the nature of scientific misconduct, and because technological and social changes have altered the environment in which science is conducted, it is clear that the framework established more than two decades ago needs to be updated. Responsible Science served as a valuable benchmark to set the context for this most recent analysis and to help guide the committee's thought process. Fostering Integrity in Research identifies best practices in research and recommends practical options for discouraging and addressing research misconduct and detrimental research practices.
Download or read book Government Transparency written by T. Erkkilä and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transparency has become a global concept of responsible government. This book argues that the transnational discourse of transparency promotes potentially contradictory policy ideas that can lead to unintended consequences. It critically examines whether or not increased transparency really leads to increased democratic accountability.
Download or read book Transparency in Global Environmental Governance written by Aarti Gupta and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transparency is increasingly seen as part of the solution to a complex array of economic, political, and ethical problems in an interconnected world. It is often assumed to result in more accountable and effective governance. The 'transparency turn' in global environmental governance in particular is evident in a wide range of international agreements, voluntary disclosure initiatives, and public-private partnerships. This is the first book to scrutinise this transparency turn critically, and to investigate whether it is a broadly transformative force or plays a more limited, instrumental role.
Download or read book The Right to Know written by Ann Florini and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Right to Know is a timely and compelling consideration of a vital question: What information should governments and other powerful organizations disclose? Excessive secrecy corrodes democracy, facilitates corruption, and undermines good public policymaking, but keeping a lid on military strategies, personal data, and trade secrets is crucial to the protection of the public interest. Over the past several years, transparency has swept the world. India and South Africa have adopted groundbreaking national freedom of information laws. China is on the verge of promulgating new openness regulations that build on the successful experiments of such major municipalities as Shanghai. From Asia to Africa to Europe to Latin America, countries are struggling to overcome entrenched secrecy and establish effective disclosure policies. More than seventy now have or are developing major disclosure policies or laws. But most of the world's nearly 200 nations do not have coherent disclosure laws; implementation of existing rules often proves difficult; and there is no consensus about what disclosure standards should apply to the increasingly powerful private sector. As governments and corporations battle with citizens and one another over the growing demand to submit their secrets to public scrutiny, they need new insights into whether, how, and when greater openness can serve the public interest, and how to bring about beneficial forms of greater disclosure. The Right to Know distills the lessons of many nations' often bitter experience and provides careful analysis of transparency's impact on governance, business regulation, environmental protection, and national security. Its powerful lessons make it a critical companion for policymakers, executives, and activists, as well as students and scholars seeking a better understanding of how to make information policy serve the public interest.
