LIST OF PANELS

Providing redress for maladministration is a key requirement of any legitimate system of public service delivery. The panel explores different ways of holding public authorities and agents of public service delivery accountable. Public sector control and accountable is a salient and recurrent issue in the analysis of public policy and its implementation and evaluation in particular. Against this background, the panel organizers seek to combine institutional political science perspectives (focusing on relations between the branches of government as well as on the dynamics of parliamentary behavior) with public administration research (with an eye on public service delivery and organizational behavior in the public sector).

While some notions of accountability refer to formal and highly institutionalized forms of control (such as disciplinary powers or court proceedings), others highlight the informal nature of “accountability as a virtue” and rely on ethical standards and personal convictions as expressed in social control and peer group pressure, but also in acts of “whistle blowing”. On another spectrum of different elements of accountability and control, the variety ranges from instruments and mechanisms internal to the organization (such as oversight by supervisors, political executives and investigations by internal affair units), to arrangements that primarily lie outside of the organization (such as parliamentary scrutiny, ombudspersons, citizen review boards, audit systems, regulatory agencies and even “counter-bureaucracies”, but also investigative journalism, “citizen watch” initiatives and social media activism).

The panel pursues research questions that revolve around contextual differences of control and accountability systems. We hypothesize that institutional arrangements for holding public sector agents accountable will differ across time horizons and national boundaries depending, for example, on prevailing notions of the state, political system characteristics (presidential vs. parliamentary systems of government), types of executive government, political competition and party systems, modes of interest representation, but also on different types of public services rendered (ranging from street-level bureaucracies to regulatory tasks of government agencies to public policy making functions of ministerial governments) and varieties of public policy fields (ranging from extended welfare services to planning functions and potentially repressive agencies of the state, involving the use of physical force). In doing so, the panel investigates the variety of ways of holding the executive apparatus of the state accountable, particularly in light of their comparative advantages and disadvantages as well as their embeddedness in different politico-administrative systems.

The panel will be organized onsite with an option to present papers online as well as in-person. This hybrid mode of the conference will allow for physical as well as virtual participation.

Providing redress for maladministration is a key requirement of any legitimate system of public service delivery. The panel explores different ways of holding public authorities and agents of public service delivery accountable. Public sector control and accountable is a salient and recurrent issue in the analysis of public policy and its implementation and evaluation in particular. Against this background, the panel organizers seek to combine institutional political science perspectives (focusing on relations between the branches of government as well as on the dynamics of parliamentary behavior) with public administration research (with an eye on public service delivery and organizational behavior in the public sector).

The panel pursues research questions that revolve around contextual differences of control and accountability systems. We hypothesize that institutional arrangements for holding public sector agents accountable will differ across time horizons and national boundaries depending, for example, on prevailing notions of the state, political system characteristics (presidential vs. parliamentary systems of government), types of executive government, political competition and party systems, modes of interest representation, but also on different types of public services rendered (ranging from street-level bureaucracies to regulatory tasks of government agencies to public policy making functions of ministerial governments) and varieties of public policy fields (ranging from extended welfare services to planning functions and potentially repressive agencies of the state, involving the use of physical force). In doing so, the panel investigates the variety of ways of holding the executive apparatus of the state accountable, particularly in light of their comparative advantages and disadvantages as well as their embeddedness in different politico-administrative systems.

Format of panel:  The panel will be organized onsite with an option to present papers online as well as in-person. This hybrid mode of the conference will allow for physical as well as virtual participation. Each accepted paper will be allocated a discussant, and in submitting a paper, each author indicates his or her willingness to be a discussant of another paper.

The panel invites contributions that address analytical questions about the functioning of control, oversight and accountability in different political systems and across various types of public services. Theoretical and conceptual expositions as well as empirical analyses are sought that that may employ various research methods. We are looking for papers that address the topics broadly from a system’s perspective, or that provide a detailed analysis of particular institutions and processes, such as parliamentary oversight and scrutiny, ombudspersons, audit systems, citizen review and citizen watch organizations. Comparative perspectives across time, national borders or different cases of policing are particularly encouraged.