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Accountability and
Transparency: Siamese Twins,
Matching Parts, Awkward
Couple?
Christopher Hood
Published online: 10 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Christopher Hood (2010) Accountability and Transparency: Siamese
Twins, Matching Parts, Awkward Couple?, West European Politics, 33:5, 989-1009, DOI:
10.1080/01402382.2010.486122
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2010.486122
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West European Politics,
Vol. 33, No. 5, 989–1009, September 2010
Accountability and Transparency:

Siamese Twins, Matching Parts,
Awkward Couple?
CHRISTOPHER HOOD
This paper contrasts three possible ways of thinking about the relationship between
accountability and transparency as principles of governance: as ‘Siamese twins’, not
really distinguishable; as ‘matching parts’ that are separable but nevertheless
complement one another smoothly to produce good governance; and as ‘awkward
couple’, involving elements that are potentially or actually in tension with one another.
It then identifies three possible ways in which we could establish the accuracy or
plausibility of each of those three characterisations. One is a search for true essences
that would separate true from spurious meanings. A second is to dimensionalise each of
the concepts and explore the matrix of connectivity between the dimensions. A third is
to explore the multiple frames for thinking about accountability and transparency that
come from the neo-Durkheimian analysis of the limited number of elementary ways of
life developed by the late Mary Douglas and her followers. The analytic utility of this
approach is that it allows us to identify four different ways of thinking about
transparency and accountability and the links between them.
This paper is concerned with the relationship between two abstract nouns:
accountability and transparency. Accountability broadly denotes the duty
of an individual or organisation to answer in some way about how they have
conducted their affairs. Transparency broadly means the conduct of
business in a fashion that makes decisions, rules and other information
visible from outside.
Both of these terms have Latin roots, though accountability is a term
associated with English-language discussions of governance, and there is
said to be no precisely equivalent word in some languages, such as Spanish
(see, for example, Carstens 2005).
Both of these terms are the subject of a huge and growing literature. In the
recent past both of them have figured prominently in maxims of ‘good
governance’ for business corporations and government, though this paper
Correspondence Address: christopher.hood@politics.ox.ac.uk
ISSN 0140-2382 Print/1743-9655 Online ª 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2010.486122
990 C. Hood
focuses on the latter. Indeed the two terms often appear together in lists of
the various desiderata for good governance, as in the World Bank’s well-
known governance rankings, the International Monetary Fund’s lending
requirements or the US’s Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006.
Accountability is conventionally taken as the central problem in the Anglo-
American public administration literature (to the point that traditional public
administration scholars have sometimes been accused of neglecting other
important aspects of public management). Similarly transparency has long
been a central topic in discussions of governance. Though the phenomenon
was certainly discussed before the term ‘transparency’ was coined (Hood 2006:
5), that term has existed for at least two centuries as a way of describing an
aspect of governance, and figures centrally in the works of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and Jeremy Bentham (for whom the ‘transparent management’
principle was a central tenet of good governance). But the word transparency
started to become a central doctrine of good governance for both firms and
states from the 1990s, and indeed seemed to be reaching saturation coverage
by the 2000s (see, for instance, Heald 2006: 26). It appears to be one of those
ideas that are endorsed without much reflection as principles of good
government and management, and are in that sense ‘banal’ in the way that
Michael Billig (1995) sees nationalism as often pervasive but unexamined in
politics and government (Hood 2007).
So how do these two aspects of governance relate to one another? This
paper explores three possible ways. First, they might be considered as
Siamese twins in the sense of being inextricably intertwined to the point
where they cannot meaningfully be distinguished as different things. Second,
they might be considered as matching parts, meaning they are separable but
complementary in that they produce good governance only in combination,
in the same way that hydrogen and oxygen make up water or electric power
and computers combine to produce digital information. From a matching
parts viewpoint, transparency and accountability both count as aspects of
‘good governance’, meaning that they complement one another in
democratic institutions, but they are not the same, even if the former might
be considered a necessary condition for the latter. And a third possible
relationship for transparency and accountability might be that of awkward
couple or uneasy bedfellows, meaning they involve elements that are not
only separable but by no means always combine to produce good
governance, and indeed can be in tension at least sometimes.
The Siamese twin interpretation might be supported by the frequency
with which the terms accountability and transparency are bracketed
together in the good governance literature and indeed mentioned together
in the same breath, as noted earlier. And after all, accountability in the sense
of answerability necessarily implies the answerers sharing information with
those to whom they are answerable, while transparency in the sense of
openness is itself a way of answering for the conduct of an individual or
organisation.
Accountability and Transparency 991
But beyond that very elementary level, the Siamese twin interpretation is
far from unchallengeable, for various reasons. After all, there plainly can be
accountability of a certain sort without transparency in the sense of general
disclosure to the world at large. For example, in most traditional civil
service systems, civil servants have been answerable to their ministers,
without their advice or details of their activities being available to the public
at large or even to parliamentary committees. Similarly, officeholders can be
accountable to legislatures without full transparency in every possible
dimension, for example, when security and intelligence services are
scrutinised by legislative committees without full public disclosure of their
activities and precisely who produced what information at what time. And if
what those legislators primarily want to know is what information ministers
had available to them when they made a particular decision (the crucial
‘when did you know?’ question on which political blame so often turns), the
accountability process is not necessarily disabled if the identity of those who
gave the advice is not revealed or if the information is not available in real
time but only after the event. In the private sector, which has often been
claimed by business-minded reformers as a model for governments to follow
in public service delivery, executives and managers can be accountable for
their work and decisions within the corporate structure without full
transparency to the world at large, particularly over matters of commercial
strategy and market-sensitive information.
Similarly, there can in principle be transparency without accountability in
the sense of authoritative democratic forums in which individuals or
officeholders have to answer for their behaviour and actions. After all,
registered corporations have to file their accounts for anyone to see, but that
does not imply a duty to answer to the general public over any particular
decision that may be of public concern. To take a different example, the
bureaucratic totalitarian states of the twentieth century (such as the USSR,
Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic) had some elements
of transparency in the sense of rule-governed operations, accessible statistics
and various kinds of records, but were not democratically accountable (see
Heald 2006: 28). That feature figured prominently in Ernst Fraenkel’s (1941)
famous ‘dual state’ thesis on the nature of Nazi Germany, as a state
combining elements of rule of law in its bureaucratic processes with
arbitrary rule, and therefore well placed to adapt to democratic rule under a
different regime. The same might be said of the apartheid regime in South
Africa, which likewise had elements of transparency in a certain sense but
was not accountable to the bulk of the population (see Meierhenrich 2008).
Ironically, the famous NGO Transparency International (founded by Peter
Eigen in 1993) in itself might be considered an example of transparency
without accountability, in the sense that it publishes fairly extensive (but not
full) information about the sources on which it draws its well-known
international country rankings,1 but does not face the sort of political
accountability that applies in many of the states that it rates.
992 C. Hood
The matching parts interpretation differs from the Siamese twins view
insofar as it recognises that transparency and accountability are separable in
principle, and occasionally in practice. But from the matching parts
viewpoint, the two items are both needed to produce good governance, in
the same way that transparency is normally seen to combine with fair
process to produce justice in legal proceedings. For instance, many would
say that transparency in the sense of general disclosure of information about
the affairs of government provides necessary raw material for democratic
accountability even though it is not identical with it, primarily because it
enables concerned citizens and interest groups to be sufficiently informed
about the activities of executive government to be able to feed their views

effectively into the legislature or other forums. And it can be said to
contribute to accountability in the sense of making corrupt dealings more
likely to be exposed when public accounts and fees for office are published.
In Jeremy Bentham’s (1931 [1802]: 311) famous words, public scrutiny of
such matters is a process in which ‘the worst principles have their use as well
as the best; envy, hatred, malice, perform the task of public spirit’. And
transparency can contribute to government accountability in perhaps more
indirect ways as well, for example, by reducing the risk of unnoticed errors
and by making objectives explicit so that there is less chance of confusion or
underlaps within government.
The matching parts interpretation is one of those comfortably trade-off-
free, win–win positions that attract politicians and diplomats (always
seeking a world in which you do not have to give up some of x to get more
of y). So it is no wonder that such a position is implicit in so much of the
official good governance literature. But it also can be challenged as too
simple from the viewpoint of a rather less comfortable ‘awkward couple’
conception of the relationship between transparency and accountability.
From that perspective, effective accountability and all variants of
transparency do not always run smoothly together, and difficult trade-offs
between the two principles often have to be faced. Perhaps the best known
argument for the ‘awkward couple’ view is that of Onora O’Neill (2002,
2006), who has questioned the value of transparency as an all-purpose recipe
for improving the quality of governance and accountability, on the grounds
that formal transparency requirements tend to lead to low-intelligence
defensive box-ticking and one-way communication rather than real
answerability in effective dialogue.
For instance, in the examples given earlier of accountability without
general transparency (of civil servants to their ministers in traditional civil
service systems, of security and intelligence systems to legislatures in camera,
and of business managers to their boards or superiors), it can be and is
argued by defenders of all of those modes of accountability that the
limitation of transparency is either a condition of the accountability being
effective or a means of obtaining other desiderata of ‘good governance’. For
example, take ‘proportionality’, the idea (dating back at least to Augustine’s
fourth century principles for ‘just war’) that government’s response to any
problem should match its expected severity. If full transparency often leads
in practice to politicians, bureaucrats and service professionals putting all
their efforts into blame avoidance rather than the taking of properly
calculated risks (for instance by classifying all security risks as high), such
aspects of good governance may indeed be sacrificed by linking transpar-
ency and accountability, producing what is seen as a characteristic failing of
public sector organisation by defenders of the limited approach to
transparency taken in private corporations (see also Hood 2007).
The same thing may happen even in the legal process model, which is
often held to be the model for transparency in government. Features such

as publicly available rules governing the admissibility of evidence,
proceedings open to the public, all evidence placed on the public record
and available to all parties, are conventionally held to be instrumental for
justice. But there are limitations on transparency even in the legal model
(such as information that does not need to be shared between
prosecution and defence and restrictions on sharing of information
among witnesses). And indeed there are some occasions where the
effective pursuit of justice is held to be obtainable only by limitations on
transparency, for example, in trials of suspected terrorists, rapists or child
abusers. The awkward couple interpretation might be seen by those who
hold to the matching parts view as an occasional aberration that should
not alter their generally trade-off-free view of the world. But it seems
impossible to dismiss it altogether.
Three Ways of Developing the Analysis

This first-principles discussion suggests that the Siamese twin, matching
parts and awkward couple interpretation of the relationship between
accountability and transparency as concepts of governance could each claim
some sort of prima facie plausibility. But given that current discussion about
transparency and accountability is often simplistic and weakly grounded,
how can such an analysis be developed further? There are at least three
possible ways of doing so.
One way of reasoning about it would be to take accountability and
transparency as if they were pure essences, and discover how they relate to
one another by a search for their proper canonical meanings and by an
exacting process of philosophical questioning or Socratic dialogue coming
to discard peripheral or mistaken ideas about what real accountability or
transparency involves. After all, as the examples given earlier suggested, the
linkage between transparency and accountability will typically turn on what
is seen as essential or effective accountability, as opposed to formal, nominal
or peripheral types. The same goes for what is seen as the essence of
transparency – for example, whether the information is required to be
revealed in real time or after the event through an embargo procedure, or
994 C. Hood
whether transparency applies to specific instances of report or decision –

such as a corporation’s reported results, an examination board’s decisions, a
jury’s verdict – or to every moment of the decision process in such cases.
Such an essentialist approach would have, of course, impeccable philoso-
phical credentials. Indeed, much of the discussion of accountability in
traditional constitutional debate has treated it precisely as if it was some
kind of essence to be determined by that sort of analysis. Transparency,
surprisingly perhaps given its popularity in discussions of good governance,
has been less subjected to this kind of analytic treatment than accountability
and may well be ripe for it. But what if there is no single essence of such
things?
If there is no such single essence, a second possible way to produce a more
refined analysis of accountability and transparency is to dimensionalise each
of the two concepts, identifying different forms and multiple variants of each
concept and then exploring how the variant forms of one concept relate to
the corresponding variant forms of the other. That, after all, is Aristotle’s
starting point for analysing forms of government and modern political
scientists often follow much the same basic approach, for example, in Collier
and Levitsky’s (1997) well-known discussion of ‘democracy with adjectives’.
It has often been observed in the accountability literature that there are
multiple dimensions and forms of accountability (for instance in answer-
ability and culpability, formal and informal accountability, financial and
other forms of accountability), as in the case of Mark Bovens’ account of
two concepts of accountability in this collection (Bovens 2010). The same
analytic treatment can be given to the concept of transparency. For
example, in his analysis of transparency, David Heald (2003, 2006) has
distinguished formal from real types, transparency in real time from
transparency after the event, and transparency relating to ‘events’ from
transparency relating to ‘processes’. Similarly, in earlier work I have
distinguished between general and particular and direct and indirect forms
of transparency, to identify four different types of transparency, namely:
open mutual scrutiny in society at large; general surveillance of social
behaviour, conducted by experts or agents; public forums or mechanisms by
which public officeholders must answer to citizens; and bureaucratic
transparency, in which individuals’ or organisations’ affairs must be made
observable to experts or accountants (as in the case of the European Union’s
‘transparency’ directives relating to the way state-owned enterprises have to
keep their accounts) (Hood 2007: 195). Those four types represent at the
least very different conceptions of transparency.
Such a ‘splitting’ approach leads us to ‘adjectivise’ both transparency and
accountability, with the implication that the type of accountability you get
may be related to the type of transparency you have, or vice versa. Such an
approach leads to the development of a potentially n-dimensional matrix, a
sort of institutional Rubik’s cube in which the analytic puzzle is to relate the
variants of transparency and accountability to one another.
There is much to be said for that kind of approach. After all, academics
tend to be analytic ‘splitters’ and dimensionalising both of these concepts
offers a way to explore the contingencies that can arise when the various
forms combine. The problem is to know when to stop (or where to start)
with that sort of analysis, because in principle such an approach can lead to
a level of complexity far beyond that of the Rubik cube. One standard
analytic method of dealing with the problem of infinite dimensionality (as in
Bentham’s method) is to work per genus et differentiam, making successive
dichotomous distinctions in a hierarchical way. And a common variant of
that is to use the ubiquitous two-by-two table (as in Figure 1), so as to
produce an analytic universe of parts that are mutually exclusive and jointly
exhaustive without being swamped by complexity. But of course the
problem does not end there, because there is an infinity of possible 2 6 2
FI G U R E 1
F OU R AP P ROACH ES TO A C CO UN TA BILIT Y AN D T RAN SP AR EN CY
S U M M A R I S ED
996 C. Hood
tables and a consequently huge selection problem. The alternative, factor

analysis-type approach of inductively arriving at clusters of elements in
documentary analysis or similar data sets, in principle mitigates that
problem but provides no guarantee that the inductive factors are intelligible,
and at worst may simply reproduce the confusion and vagueness of earlier
discussions of these complex phenomena.
Those problems are not trivial either. So instead of limitless differentia-
tion of types by the addition of ever more adjectives, there is an analytic
value in making the assumption that there are a limited number of
‘elementary’ forms of thought and belief, in the same sense that the great
sociologist Émile Durkheim (1954 [1912]) wrote of elementary forms of

religious thought and practice, and distinguished the basic forms of social
variation in terms of regulation and integration in his work on suicide and
moral education. In the second half of the twentieth century, the late Mary
Douglas and her followers brought Durkheim’s two separate dimensions
together into a cross-tabulation to identify four fundamental worldviews
that tend to recur in social life in dynamic relations with one another (see 6
2003; Peck and 6 2006). If we follow this line of analysis, we will not expect
to find a single essence of accountability and transparency, but nor will we
expect to find an infinity of ideas. Rather we will expect accountability and
transparency to function rather like ideas of proper diet or other forms of
‘appropriate’ conduct, as litmus tests of cultural bias.
Indeed, accountability (albeit not in the sense conventionally used by
constitutional lawyers) is central to the cultural theory of Mary Douglas.
The different worldviews identified in that theory are centred on competing
views of accountability, in the sense of rival attitudes and beliefs about who
should be blamed for what, and about the way that the conduct of
individuals or organisations should be socially regulated (see, for example,
Thompson et al. 1990; Verweij and Thompson 2006). The founder of this
approach, Mary Douglas (1990: 10) wrote:
Cultural theory starts by assuming that culture is a system of persons

holding one another mutually accountable. A person tries to live at some
level of being held accountable which is bearable and which matches the
level at which that person wants to hold others accountable.
Later in the same paper, Douglas added (1990: 15–16): ‘In an individualist
culture, the weak are going to carry the blame for what happens to them; in
a hierarchy, the deviants; in a sect, aliens and also faction leaders.’
From this analytic perspective, any idea of a single essential and correct
view of accountability or transparency makes little sense. We could hardly
expect ideas as fundamental to human conduct as accountability and
transparency to look the same across all varieties of political thought,
ideology and religious doctrine that Mary Douglas’ neo-Durkheimian
approach aims to encapsulate in its four fundamental worldviews. If those
worldviews are in continuous tension with one another, as cultural theorists

expect, the same should apply to ideas about accountability and
transparency. So a Durkheimian analysis will not produce a universal
answer to the question as to how transparency relates to accountability.
Rather it can guide us into identifying a range of competing views of each of
these phenomena and help us to explore how they might be linked together
from the standpoint of each different worldview.
In principle, then, this approach has the advantage of avoiding the ‘single
essence’ view of accountability and transparency without leading to
boundless complexity. That is because Douglas’ cross-tabulation of the
Durkheimian categories can in turn be successively refined by adding further

2 6 2 distinctions ranging from the society-wide level of aggregation to
that of individuals.2 And the 2 6 2 distinctions are themselves rooted in a
theory of culture that is based on the interaction of the two foundational
elements of social organisation as identified by Durkheim. Nowadays those
two elements are normally referred to as ‘group’, the extent to which the
individual is controlled by social integration by means such as commensality
or other social links, and ‘grid’, the extent to which social interactions are
explicitly regulated in some way, rather than based on ad hoc interactions.
But the extent of ‘grid’ is not necessarily reflected in rules that are enacted in
some formal statutory sense. A social unit can be high-grid even (and
sometimes especially) with unwritten rules, if those rules are widely
understood.
Combining those two elements produces a comprehensive analytic
universe consisting of four main worldviews or ways of life, conventionally
labelled as hierarchism, individualism, fatalism and egalitarianism (often
also referred to as sectarianism). This approach, developing from Durkheim
via the colonial anthropology on which Mary Douglas based her integrative
theory, has become increasingly familiar as it has come to be applied to
social and policy analysis in a range of situations from environmental
policies affecting Himalayan hill farmers (Thompson et al. 1986, 2006) to
policy issues such as seat belts and the internet and administrative theory
more generally (Hood 1998; Verweij and Thompson 2006). But as yet it does
not seem to have been applied to the idea of transparency, and its
relationship with accountability.
Of course, the potential analytic tractability offered by this approach – in
limiting variety without adopting a culture-free essentialist approach – has
two corresponding and familiar disadvantages commonly found in soft
qualitative analysis. One is the coder reliability problem of where to fit what
data, since coders can be expected to differ in where they place observations,
and too much of grid group analysis in practice has not hitherto taken the
problem of inter-coder variation seriously, often relying on casual one-shot
classifications by single coders. The other is the empirical problem of how to
observe and identify the various ways of life. For example, if a survey
instrument leads to the conclusion that a particular way of life is missing
998 C. Hood
from the social domain being surveyed, does that mean that the instrument
is flawed, or that that particular social domain simply does not contain the
full range of ways of life? If the assumption is that the four ways of life must
be everywhere, it suggests the former conclusion, but raises basic issues
about the empirical falsifiability of the grid-group analysis. If the latter
conclusion is reached, it challenges what cultural theorists grandly call their
‘requisite variety’ proposition that the four (or on some variants, five) ways
of life tend to be universal.3
Those difficulties should not be glossed over, particularly for any first
application of such analysis, and they can only be expected to be reduced by a
process of successive refinement and adaptation to criticism. But at the same

time the problems thrown up by this approach do not seem to be intrinsically
more intractable than those that arise from applying the first two methods
discussed earlier. After all, the first runs up against the elemental difficulty of
how we can ever determine those elusive true essences of transparency and
accountability in a culture-free way from the philosopher’s cave (or indeed
which philosopher in which cave should be chosen), while the second takes us
into a world of potentially boundless complexity. Accordingly, the next section
of this paper offers a first and necessarily tentative perspective on how we
might see transparency and accountability, and the link between them, from a
neo-Durkheimian analytic standpoint.
Four Ways of Viewing Transparency and Accountability: Hierachist,

Egalitarian, Individualist and Fatalist Perspectives
As briefly noted above, there are four primary ways of life in the cultural
theory analysis, each associated with a different worldview and a different
view of social accountability. Each of these ways of life can be understood as
a reaction against what can be seen as the excesses or shortcomings of the
others, and they thus represent ‘contradictory certainties’ about the social
order and how it should be managed. Three of them – hierarchism,
individualism and egalitarianism – are readily identifiable by other analytic
routes. A fourth, fatalism, is often claimed by cultural theorists to be their
special discovery and yet is often relegated to the role of a ‘passive’
approach (because at first sight it is difficult to reconcile with normative
what-to-do ideas about policy and organisation) and left out of account
when cultural theorists analyse competing social and political positions
(Hood 1998: 145–7). So we need to focus on what the accountability and
transparency problem looks like from the perspective of each of these four
ways of life, and that is what the next four sub-sections aim to sketch out.
Transparency and Accountability from a Hierarchist Perspective

In grid group analysis, the hierarchist view of the world is rooted in a high-
grid, high-group approach to social organisation, in the sense that social
interactions are governed by intricate rules and the individual is dominated

by the group, with an established pecking order of authority governed by
status (‘A dog’s obeyed in office’, as Shakespeare put it in King Lear).4
Ordinarily this is the view of the world that will be embedded in the status
quo, but there can be exceptions to that.
In this view of the world, accountability seems likely to be seen primarily
as a vertical or ‘upwards’ process, with answerability owed to proper
authority in the higher parts of the social order – rulers, experts, courts,
parliaments, high officeholders of various kinds – just as in some kinds of
religious thought the individual is considered to be accountable to God
through established ecclesiastical authority. And that accountability will be

primarily concerned with adherence to rules and standards set down by
those authorities or their agents, with censure associated with deviation
from and breach of those rules.
Information in a hierarchist worldview can also be expected to be
governed by strict rules of appropriateness, dominated by the needs of
established authority. To achieve accountability up the line there will
certainly need to be appropriate information to surmount principal–agent
problems, but that does not necessarily imply any need for general
transparency to the world at large. Indeed, in a hierarchist view of the
world, information can be expected to be governed by a ladder of rights to
access varying with status (expressed as security levels and ‘need to know’
categorisations, for instance). And the information needed for account-
ability processes to authorities or their agents can be restricted by meetings
in camera and confidentiality rules analogous to the secrecy of the
confessional or the meetings of the College of Cardinals in the Roman
Catholic Church. The examples given earlier of civil servants’ accountability
to their ministers without public disclosure of their advice, of confidential
accountability by security agencies to parliamentary committees and of
accountability of private sector managers to their superordinates in a
context of limited general transparency, all fit readily with this worldview.
Indeed, from this viewpoint, general transparency, particularly in real time,
may readily be seen as coming into conflict with the conditions for effective
accountability, on the basis that it will tend to destroy the basis for delicate
case-based judgements about risk by experts or candid advice up the line to
superordinates in conditions of crisis or uncertainty.
In a hierarchist world, therefore, accountability is unlikely to be
interpreted as meaning that everyone has an equal right to know the secrets
of government or public organisations. On the contrary, information
entitlements are likely to be variable, and general transparency is likely to be
seen as an instrumental value (Heald 2006) rather than a basic human right
(Birkinshaw 2006). In some cases openness can contribute to a hierarchist
view of accountability, for instance if it helps to bring instances of
corruption or malfeasance to the attention of the proper authorities. But
there can also be too much openness from this perspective, for instance
1000 C. Hood
where it aids anti-system forces against the authorities or undermines

effective accountability by driving the real debates underground. Such views
are not exactly far to seek – for instance, they regularly emerge over the issue
of who should be allowed to know what about the expense claims of elected
representatives in the European Parliament – and commonly figure in
hierarchist critiques of transparency. For that reason, the view of the
relationship between accountability and transparency that seems to fit most
closely with a hierarchist perspective is the matching parts approach, in
which a vertical view of accountability goes with a differential access view of
transparency. But the corollary of that is the risk of an awkward couple
relationship if the ‘wrong kind of transparency’ (Prat 2005) is chosen.
Transparency and Accountability from an Egalitarian Perspective

In contrast to the hierarchist worldview, cultural theorists see egalitarianism
or sectarianism as rooted in a low-grid, high-group approach to social
organisation. As with hierarchism, this is a world in which the group
dominates the individual. But social interaction is less rule-governed than in
the hierarchist world and there is no strict pecking order of status or
authority. Egalitarian groups tend to unite in the face of perceived threats
from outside the group (Douglas 1987) and blame is directed against
outsiders and those who come to be seen as betraying the true interests of
the community. Egalitarianism is often associated with social radicalism but
it can also be found within elite institutions which place emphasis on
mutuality.
In this worldview, accountability is what is owed to the people or the
community at large, and can be thought of as essentially a ‘downwards’
process. If, for hierarchists, ‘a dog’s obeyed in office’, for egalitarians the
corresponding watchword is ‘surrender to the people or die!’ (a graphic
slogan of the Chinese Cultural Revolution quoted by Thurston 1988: 156).
This accountability world is one of answerability to peer groups or
communities. Perhaps the classic example of answerability of officeholders
to citizens at large is the New England town meeting, said to have started at
Salem in 1636 (Bryan 2004). And the notion of the ‘citizens’ forum’ in
various forms, from US grand juries to other mechanisms for holding
officeholders accountable to citizen groups, is frequently advocated as a
model of extended democratic accountability. A case in point is Kirstin
Shrader-Frechette’s (1991) ‘populist’ approach to risk management by
subjecting corporations and governments to scrutiny by citizen forums. This
egalitarian approach to accountability has its religious equivalent in those
sorts of communities where the faithful answer to one another, or to the
body of the congregation, rather than to ministers or priests alone – as in the
reformed church world of the ‘stool of repentance’ and the church meeting
sitting in judgement on the actions of church officeholders and members (see
Hood 2006: 7).
Information in an egalitarian worldview cannot be expected to be limited

by subtle rules regarding who should be allowed to know what, for what
purposes. On the contrary, the presumption will be towards general
openness and disclosure, of the doings of both organisations and
individuals. The ideal is of a transparent society, as advocated by Jean-
Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century in his plans for the government
of Poland, when he argued that the best security for honest government is a
society in which everyone’s conduct is open to everyone else’s scrutiny. In
his plans for Poland, Rousseau (1985 [1772]: 72) carried this principle to the
point where, like Spinoza (1951 [1670]), he advocated compulsory uniforms
for public officeholders to make it impossible for them to go about their

business incognito. Similar ideas can be found in the French revolutionaries’
demand for a transparent society, mixing ideas from Rousseau and
Bentham, and in the demands for public exposure of (almost) everyone’s
actions during the Cultural Revolution period in China. An egalitarian
worldview will be disinclined to adopt subtle boundary lines between public
and private life, and will have little truck with privacy arguments for limiting
transparency about personal conduct. For instance, it will be resistant to
security arguments for limiting information on legislators’ expense
allowances or for restricting the details of the names and addresses of
released sex offenders to police or professionals on a ‘need-to-know’ basis.
Looked at through egalitarian spectacles, neither accountability nor
transparency is to be distinguished by levels of authority or appropriateness.
Maximum answerability to popular forums will be the egalitarian watch-
word for accountability, and full transparency is integral to achieving that
populist version of accountability. So egalitarians are more likely to
embrace the vision of transparency as a human right (Birkinshaw 2006), not
as something that is instrumental to other good purposes and appropriate
up to a point for effective accountability. So the view of the relationship
between accountability and transparency that seems to fit most closely with
a hierarchist perspective is the Siamese twins approach, with the one not
really separable from the other.
Transparency and Accountability from an Individualist Perspective

Individualism in cultural theory is rooted in a low-group, low-grid approach
to social organisation, with little presumption of group dominance over
individuals and no highly rule-governed approach to social interaction.
Unlike hierarchists or egalitarians, individualists do not put collective needs
above those of individuals, and are more inclined to put their faith in
competition, rivalry and private agreements and personal endeavour than in
any corporate or state activity. For Douglas (1990: 15), individualist
cultures find ways of making their disadvantaged members disappear from
sight, for example, by the classification schemes they employ to ‘draw a veil
over the sorrows of the poor and aliens and deviants’. This worldview is
1002 C. Hood
often claimed to have been in the ascendancy in many Western societies in

the recent past, though others see a shift to egalitarianism as the dominant
trend (Wildavsky and Swedlow 1991).
From the standpoint of this way of life, public or collective accountability
will be seen as a more restricted affair than it appears in the egalitarian or
hierarchist worlds. Rather than upwards or downwards, it is likely at most
to be sideways, as between different individual contracting parties in a
market (such as buyer and seller or landlord and tenant), or simply personal.
After all, for the true individualist, accountability is ultimately to oneself,
and relatively little can be expected from collectivist processes of any kind,
whatever authority such processes invoke. So if individualists have a

soundbite slogan to match those mentioned above for hierarchists and
egalitarians, it could be ‘to thine own self be true’ (Polonius’ famous advice
in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3). The purest religious parallel is
perhaps with freethinkers, or at least with those sects, such as the Quakers,
in which everyone develops their own beliefs without any strict common
creed and accountability involves neither church meeting nor minister or
priest (even if the individual’s conscience is considered to be God-given in
some way).
Individualists can thus be expected to prefer a minimalist approach to
accountability to collective bodies. They will prefer to put their faith in
accountability to markets or similar mechanisms that rest on individual
choice (for instance the star ratings that buyers on the online market e-bay
give to sellers as a result of their experiences in dealing with them) than in
hearings purporting to be in the name of the people or of high state
authority. In public services, individualists will prefer to see mechanisms
such as ‘Tiebout competition’ (Tiebout 1956) that make contiguous
jurisdictions accountable to potentially mobile voter-citizens in response
to their tax and service mix, than more collectivist approaches to
accountability. Individualists will expect accountability to be most effective
when voter-citizens have choice and possibilities of exit from one service
provider to another. So they will be interested in putting state and public
authorities into competition, for example, with options to choose alternative
regulatory regimes or tax–service mixes. Like egalitarianism, individualism
implies a bottom-up approach to accountability, but unlike egalitarianism
the aim will be to minimise the collective element in such accountability and
bring it down to personal choices.
From an individualist worldview, individual rights to privacy, intellectual
property and commercial secrets are likely to be preferred to general
transparency (as in the top two cells of Figure 1). Data protection of
individuals’ sensitive information can therefore be expected to be put above
what are claimed to be collective needs. ‘Fifth Amendment’ rights (in US
parlance) and their equivalents will tend to dominate individualist
approaches to transparency, and commercial confidentiality claims will
tend to trump right-to-know demands made in the name of the people or the
state. The sort of transparency that is likely to be most favoured from an

individualist worldview and to fit with the individualist view of account-
ability will involve the sort of information (such as corporate or individual
rating information or information about tariffs) that makes it easier for
individuals to make choices or transact negotiations. To the extent that
individualists recognise that there are areas of public life where competition
and choice are difficult to achieve, they may see a place for transparency in
the governance of such matters, but are less likely than egalitarians or
hierarchists to be convinced about the pervasiveness of true ‘public goods’.
So, as with hierarchism, transparency seems likely to be restricted as a
way of underpinning accountability from an individualist viewpoint, but in

a different way. For individualists there can be too much transparency if it
undermines personal privacy, but a limited approach to transparency can be
fitted with a limited approach to accountability in a matching parts way.
Like hierarchism, individualism suggests that restricting transparency can be
a way of promoting good governance generally, but for quite different
reasons (that is, the protection of personal privacy and commercial
confidentiality rather than restriction of information to higher authority).
Transparency and Accountability from a Fatalist Perspective

As already noted, fatalism is often said to be cultural theory’s most
important ‘discovery’, whereas the other three ways of life can fairly readily
be found in or derived from other analytic approaches in social science. In
cultural theory, fatalists live in a world that is low in group (they are not
subsumed by group ties and are more likely to be isolates) but high in grid
(they are not able or willing to negotiate the terms of their interaction on an
ad hoc basis). Fatalists are often said by cultural theorists to constitute a
‘passive’ way of life. For fatalists the only certainty in life is that there is no
certainty. Fatalists can thus be expected to have low enthusiasm for or
confidence in any firm beliefs about social organisation or how good
governance can be achieved and to expect both the social and physical
worlds to be far more indeterminate, capricious and uncertain than is
allowed for in the so-called ‘active’ ways of life. For fatalists, the
appropriate watchword for the accountability problem is perhaps the old
saw of ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’ and the equivalent
proverbs in other languages.
Cultural theorists are apt to treat fatalists as a sort of Greek chorus,
constituting a critical but existential reaction against the contradictory
certitudes of hierarchism, egalitarianism and individualism, rather than a
very positive doctrinal alternative (though there are some important
exceptions, such as Gerald Mars’ (1982) analysis of workplace cheating,
in which he shows there is a distinct form of cheating practised by isolated
workers such as supermarket cashiers and solo domestic servants). In line
with that approach, it can be argued that no single approach to
1004 C. Hood
accountability can provide an all-purpose formula for good governance

from a fatalist perspective. For those who see the social world as essentially
capricious and uncertain, there are just too many x-factors, unpredictable
contingencies and chance connections for reliable generalisations to be made
about ‘what works’. From this perspective, the hierarchist formula for
accountability can easily turn into a self-referential exercise in blame
dissolution that isolates and often protects the political and bureaucratic
class from real popular scrutiny. Likewise, the egalitarian formula for
accountability can easily degenerate for fatalists into a variant of the famous
seventeenth-century Salem witch trials in which misguided popular
sentiment can shape outcomes in ways that prove to be profoundly

mistaken. And the individualist formula can produce an accountability
vacuum between individual transactions and collective affairs, if variants of
the ‘e-bay’ or Tiebout approach to accountability prove to be rather less
universally applicable than individualists expect.
To the extent that fatalism generates any positive recipe for account-
ability, it suggests an emphasis on processes and structures that make the
accountability environment unpredictable for individuals and organisations,
for example, by ‘contrived randomness’ in allocation of individuals to
positions in such a way as to minimise the element of predictability and trust
among officeholders (two of the basic prerequisites for organised corrup-
tion). That is the sort of effect that is achieved by the unpredictable ways
that individuals can move around in complex institutions, such that no one
can readily predict very far into the future who they will answer to as
superordinates, colleagues or referees. It is institutionalised in the way that
multinational corporations post their functionaries around their worldwide
domains, and in a range of other institutions from unpredictable postings in
bureaucratic field administration structures, through the capricious process
of peer reviewing in the academic world to those religious orders which limit
the tenure of their members in any one place and post them to new locations
and positions in ways that cannot readily be foreseen (see Hood 1998: 64–
8).5 It is the sort of world portrayed in novels like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
(1964), where people move around and collide unexpectedly in the great
ramified military machine, with effects that are sometimes manifestly
dysfunctional but at other times help to keep corruption cliques in check. If
the hierarchist worldview suggests an upwards view of transparency, the
egalitarian worldview suggests a downwards view and the individualist
worldview suggests a sideways or personal view, the fatalist’s worldview
suggests a haphazard mixture of all those directions of accountability.
A fatalist perspective also suggests little faith in any all-encompassing
view of transparency as a route to better government. For fatalists,
unintended consequences are everywhere in social affairs, and the link
between measures intended to promote transparency and transparency in
practice is likely to be seen as especially problematic from this worldview,
which will stress the various cunning ways that established and powerful
organisations can circumvent measures intended to promote transparency.

Fatalists will stress the extent to which such measures can have
unpredictable side or reverse effects, as in Alasdair Roberts’ (2006a,
2006b) analysis of freedom of information laws in a range of developed
countries, where the initial promise by those introducing the relevant laws
that FOI measures would lead to a ‘new culture of openness’ in every case
produced instead tighter and more centralised management of all politically
sensitive information in government. Rather, for fatalists all institutional life
is a lottery and so transparency where it happens is likely to be the product
of coincidental circumstances that open windows in a way that cannot
readily be engineered but can only be taken advantage of when a window

happens to present itself, for example, when cosy cliques fall out or
individuals move from poacher to gamekeeper positions.6
Given that fatalists put the stress on the unpredictability of human affairs,
this perspective would also suggest that there is no necessary or reliable
connection between accountability and transparency. From a fatalist
worldview, we might expect them sometimes to be Siamese twins, sometimes
matching parts and sometimes an awkward couple, but we would expect it
to be hard to predict the conditions which produce each of those
relationships. And that goes with a view of the world that is sceptical of
any received view of good governance but nevertheless expects fruitful
opportunities for better governance to open up sometimes, albeit in random
ways, for lucky actors who happen to be in the right place at the right time.
Summary and Conclusion

This essay has aimed to show that there are multiple frames in which we can
see accountability and transparency and the relationship between them – as
Siamese twins, as matching parts and as an ‘awkward couple’. Although
much of the traditional literature on accountability and transparency has at
least implicitly conceived of these ideas as having true essences that can be
penetrated by analysis, more recent academic literature tends to differentiate
different modes and types of accountability, and the same is just beginning
to happen with the idea of transparency. The analytic problem with the
‘adjectival’ route to splitting up forms and types is that it is in principle a
limitless n-dimensional exercise, and that is why the neo-Durkheimian
approach here has analytic value, because it allows us to look at
accountability and transparency and the links between them from the
perspective of a limited number of ‘elementary’ worldviews as identified by
the grid-group cultural theory. Figure 1 summarises the analysis that was
sketched out in the previous section.
Sketchy and tentative as that analysis admittedly is, it suggests that such
an approach merits more attention as a way of thinking about ideas of
accountability and transparency and how they can be linked together. Many
commentators have observed and commented on the ‘multiple
1006 C. Hood
accountabilities’ issue faced by institutions and officeholders in the modern

world. But transparency can also be understood in multiple ways, as the
preceding discussion has shown, and a neo-Durkheimian analysis can help
to bring out those different understandings of transparency more sharply.
Such an approach can also enable us to track changes of emphasis over
time. If the grid-group modification of Durkheim’s theory is correct, it
suggests that all of these worldviews are likely to coexist in most times and
places, but the balance is certainly not fixed. And indeed individualist and
egalitarian approaches to accountability and transparency seem to have
been much in evidence in ideas about good governance in recent decades,
with the rise of the ‘Chicago theory of government’ in the 1980s, and what
the late Aaron Wildavsky and Brendan Swedlow (1991) saw as a general
move towards greater stress on egalitarian attitudes and beliefs in western
countries over the recent past. But those different worldviews suggest
different and even contradictory views about how accountability and
transparency should properly be conceived and how they relate to one
another.
While the main value of this analysis is to bring out multiple frames in
which we can understand accountability and transparency, this approach
also suggests at least some partial answers to the question raised at the
outset as to whether the relationship between accountability and transpar-
ency is better conceived as that of Siamese twins, matching parts or
awkward couple. As Figure 1 indicates, the answer may look different from
the perspective of different worldviews. As suggested earlier, from a fatalist
perspective all three relationships seem likely to be possible, in unpredictable
ways, whereas accountability and transparency are so hard to distinguish
from an egalitarian perspective that they almost seem like Siamese twins,
and hierarchism and individualism both seem to lend themselves to a
matching parts perspective, with a restrictive approach to accountability
linked to a restrictive approach to transparency. So as long as we stay within
hierarchist or individualist wordviews, the notion of matching parts seems
plausible and that perhaps explains how much of the received reform
literature on governance, albeit implicitly, treats their relationship in that
way.
But the matching parts vision of the hierarchist worldview is not the same
as that of the individualist worldview, and from the perspective of other
worldviews the matching parts view is harder to sustain. Moreover,
‘awkward couple’ relationships between transparency and accountability
seem highly likely to arise when we cross the boundaries between those ways
of life, and mix one worldview’s approach to accountability with another
worldview’s approach to transparency, because such combinations will not
readily produce a coherent approach to governance. For instance, efforts to
combine business-derived views of corporate accountability with general
presumptions of openness in administrative operations – both of which have
featured strongly in ideas about public sector reform in the past two
decades – represent precisely such an ‘awkward couple’ marriage of very

different worldviews. For the theorists of so-called ‘clumsy institutions’ that
combine different cultural types (Verweij and Thompson 2006), that may be
a recipe for creative accommodations and institutional innovation; but it
can also produce all of a hybrid’s failings.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Connex Thematic
Conference on Accountability in June 2007 and at the Connex workshop on
Accountability in April 2008, at the European University Institute,

Florence. I am very grateful to those who commented on it on both
occasions, especially to Yannis Papadopoulos and an anonymous reviewer.
Notes
1. That is, all data for the 163 countries in TI’s 2006 Corruption Perception Index can be
retrieved from TI’s website in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, but that is the aggregate
data, not the raw data, because some of TI’s sources do not allow disclosure of the data they
contribute (see http://www.icgg.org/corruption.cpi_2006.html and http://www.transparen-
cy.org/surveys/index.html#cpi).
2. Using an optical analogy, Mars (1982: 38) suggests that ‘It is always possible . . . to slip a
more powerful . . . lens into any quadrant by . . . dividing it into a further 2 6 2 matrix and
to continue to do so until the analysis applies at the level of the individual’.
3. See Thompson et al. (1990: 4, 86). The reference is to Ashby’s (1956) famous law of ‘requisite
variety’ in cybernetic theory (namely that variety can only be controlled by systems that
match the informational variety of the object of control), which is extended by cultural
theorists to argue that all four worldviews are needed to produce viable societies and
institutions.
4. Act 4, scene 6.
5. In earlier work (Hood 1998: 64) I have called this approach ‘chancism’ to contrast with
‘bossism’, ‘groupism’ and ‘choicism’ as advocated by the other three cultural theory
worldviews.
6. As in the well-known gaming machine view of the policy world as presented by Kingdon
(1984) or the earlier and equally well-known ‘garbage can model’ of organisational decision-
making developed by Cohen et al. (1972).
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Correspondence Address: christopher.hood@politics.ox.ac.uk

ISSN 0140-2382 Print/1743-9655 Online ª 2010 Taylor & Francis

about the activities of executive government to be able to feed their views

often held to be the model for transparency in government. Features such

Three Ways of Developing the Analysis

whether transparency applies to speciﬁc instances of report or decision –

tables and a consequently huge selection problem. The alternative, factor

sociologist Émile Durkheim (1954 [1912]) wrote of elementary forms of

Cultural theory starts by assuming that culture is a system of persons

worldviews are in continuous tension with one another, as cultural theorists

Durkheimian categories can in turn be successively reﬁned by adding further

process of successive reﬁnement and adaptation to criticism. But at the same

Four Ways of Viewing Transparency and Accountability: Hierachist,

Transparency and Accountability from a Hierarchist Perspective

interactions are governed by intricate rules and the individual is dominated

through established ecclesiastical authority. And that accountability will be

where it aids anti-system forces against the authorities or undermines

relationship if the ‘wrong kind of transparency’ (Prat 2005) is chosen.

Transparency and Accountability from an Egalitarian Perspective

Information in an egalitarian worldview cannot be expected to be limited

for public oﬃceholders to make it impossible for them to go about their

Transparency and Accountability from an Individualist Perspective

often claimed to have been in the ascendancy in many Western societies in

whatever authority such processes invoke. So if individualists have a

state. The sort of transparency that is likely to be most favoured from an

way of underpinning accountability from an individualist viewpoint, but in

Transparency and Accountability from a Fatalist Perspective

accountability can provide an all-purpose formula for good governance

sentiment can shape outcomes in ways that prove to be profoundly

organisations can circumvent measures intended to promote transparency.

readily be engineered but can only be taken advantage of when a window

Summary and Conclusion

accountabilities’ issue faced by institutions and oﬃceholders in the modern

decades – represent precisely such an ‘awkward couple’ marriage of very

Accountability in April 2008, at the European University Institute,

Douglas, Mary (1987). How Institutions Think. London: Routledge.

Spinoza, Benedict de (1951 [1670]). A Theologico-Political Treatise and a Political Treatise,

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