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West European Politics

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Positioning Accountability in
European Governance: An
Introduction
Deirdre Curtin , Peter Mair & Yannis Papadopoulos
Published online: 10 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Deirdre Curtin , Peter Mair & Yannis Papadopoulos (2010) Positioning
Accountability in European Governance: An Introduction, West European Politics, 33:5,
929-945, DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2010.485862

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 West European Politics,
Vol. 33, No. 5, 929–945, September 2010

Positioning Accountability in
European Governance: An
Introduction
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DEIRDRE CURTIN, PETER MAIR and YANNIS PAPADOPOULOS

The special issue of which this paper forms the introduction takes as its central focus one
particular aspect of democratic governance: accountability. It attempts to position a broad
understanding of the notion of accountability within the overall context of the evolving
political system of governance in Europe and in particular of the European Union. With
accountability at the centre, we consider its relationship to a fairly wide range of other
themes in any given political system. This introduction first looks to the concept of
accountability as it stands alongside and within other major themes of contemporary
political systems. The issue of accountability beyond the national democratic state is then
considered, and in particular within what Sbragia has termed the ‘ecology’ of governance.
The introduction concludes with summaries of the papers included in the special issue.

This special issue takes as its central focus one particular aspect of democratic
governance: accountability. It attempts to position a broad understanding of
the notion of accountability within the overall context of the evolving political
system of governance in Europe and in particular of the European Union.
With accountability at the centre, we consider its relationship to a fairly wide
range of other themes in any given political system.
In this brief introductory essay, we first look to the concept of accountability
as it stands alongside and within other major themes of contemporary political
systems. We then consider the issue of accountability beyond the national
democratic state, and in particular within what Sbragia (2008) has aptly
termed the ‘ecology’ of governance, that is, the context in which the various
meta-norms and organising principles come to be applied. We conclude this
introductory essay with summaries of the papers included in the special issue.

Accountability: From ‘Buzzword’ to Operating Principle

Accountability is one of those golden concepts that are relatively
uncontested in the sense that there is intuitive agreement that public
Correspondence Address: d.m.curtin@uva.nl; peter.mair@eui.eu; ioannis.papadopoulos@unil.ch

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

DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2010.485862
 930 D. Curtin et al.

institutions or authorities should render public account for the use of their
mandates and for the manner in which they use public resources. Moreover,
the term ‘accountable’ is increasingly used in political discourse and policy
documents as a means of underlining an image of transparency and
trustworthiness. In good governance terms, it is regarded as an undisputed
virtue (Bovens 2010), and in the last two decades, as Onora O’Neill (2002)
put it, the quest for greater accountability ‘has penetrated all our lives, like
great draughts of Heineken, reaching parts that supposedly less developed
forms of accountability did not reach’. However, it is also a very elusive
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concept, meaning very different things to different people and to different

audiences. In this sense, as Bovens (2005: 184) has suggested elsewhere, it is
a vague concept, ‘a garbage can filled with good intentions, loosely defined
concepts and vague images of good governance’, the very elasticity of which
constitutes both a challenge and a pitfall (see also Lindberg 2009).
Accountability is a broad and rather stretched concept that reflects a
range of understandings rather than a single core paradigm. In democratic
polities, it also appears intimately related to electoral representation,
reflecting a looped relationship between authorisation of parties and their
governments through ex-ante mandates, on the one hand, and, on the other,
the evaluation of their performance in office through ex-post controls
(Andeweg 2003), with the ultimate sanction being the capacity to ‘throw the
rascals out’. In reality these links have become more complex. In the first
place, it is now increasingly difficult for voters to authorise parties, or for
parties to act as authorised agents. This is partly to do with the general
problems of representation in the modern polity, about which Manin (1997)
and Andeweg (2003), among others, have written insightfully. As societies
and hence electorates fragment, and as their major components lose
ideological cohesion and coherence, the issues on which parties might
mobilise support become narrower and less capable of being aggregated.
The result is the promotion of a party policy in election programmes that is
often less a mandate for action and more a symbolic signalling of priorities
and core concerns. In this context the party assumes the role of ‘trustee’
rather than ‘delegate’, and is voted on more in hope than expectation. In
addition, the complexity of modern governance systems often makes the
accountability of elected officials fictitious: they are considered responsible
for events beyond their control and they can evade accountability for some
of their undertakings (Papadopoulos 2003).
The problem is also to do with the parties themselves, which have become
so embedded within the institutions of the democratic polity, and which
have become so caught up with their role as administrators or governors,
that they are no longer so capable of listening to voters and acting on their
behalf. In other words, parties find themselves with much less room and
capacity to acts as representatives, and representation – and hence also
authorisation – tends thereby to migrate away from the electoral channel,
and to find expression through the agency of interest groups, advocacy
 Introduction 931

coalitions, lobbyists, and the media. In this sense, and to adopt Ulrich
Beck’s (1992) familiar expression, representation moves from being part of
politics with a big ‘P’ to being part of politics with a small ‘p’ (for a more
extensive discussion of these issues, see Mair 2008, 2009).
All of this involves a re-equilibration of voter–party links, with a steady
downplaying of pre-electoral mandates and a growing emphasis on post-
electoral controls. This is also why the notion of accountability now begins
to figure so strongly in discussions of electoral politics and representative
government. If voters can no longer authorise parties in advance in terms of
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their programmatic preferences and commitments, and if the parties

themselves are no longer susceptible to this type of authorisation, then
retrospective accountability becomes the most important linkage mechan-
ism. Parties, and their governments, are elected with the promise of serving
as good governors rather than as partisans, and hence are judged on how
well they have performed when their term of office concludes. This is
precisely the form of relationship which is invoked by the notion of
accountability, with the government seeking to explain or justify its actions,
in retrospect, to the citizens, and doing so in the hope of gaining the reward
of re-election and avoiding the sanction of dismissal. In sum, accountability
in electoral politics looms much larger in situations in which citizens find it
difficult to authorise parties beforehand, and in which parties find it difficult
to be so authorised (see also Müller and Mayer 2010).
One consequence of this re-equilibration is the growing trend towards
bipolarism in modern European party systems. Bipolarism refers here to the
tendency for parties in multiparty systems to group together to offer
alternative governments and pre-electoral coalitions, thus offering voters the
opportunity to choose between alternative teams of leaders even within the
context of fragmented multiparty politics. Italy is the most obvious
example of such a transformation, but a tendency towards bipolarism has
also been evident in Germany, as well as in Austria and France. Moreover,
many of the new third- and fourth-wave democracies in Europe, including
Greece, Portugal and Spain, and more recently Hungary, the Czech
Republic and Poland, are also often bipolar in character, whether through
two-partism or through bipolar multipartism. Thirty years ago, bipolar
systems were relatively rare; today, they are emerging as one of Europe’s
dominant forms of party system. But it is also important to underline that in
many cases these bipolar systems are not simply two-party systems. Rather,
competition ensues between two alternating and sometimes shifting
coalitions, through which elections become decisive even within the context
of increasingly fragmented multiparty politics, and through which a
relationship of electoral accountability can be established. When parties
become less oriented towards delegated representation, they become more
inclined to present themselves to voters as governors, and to ask to be
evaluated, in retrospect, as governors. This clearly involves a more
instrumental and accountability-oriented approach to voting – judging the
 932 D. Curtin et al.

incumbents on how well they have performed, and on how well they have
managed the polity, and judging the opposition in terms of how much better
or worse they might have done had they been in office (Andeweg 2003).
In a context of widespread distrust and negative attitudes about
politicians, there are also more demands for an efficient monitoring of their
behaviour to ensure that they do not primarily care about their own interest.
Politicians’ conduct, including in their private sphere, is subject to increased
scrutiny. This is partly what Manin (1997) speaks about when he discusses
the advent of an ‘audience’ democracy. The scrutiny of politicians’ conduct
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is facilitated by the role of the media that are increasingly independent of

parties and subject to a commercial logic that makes them privilege failures
of politicians (Stoker 2006: 127–31). This probably further reinforces cynical
views and the quest for accountability. Holding governments to account has
also involved in recent years the copious use of the rhetoric of transparency
and participation by civil society groups and individual citizens. We are here
in a context of a ‘monitory’ democracy (Keane 2009) – which is not
unrelated to ‘audience’ democracy – where NGOs act as watchdogs and
often go public to name and shame the rulers about their conduct (see also
Kohler-Koch 2010).

Governance in Europe and Beyond

The description thus far of the different facets and understandings of
accountability relates above all to the context of the political systems of
nation states. But what of systems of governance beyond the nation state: at
the transnational, supranational, international or global levels of govern-
ance? The fact is that a new political order has arisen beyond the nation
state. It is transforming the previously existing Westphalian order on an
ongoing basis, albeit often invisibly. It is most developed in Europe, in
particular in the context of ongoing processes of European integration. But
we find essentially the same phenomenon at transnational, international and
even global levels of governance (see also Koenig-Archibugi 2010 and
references cited).
The new political order is dominated by executive powers who jump the
fence of their national constitutional and democratic systems and who
exercise public power over an increasing range of politically and socially
salient issues. Issues such as the influenza pandemic, climate change and
bonuses in the banking system are now largely addressed and regulated by
public power in the post-national order, exercised by governments, (prime)
ministers, civil servants as well as other national actors and policy/scientific
experts who are part of the so-called ‘disaggregated state’ (Slaughter 2004)
and who perform essentially executive and regulatory functions in and
around the European Union, and at the transnational, international and
global level (for example, the G20 and the United Nations). Alongside
national actors, their supranational and international counterparts
 Introduction 933

(Eurocrats and international civil servants) further accumulate public power

(Barnett and Finnemore 2006). The accountability chain in the IMF, for
example, is seen as very ‘tortuous’ (Sperling 2009: 42), running from
administrative staff to the executive board, then to the Board of Governors,
to the government of member states that appointed its governor, and finally
to national voters.
This development presents an important puzzle: can the ongoing and
incremental accumulation of these various ‘executive orders’ (Curtin and
Egeberg 2008) take place without being matched by accountability
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mechanisms similar to those that exist at the level of national political

and constitutional systems? The European Union presents in this context a
salient example of the exercise of public power by both political and
administrative executives that works to a large extent beyond the reach of
national accountability mechanisms. At the same time the institutional
specificity and sophistication of the EU means that it is at the cutting edge in
terms of developing accountability mechanisms of various kinds at the
supranational level of governance.

The Ecology of EU Governance

The EU as we know it is not an ‘ordinary’ international organisation. Yet it
operates on the international plane and conducts its own external relations
with both third states and other international organisations and actors. At
the same time, the EU has its own internal and autonomous – and well
developed – legal system, as well as its own evolving political system, both of
which interact in an intricate, complex and often opaque manner with the
legal and political systems of the individual member states. Nor is the EU a
conventional state, but it obviously has state-like features and functions, as
well as a mode of governance that, like those of the member states
themselves, is increasingly multi-actor, multi-functional and multi-level
(Bovens et al. 2010).
The Treaty of Lisbon, like the Constitutional Treaty before it, can be said
to make more visible than hitherto the fact that the European Union is
evolving as a matter of legal and institutional practices into a political
system in its own right. This is not the same as saying that it is evolving into
a super-state, federal or otherwise; rather, the manner in which power is
being organised and exercised is ever closer to a practice that is better
understood in terms of comparative politics than international relations.
Although this evolution has obviously being going on for quite some time
now (Hix 2005), it is important to underline that several already existing
trends have now been consolidated in the Treaty of Lisbon, including the
main legislative procedure now leading to the adoption of what are de facto
‘laws’. Moreover, while the mainstreaming of the European Parliament at
the heart of the adoption of EU legislation has been evolving for some time,
it has now reached fairly advanced proportions, even allowing for the
 934 D. Curtin et al.

variety of exceptions and ‘specific’ legislative procedures that allow the

Council of Ministers to retain the primordial role as legislator in specific
policy fields and areas (mainly defence and security policy).
Second, the Lisbon Treaty has consolidated and accentuated the fact that
at the level of the EU political system itself there is now a plural executive
power. This is composed of the Commission, the Council of Ministers and
the European Council, with the position of the latter being not only
institutionalised and linked closely to the Council of Ministers, but also
being reinforced considerably by the provision for a semi-permanent
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President. In fact all three core institutions can be analysed increasingly in

terms of the dichotomy that defines the two aspects of executive power – the
political and the administrative (Curtin 2009).
This brings us to the third aspect of the EU political system, which is the
role played at the EU level by national ministers and national civil servants
(see Geuijen et al. 2008). This also contributes to the distinctive nature of the
EU political system. Some of its key players are agents of democratic
principals (ultimately the citizens) in the national political processes but lack
a ‘European’ mandate as such. Contrary to the belief that these actors play a
democratically legitimate role in the EU political system having been elected
and mandated in national elections, the reality is closer to the notion that
these components of national executive power have become effectively
‘depoliticised’ in their operations in the European context (see also
Abromeit 2009). This is so because democratic governments are indeed
accountable to national electorates, but usually their positions on European
integration do not form a core part of the public debate in the framework of
national electoral competition: typically a case of fictitious accountability.
Another problem with respect to accountability is that decision-making at
EU level is propitious to credit-claiming and blame-avoidance strategies on
behalf of national governments (Smith 1997).
The paradox is that at the same time as national actors became
increasingly depoliticised, the Commission, which was originally conceived
as a technocratic expert-based body, has become increasingly politicised at
the EU level (Wille 2009). This has partially to do with the manner in which
the Commission has interpreted its own role and tasks in the EU context by
delegating to others its non-political and more administrative and manage-
rial tasks. But it is also a reflection of the manner in which the European
Parliament has consolidated its power and willingness to hold the
Commission to account for its actions and failings.

The Democratic Accountability Deficit

The oft-cited statement by Jacques Delors that the EU has an influence over
80 per cent of the legislation of its member states is usually qualified as a
myth. However, the EU indisputably governs, and its governance
indisputably matters. We need only note, for example, the power of the
 Introduction 935

European Commission to instruct the Dutch ING Bank to repay a very

substantial part of the loan it received as a prohibited ‘state aid’, and to
significantly restructure and slim its businesses. We might also note its
power to order Microsoft to pay almost e900 million for abusing its
dominant position in the market, a decision which is also likely to open up
otherwise restrictive practices on the part of Microsoft, and hence to have an
impact on computer users everywhere. Hence EU governance is also felt in
areas such as the environment, food labelling, health crises, police
cooperation, exchange of information, interlinked databases and much
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more, where the EU as a matter of legislation or of executive rule-making or

practice is adopting and enforcing rules and standards in a manner that
ultimately and directly affects the rights and interests of individual citizens
in the member states. Needless to add, this constitutes a hugely salient
difference with other international organisations that have less generic and
less direct impact within national legal and political systems.
Because EU governance matters, it obviously makes sense to ask about
how it is being held to account. Of course, the same applies to other
intergovernmental or transnational institutions whose governance also
matters (such as the WTO, the IMF or the World Bank – see also Koenig-
Archibugi 2010), but precisely because the EU has developed increasingly
state-like functions (van Gerven 2005), the issue of its accountability
becomes ever more salient (Gustavsson et al. 2009). Multi-level governance
has now become a familiar term that is used to capture the different layers
and interactions involved in decision-making within and beyond the level of
the nation state (Papadopoulos 2010). However, while the decision-making
layers may well be multi-level, the political and administrative actors are
often the same. In other words national ministers and national civil servants
will appear on various political stages – international, European and
national – even though they may be playing different roles in each. At the
same time, in its focus on separate ‘levels’, the multi-level approach may be
too exclusive and limiting and imply a degree of hierarchy and verticality
that may not be reflected in governance practices.
It is also the case that the more basic issue of accountability in the EU is
sometimes lost in the grander scholarly (and political) debates about how
well the broad meta-norm of ‘democracy’ relates to the Union and about the
supposed ‘deficit’ that is visible in the democratic content of the EU
decisions, actors and processes. These debates have many dimensions and
elements, but, as Abromeit (2009) has argued, one of their most striking
aspects is the lack of agreement as to what is meant by democracy in relation
to the member states or to the EU itself. In fact, there are different levels to
the so-called democratic challenge: one at the level of the EU political
system itself; a second at the level of each of the national political systems,
and a third that is engaged in the often intricate interactions between the
two. This also suggests that there is unlikely to be a single solution to
Europe’s democratic challenge that would apply at all the levels, particularly
 936 D. Curtin et al.

since national democracies are not only different from one another, but have
been affected in critically different ways by the ongoing processes of
European integration.
Openness has long been a hallmark of democratic government, of course.
It provides the basis for active citizenship and is for this reason highlighted
in pluralistic, discursive and participatory theories of democracy (e.g.
Michels 2008). The basic idea of open government is that governments
should not conduct their business secretly, behind closed doors, but rather
out in the open, thus discouraging abuses of power and corruption.
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Openness is also seen as likely to prevent a runaway bureaucracy, and

thereby to constitute one of the key elements of good governance (Addink
2005; see also Page 2010). On the other hand, openness is traditionally not
much of an issue in the international relations field, where a diplomatic
ethos and secrecy go hand in hand, even in the context of many
intergovernmental organisations (Roberts 2004). That said, in recent years
there has been an effort in some international organisations and institutions,
such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund,
or the World Bank, to confront a crisis of legitimacy by promising more
transparency and openness of information held by intergovernmental
organisations.
The European Union is at the cutting edge in this development due to its
nature as a supranational organisation and the perception that it is an
evolving political system (as well as autonomous legal system in its own
right). Given the wide-ranging nature of its legislative and executive powers
(Curtin 2009), unprecedented in any other international organisation, the
issue of openness is particularly salient in the EU context. However, the fact
that openness is highly valued in political theory does not necessarily mean
that it can be taken for granted in political practice, and here both its level
and character have always been subject to political contestation (Hood
2010). Even the publication of laws, a crucial precondition for a Rechtstaat,
has not always been regarded as an obvious element of government. Access
to meetings of parliamentary representatives has increased over time and
modern mass media are now used to broadcast these meetings. Nevertheless,
meetings of the executive (government ministers) generally still take place
behind closed doors and in the EU the minutes of the Council of Ministers
are only made publicly available in a very summary fashion.
The debate about openness and transparency in the European Union,
however, has so far been largely of a normative and legal nature and the
assumptions underlying this debate have not yet been tested through
empirical research (Curtin and Meijer 2006). Does transparency make the
European Union more democratic in practice, and if so, by what
mechanisms? This is particularly crucial for arguments in which transpar-
ency rather than democracy as such is seen as a possible cure to the
European Union’s legitimacy problems. Indeed, the concept of ‘open’
government as a hallmark of democratic government is seen to compensate
 Introduction 937

for the fact that certain EU executive actors (and in particular the
Commission) do not themselves benefit from direct or democratic
authorisation or accountability. Democratic accountability in the EU, in
fact, is limited, and the accountability deficit is thereby a major component
of the wider and more familiar ‘democratic deficit’ (see Follesdal and Hix
2006: 534–7; Magnette 2003; Papadopoulos 2005). On the other hand, an
approach to a better system of accountability that could be based mainly on
the shadow of the replacement of governors is precluded by the dispersion of
power in the EU (Lord 2004: 195).
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But is openness the remedy? Accountable government cannot be simply

reduced to open government.1 Certainly, openness of governmental practice
is a necessary condition for accountability, such that what governments do,
and how they operate, should be visible to the public. But it is not a
sufficient condition, for accountability also requires a process of politicisa-
tion of what governing bodies do (and do not do). It is only then that the
public that is expected to hold governing bodies accountable can become
aware of the most crucial issues of governance. The problem here is a lack of
‘politics’: that is, as Vivien Schmidt (2006) puts it, we have ‘policy without
politics’ at the level of the EU, in that we have a decision-making system
that is weakly responsive in terms of elections, parties and the conventional
procedures of popular democracy. This clearly leads to an accountability
deficit. At the same time the EU is institutionally part of the
national political systems of the member states, and it is there that we
find the conditions for electoral and party democracy. However here, as
Schmidt also puts it, we are left with ‘politics without policy’. This also
implies a deficit of democratic accountability, but this time, and increasingly
so, at the level of the nation state, with this latter development being
fostered by both Europeanisation and, at a more general level, denationa-
lisation.
There is evidence of some contrary trends, however. Several decades ago
Philippe Schmitter (1969) identified as an initial core element of politicisa-
tion the increased controversiality of decisions, which he correctly expected
to lead to a widening of the interested publics. This is now clearly the case
with the issue of European integration. There is greater public awareness of
the consequences of integration for the lives of ordinary citizens, and there is
greater popular willingness to challenge the integration projects. Moreover,
popular and elite estimates of the benefits of integration strongly diverge,
and this is all the more noticeable as supranational competences have
steadily expanded (Majone 2009). It is in this sense that issues related to
European integration are increasingly politicised. What is still constitutive
of an ‘accountability deficit’ in this regard, however, is the lack of an explicit
and effective mechanism of sanctions if and whenever people are dissatisfied.
As an ‘account-holder’ the European Parliament has been able to strengthen
its role, and the Bulgarian candidate for the seat of her country in the
Commission was recently obliged to withdraw following criticism from the
 938 D. Curtin et al.

EP. But neither members of the Commission, nor members of the Council,
not even members of the EP are truly accountable to national electorates for
what they do in Brussels or Strasbourg. At most, as Sara Hobolt and her
colleagues (2009) show, disaffection from the EU translates into a vote
against the incumbent government, but even that is indirect and difficult for
political leaders to interpret.
At the same time, in the EU too we find evidence of the evolution towards
a sort of ‘monitory’ democracy (Kohler-Koch 2010). Authorities cannot
ignore popular reactions in referenda or pressure from ‘civil society’ and
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advocacy groups. Not only do they have to introduce more transparency

and openness, but they also must increase the answerability and respon-
siveness of the governance process in order to preserve their legitimacy. The
question is if ‘advocacy’ democracy (Cain et al. 2003) – where accountability
is primarily targeted to organised forms of (transnational) civil society – is a
satisfactory functional equivalent to the lack of accountability through
electoral mechanisms, or to the lack of effectiveness of this kind of
accountability, as in the case of European integration. Indeed, and even
outside the EU, this is a more general problem for the accountability of all
forms of governance that operate beyond the nation state.

A Disaggregated and Operational Definition of Accountability

There has been much discussion in recent years on the relative merits of
various proposals to institutionalise accountability in the complex, multi-
level web of European governance structures (e.g. Arnull and Wincott 2002;
Curtin 2004; Fisher 2004; Harlow 2002). Definitions of accountability
initially varied widely, but some empirical focus has lately proved possible
through the use of a rather ‘thin’ definition of accountability which sees it
simply as a social relationship between an actor and a forum (Bovens 2007,
2010). This is an admittedly limited understanding, but it offers an excellent
angle from which to link actors and accountability forums of all types, be
they legal, political, financial or administrative, and irrespective of the
broader constitutional design within which they are framed.
This also means that, with various steps and links, it becomes possible to
operationalise accountability in very specific institutional and non-institu-
tional contexts and to study empirically the practices of accountability with
regard to many different kinds of forums (courts, parliaments, auditors,
ombudsmen, etc.). This is the advantage in the short and medium term. In
this manner it is possible to explore, to a greater or lesser extent, the nature
of existing accountability deficits, even if this allows nothing substantial to
be concluded about wider aspects of accountability and about those
elements that concern the political system as a whole (Bovens et al. 2010). In
the longer term, however, we still need to explore the links between this
narrower conceptualisation of accountability and the other core themes of
any political system, including its relationship to democratic representation.
 Introduction 939

The very fact that at the heart of the constitutional system there is lack of
agreement on what Wiener (2007) terms the meta-norm of ‘democracy’, as
well as on its relationship to other meta-norms in the political system such as
‘representation’ or ‘legitimacy’, is itself hugely problematic. It is not only the
problem that different disciplines have different approaches and perspec-
tives, but it is also the sheer contestedness of concepts that are drawn from
the constitutional state and then applied to different and possibly non-state
levels of governance. Even those who suggest that the democratic deficit is a
myth, agree that one of the key indicators for the democratic quality of the
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EU is the extent to which both the European and national actors who
populate EU institutions can be – and are – held to account by democratic
forums (Bovens et al. 2010; Gustavsson et al. 2009).

Configuration of this Special Issue

This special issue is intended precisely to discuss the ‘organising principle’ of
accountability in relation to a number of the other core themes that are
relevant in any political system and at any level of governance – be it
national, transnational or supranational. In this way, we hope to contribute
to the existing literature and to increase the understanding of how to view
the concept of accountability in a more nuanced and contextual fashion.
This special issue opens with a conceptual paper by Mark Bovens, who
has been one of the main contributors to the recent academic debates on
accountability. As Bovens points out, this literature is often confusing, in
that various different concepts of accountability are used interchangeably.
The concept in this way becomes both confused and stretched. Bovens seeks
here to distinguish between two main concepts of accountability: account-
ability as a virtue and accountability as a mechanism. In the first case, the
concept of accountability is primarily normative, and is developed as a set of
standards for the evaluation of the behaviour of public actors. Being
accountable is then seen as a positive attribute of organisations or officials,
and accountability studies often take a normative position when assessing
the actual and active behaviour of public agents. In the second case, the use
of accountability is narrower and more descriptive. The term refers to an
institutional relation or to an arrangement in which an actor can be held to
account by a forum. In this case, the focus is not the behaviour of public
agents, but the way in which these institutional arrangements operate.
Bovens argues that distinguishing more clearly between these two concepts
of accountability resolves at least some of the current conceptual confusion
and can provide a foundation for comparative and cumulative analysis.
Christopher Lord and Johannes Pollak are concerned with the tensions
between representation and accountability in modern democracy. As they
suggest, different varied ways of combining representation with account-
ability can lead to significant differences in the practice and quality of
democracy. Lord and Pollak review these effects by looking at the British
 940 D. Curtin et al.

and American traditions of representative government and by trying to

bring greater conceptual order to the understanding of the relationship
between representation and accountability. They argue that both are
‘unsaturated’ concepts, whose relationship one to another can only be
properly understood through several stages of specification. These include
the specification of what kind of representation is thought desirable, of the
major choices that need to be made in the design of any democratic polity,
and of the social and international contexts. This last aspect is central to the
understanding of representation–accountability relationships in the EU.
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Lord and Pollak go on to argue that the relationship between representation

and accountability is subject to contrary effects that come together with
special force in settings beyond the state. Although new possibilities are
being opened up by a ‘governance revolution’, this leaves untouched, and
possibly even aggravates, two difficulties that have long afflicted attempts to
combine representation with accountability: namely pluralities of values and
indivisibilities of institutional design.
The paper by Christopher Hood focuses on accountability and
transparency, and contrasts three possible ways of thinking about the
relationship between these two concepts as principles of governance. They
can be thought of as ‘Siamese twins’, which are not really distinguishable; as
‘matching parts’ that are separable but nevertheless complement
one another smoothly to produce good governance; and as an ‘awkward
couple’, involving elements that are potentially or actually in tension with
one another. Hood then goes on to look at three possible ways in which the
accuracy or plausibility of each of those three characterisations could
be established. The first is a search for true essences that would separate true
from spurious meanings. The second is to dimensionalise each of the
concepts and to explore the matrix of connections between the dimensions.
The 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. As Hood concludes, 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.
The paper by Edward Page focuses on accountability and bureaucracy,
and looks in particular at accountability mechanisms from the perspective
of the bureaucrats themselves. For this, Page employs data gathered for a
study of bureaucratic roles in rule-making in Sweden, Germany, the United
States, France, the United Kingdom and the European Union. The paper is
concerned to ask which of the mechanisms for securing public account-
ability for executive decisions do bureaucrats pay particular attention when
helping develop policy. Where are the minefields that bureaucrats feel they
have to negotiate? The most important of the minefields appears to be that
of political executive approval, which shapes the way the other mechanisms
(group opinion, the legislative and judicial branches of government) are
 Introduction 941

negotiated. As Page concludes, ‘ministerial responsibility’ and its equiva-

lents in the other countries remain crucial features of systems of
administrative accountability.
Yannis Papadopoulos deals with accountability and multi-level govern-
ance and seeks to explain why the trend towards more cooperative forms of
policy-making can have negative consequences for democratic account-
ability. His paper first explores the properties of multi-level governance that
lead to a deficit in democratic accountability – the lack of visibility, the
uncoupling from representative institutions, the composition of networks,
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and ‘multi-levelness’ itself – before coming to more general conclusions

regarding the characteristics and limits of accountability mechanisms in
multi-level governance and their consequences for democracy. In the end, as
he argues here, we may well be facing a paradox, network governance and
multi-level governance are to be characterised by more accountability, but
less democracy.
The issue of popular accountability is also taken up in the paper by
Alexander Trechsel, who looks at how the use of instruments of direct
democracy, such as referendums and popular initiatives, has become
increasingly common in modern, liberal democracies. As Trechsel notes, the
concept of democratic accountability is almost exclusively discussed in the
context of representative forms of democracy and thereby tends to neglect
the relationship between accountability and direct democracy. When the
people have the last word, and become the final decision-makers, are they to
be deemed responsible for the decision taken? And if so, to whom are the
people responsible? Both questions are answered in the affirmative: when the
people decide, the people are responsible for the decision. And they
are responsible, as the highest organ of the state, to themselves. The
accountability relationship created in such a situation departs from
the classic, vertical vision and is best described as a form of ‘reflexive
accountability’. The paper concludes by arguing that for reflexive
accountability to fully deploy, provisions for popular initiatives should
complement the set of direct democratic institutions.
Wolfgang C. Müller and Thomas M. Meyer also address the issue of
accountability and representation, looking in particular at the role of
political parties and the accountability of coalition governments. As they
argue here, parties play a double role in systems of proportional
parliamentarism. On the one hand, they make delegation and accountability
work; on the other, they add complexity to the delegation regime. Because
coalition government usually involves policy compromises, the question
arises as to how the coalition parties can ensure that the ministers stick to
the coalition deal. Employing the principal–agent framework, Müller and
Meyer show that there are several control mechanisms that can be used by
coalitions to pursue this goal. First, there are ex ante mechanisms such as
policy agreements that set the agenda for future policy decisions and
coalition screening of ministerial candidates. Second, there are ex post
 942 D. Curtin et al.

mechanisms such as strong committee systems and institutional checks like

‘watchdog’ junior ministers. They go on to show how these instruments
work and also point out that they are not without their costs.
Anchrit Wille evaluates the basic accountability system of the European
Commission and how this has changed over the last decade. New structures
and rules with a range of ex ante constraints and ex post incentives have
combined to provide a system that offers more control and accountability in
and over the Commission. Wille goes on to use two concepts of
accountability – a passive and an active one – to analyse the modernisation
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of accountability at the top of the European Commission. Drawing on

documentary evidence of politics during the Prodi and Barroso years, as
well as on interviews held with senior officials during the first Barroso
Commission, she shows how strengthened accountability mechanisms and a
shift in the dominant types of accountability characterise the executive
accountability system at the apex of the European Commission. She also
shows how the introduction of these new arrangements has created new
expectations of accountability from both the Commissioners and their
senior officials.
Beate Kohler-Koch is concerned to explore the relationship between
accountability and civil society in the EU context – a topic that has
received relatively little attention to date. As she points out, although
civil society is said to play a decisive role in holding EU authorities to
account, there has been little systematic assessment of this positive view.
Her paper clarifies the concepts of accountability and civil society and
suggests a typology of accountability relations that can be used to
explore the different roles civil society organisations may play as actors
or facilitators of EU accountability. The heuristic use of this analytical
approach is demonstrated by drawing on empirical findings from a
recently completed research project.
The final paper in this special issue is by Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, who
looks at accountability in transnational relations and asks whether there is
something inherently distinctive about accountability in transnational
spaces as compared to the more familiar instances of accountability
observed in domestic contexts. This question is prompted by some of the
recent literature, and by the increasing tendency of scholars to use the
concept of accountability to describe and assess relationships among actors
who are primarily based in different state jurisdictions, or involving actors
transcending state jurisdictions. Koenig-Archibugi’s paper examines the
distinctiveness of transnational accountability in relation to, first, its general
meaning and specific forms; second, its aims and importance; third, its
empirical existence and the relative frequency of its forms; fourth, its causes;
and fifth, its effects. He concludes that on most of these dimensions the
similarities outweigh the differences and that it would be unfruitful for
research on transnational accountability to develop separately from that on
domestic accountability.
 Introduction 943

Note
1. Indeed the European Commission in its White Paper on Governance (2001) placed
‘openness’ alongside other ‘principles of good governance’ such as accountability and
participation.

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