Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

254 Public Management and Administration
entrepreneurial management, increased discretion and worker empowerment in
daily operations, and greater responsiveness to key stakeholders and customers’
(Romzek, 1998, pp. 215–16). The traditional model offered political
accountability, even if of an indirect, unsatisfactory kind, with very poor managerial
accountability in the sense of results. Public management allows for
direct accountability to clients, greater responsiveness and transparency of
results. It may mean some diminution of political accountability, but the effect
should not be too great. Any diminution of political accountability might be
more than made up by an improvement in managerial accountability.
Accountability raises problems concerning the adoption of public management.
However, it seems unlikely that bureaucracies will go from being accountable
under the old system to being unaccountable under the new. There are many
avenues of accountability, including some on the outside such as the media and
the courts. Perhaps what is happening is the replacement of an inferior and unrealistic
form of accountability by another kind. There are possible problems of
accountability with the reform process, although whether these are greater than
in the traditional model remains to be seen. To begin with, traditional accountability
could hardly be said to work particularly well, or even at all, so that any
change in accountability may be an improvement. If managers are to be recognized
as being in charge, at least someone will be.
Conclusion
The system of accountability forms the key link between the administration of
government and the political system. Traditional methods of accountability and
responsibility were well celebrated but left much to be desired in reality. The
separation between government and its administration – the politics/administration
dichotomy – was always naive and unrealistic, as was the system of
accountability that followed from it; separating ‘politics from administration
inherently (if not consciously) obscures accountability’ (Behn, 2001, p. 115).
Political accountability in the traditional model was a complicated and vague
system that created more questions than answers. It was a well-known system in
which, in theory, ordinary citizens could bring the whole apparatus of government
to account when they come to vote. Although the precise details of political
accountability may leave much to be desired, there is no essential difference now
from the vague system of accountability, or answerability, that existed before.
When elections are held a choice may be made, at least by some voters, based on
what they thought of the government over their term. However, for the public
service, and by comparison with the private sector sense, this kind of accountability
is too sparse, too rare and too ineffective in ensuring performance.
For bureaucratic accountability, a more realistic approach is to adopt ‘accountable
management’, the idea that, in a way analogous to the private sector, public
managers are themselves accountable for their own actions and those of their