icegov2012 proceedings

available indexes and factors of eGovernment and accountability
of the last five years.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
“Accountability is a fundamental but underdeveloped concept
[...]” [10]. It comes through a sense of moral responsibility at both
the supply (i.e. the government) and demand (i.e. the citizens)
ends. According to Smith et al. [4], responsibility is a concept that
emerges in a social relationship in the causes of actions and
events, which in turns depends on the person’s knowledge,
capacity, ability to act appropriately as well as access to the
appropriate resources. In addition to human values and qualities,
discretion is an inseparable element of accountability that
ultimately decides whether a particular action from an agent will
be exposed or not in a given situation [4]. Accountability in public
administration is varied depending on the functional spaces and
nature of relationships among the internal as well as the external
stakeholders. Romzek and Dubnick [10] describe four alternative
systems of public administration (Figure 1), each of which is
based on two critical factors – sources of agency control and
degree of control over agency actions.
Figure 1. Types of Accountability Systems [10]
Among these alternatives (Figure 1), bureaucratic accountability
systems are widely used mechanisms that depend on the
organized and legitimate relationship between a superior and a
subordinate as well as close supervision on a stated administrative
rules and regulations. Legal accountability, which is closely
related to bureaucratic accountability, is associated with frequent
application of control to the administrative activities. Such a
controlling application is depended on the relationships between
the internal and external agencies, where external agency is
considered as the ‘lawmaker’ and the internal agency (i.e. the
public administrator) as the ‘executor’. Professional
accountability involves an obligated responsibility of sincerely
meeting the expected performance by the assigned employee with
the expertise or special skills. Finally, political accountability is
related to the democratic pressure that mainly concerns about the
representation of the public administrator to certain
constituencies, such as general public, elected officials, clients
and heads of the agencies, special interests groups and future
generations. Romzek and Dubnick argue that political
accountability is seen on ethical dimension as such systems may
promote favoritism and even corruption in the public
administration. They further state that “the urge for political
accountability, for example, is reflected in open meeting laws,
freedom of information acts, and ‘government in the sunshine’
statutes passed by many states and local governments [in the
US].” [10]
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Within the systems [10], the processes of accountability can be
evident in three stages – (i) the information provision stage, (ii)
the debating stage, and (iii) the judgment stage. The validity of
information is enquired in the information provision stage, while
it subsequently goes to debating stage for appropriateness of
actions followed by rewarding or sanctioning of the taken actions
in the judgment stage [4]. In this case, ICTs based
communication has potential role over the information provision
stage as such communication and data processing facilities can
make the information easily accessible to wide audience. This
explains that eGovernment is an essential enabler for enhancing or
improving administrative integrity, transparency and
accountability on an ethical dimension. However, there are some
arguments that contradict the positive views on eGovernment in
relation to accountability [8][9][11][12]. According to Kraemer
and Dedrick [11], “In general, computing [in organizations] tends
to reinforce existing tendencies, and by itself is not likely to affect
organizational structure in significant ways”. In this regard, Wong
and Welch [8] argue that the relationship between eGovernment
and accountability is a conditional one as change in the
accountability level depends on the context and characteristics of
the public administration or the kind of bureaucracy.
3. METHOD
This study relies on the arguments on accountabilities in relation
to ICTs available through on-line reports and research papers. In
order to determine the relationship between accountability and
eGovernment, three kinds of indexes are used, these are – UN
global eGovernment indexes, Global Integrity indicators and
EIU’s index of global democracy. There are so far no explicit
indicators that would explain a comparative accountability status
of a country. The 2010 Global Integrity indicators (GII) [13]
scorecard assesses the existence, effectiveness, and citizen access
to key governance and anti-corruption mechanisms through more
than 300 actionable indicators, including some indicators related
to country level accountability. The indicators, which are
associated with the major issues of accountability, are fairly
related to the accountability systems as discussed by Romzek and
Dubnick [10] in the literature study as above. For example,
bureaucratic systems can be related to the third category of GII
(i.e. Government Conflicts of Interest Safeguards & Checks and
Balances), while legal and professional systems can be fitted to
the sixth category of GII (i.e Anti-Corruption Legal Framework,
Judicial Impartiality, and Law Enforcement Professionalism).
‘Public requests for government information’ is one of the
indicators of GII that is close linked to the political accountability
systems. As for an indicative comparison, a table (Appendix 2
available at http://tinyurl.com/cp8ua6m) has been formulated that
shows various performance indications during the period between
2005 and 2010. The list of countries (40 in this study), as shown
in the table, are chosen based on availability of Integrity data of
the last three surveys covering 2006 to 2010 conducted by the
Global Integrity [13].
4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The integrity indicator is closely associated with accountability
systems of the respective countries. Accountability performance
in an environment of transformative governance cannot only be
understood by the various parameters of Integrity [13], but also by
the structure of bureaucracy which can also be well perceived by
the characteristics of a regime, such as full or flawed democracy,