Summary
Contents
Subject index
The SAGE Handbook of Political Science presents a major retrospective and prospective overview of the discipline. Comprising three volumes of contributions from expert authors from around the world, the handbook aims to frame, assess and synthesize research in the field, helping to define and identify its current and future developments. It does so from a truly global and cross-area perspective. Chapters cover a broad range of aspects, from providing a general introduction to exploring important subfields within the discipline. Each chapter is designed to provide a state-of-the-art and comprehensive overview of the topic by incorporating cross-cutting global, interdisciplinary, and, where this applies, gender perspectives. The Handbook is arranged over seven core thematic sections: Part 1: Political Theory; Part 2: Methods; Part 3: Political Sociology; Part 4: Comparative Politics; Part 5: Public Policies and Administration; Part 6: International Relations; and Part 7: Major Challenges for Politics and Political Science in the 21st Century.
Political Accountability
Political Accountability
Introduction: Accountability as a Normative Desideratum and as a Relational Concept
Accountability penetrates many social spheres: children are accountable to their parents, spouses to each other, managers to shareholders, private employees to their bosses, public bureaucrats to their organisational superiors, suppliers to customers, students to teachers and researchers to funding bodies. This chapter will concentrate more narrowly on the accountability of the official public policy-makers, in other words ‘the whole personnel employed by the modern state’ (Schedler, 1999: 22) that wields power by producing collectively binding decisions. It will disregard (with a few exceptions) accountability issues involving other types of actors that participate – and are sometimes highly influential – in the policy process, such as ...
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