Administrative Law and Agency Accountability

Political Control

The emergence of managerial and legal accountability is, in part, a response to the inefficacy of electoral control in the modern administrative state. Western democracies labor in the shadow of the (quasi-mystical) model of Athenian democracy. This model was reportedly one of the few times in recorded history that government was, in the ringing phrase of President Abraham Lincoln (1861–1865), “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Citizens met to legislate as a committee of the whole, official positions were allocated by vote or by lot, and officials reported to the assembly of citizens. Ten times a year, officials charged with carrying out various administrative tasks reported on the conduct of their offices. Their reports were subject to a vote of confidence, and if confidence was lacking, officials faced a trial by a jury of their fellow citizens. Officialdom was hazardous in Athens precisely because electoral accountability was efficacious.

That this direct and immediate approach to holding officials politically accountable to citizens does not describe modern governance is obvious. What is perhaps less obvious is that the conditions of modern complex societies make most versions of political control of official action difficult, if not incompetent.

This is not to say that periodic elections under conditions of open access to office and majority rule, and the political accountability of administrators to duly elected public officials, are unimportant details of modern democratic governance. They are crucial to the political definition of democratic citizenship. In addition, at its most general level, administrative law insists that agencies of government demonstrate compliance with the commands of elected officials and duly enacted statutes.

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