Abstract
This special issue is linked to an international research project on Reforming the Welfare State: Democracy, Accountability and Management headed by Professor Per Lægreid. The project aims to examine the ways in which reforms in three areas of the welfare state in three countries have affected accountability relations. The articles are revised versions of papers presented at a workshop at the European Studies Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, in December 2011 on ‘Researching accountability, conceptual and methodological challenges’, convened by Dr Paola Mattei.
Our main focus is on administrative reforms and to what extent they have affected accountability relations in specific sectors – hospitals, the welfare administration, and immigration – in Norway, Denmark and Germany. However, we also cover education reforms in Europe and administrative reforms in Central and Eastern Europe with respect to their impact on accountability relations. A main justification for comparing reforms in these welfare state sectors is that they cover major areas of welfare provision. The sectors display important variations in bureaucratic capacity, specialization and representation of users and citizens. It is therefore of interest to establish whether differences among sectors are more important than differences among countries.
There has been a discussion about the Scandinavian model of welfare state administration, specifically about whether it still exists or whether it is breaking up. We have chosen to address this question by comparing two Scandinavian countries with Germany and by also referring to other European countries. The analysis will provide policy-makers as well as scholars studying welfare reforms and public administration with important insights into how reforms may be designed and introduced in a way that does not undermine the political sustainability of long-established welfare state institutions. This collection of articles represents a coherent special issue on the impact of welfare state reforms in Europe in a comparative perspective for public accountability and it advances our understanding of the conceptual and methodological challenges of studying accountability empirically. The contributors include leading scholars in the field as well as early career researchers as co-authors.
Our aim is to understand how recent reforms oriented towards agencification, economization, managerialism and marketization have affected the existing accountability relationship in welfare services traditionally delivered by public institutions. There has been a growing concern that welfare states are inefficient, not sustainable and lack popular support. A series of reforms has been introduced to address this challenge, following the principle of granting autonomy to welfare institutions and responsibility to public managers. This has created confusion over to whom public welfare managers are accountable. Such reforms have also had a major impact on systems of political governance in general. Political legitimacy is a fundamental precondition for the sustainability of the welfare state. For this reason it is necessary to address how the relationship between states and citizens has been affected by recent welfare state reforms. Questions of welfare are inherently intertwined with questions of democracy (Mattei 2009), since welfare state organizations are deeply embedded in the dynamic political process of producing legitimacy and political accountability (Suleiman 2003). Thus, there is a need to reconsider the mechanisms for establishing and maintaining democratic accountability. The success of welfare systems has been due, among other things, to this strong link between democratic movements and welfare institutions. In recent reforms, however, this legacy has often been regarded as problematic.
The aim in this special issue is to move beyond the internal focus on organizational design and explore the link between welfare state organizations and democracy. The administrative and managerial dimension of the welfare state and the issue of governance and democracy should not be treated as separate questions, as they sometimes have been in scholarship on the welfare state and in recent reforms. Reforms have often single-mindedly focused on establishing managerial accountability, customer responsiveness and organizational autonomy, overlooking the critical issue of how to maintain and develop mechanisms for political accountability (Mattei 2009).
The central research question in this special issue is how recent reforms have affected the balance between organizational autonomy and political accountability in various welfare sectors and countries. Has this balance been altered in different ways in the various welfare state reforms and countries despite converging pressure to institute managerial arrangements? In what way, for what and to whom are public managers in welfare services held accountable? How have the recent decades of welfare reforms affected the democratic system of governance and how has the role of politicians in the governance of the welfare sector changed?
Accountability is a key concept in developing an understanding of the relationship between the welfare state administration and democracy. Like Mulgan (2000) and Bovens (2007) we use a rather strict definition of accountability, putting the emphasis on external scrutiny rather than on the introspective and internalized dimension. In a welfare democracy the core meaning of political accountability is the relationship between elected officials and the public and between politicians and bureaucrats. We distinguish primarily between political and managerial accountability. This classic hierarchical conceptualization of political accountability has been challenged by the increase in professional power and public expenditure, which gave professional and managerial accountability a more central role. Managerial accountability is about making those with delegated authority answerable for carrying out agreed tasks according to agreed performance criteria (Day and Klein, 1987). What distinguishes managerial accountability from political accountability is that it is legitimated as neutral and technical expertise and it has more of an internal focus.
While many reforms of the welfare state have been carried out, there is a major lack of systematic and reliable knowledge about the results and implication of these reforms, especially regarding accountability issues. In contrast to much of the existing welfare state research, which centered on distribution problems and the relationship between the public bureaucracy and the professions, the more recent focus has been on efficiency problems and how to maintain popular support for welfare services oriented towards particular groups, thus highlighting the relationship between managerial and political accountability.
Political legitimacy is a precondition for the sustainability of the welfare state, and it is for this reason that this special issue aims to address how recent welfare state reforms have affected political governance and the relationship between the state and its citizens. We ask to what extent it has been possible to combine the various modes of accountability.
The main theme of this special issue is the dynamics between accountability and administrative reforms in welfare states (Lægreid 2013). The focus is on changes in formal as well as actual accountability relations. New Public Management reforms as well as post-NPM reform initiatives have affected the balance between managerial autonomy and political accountability as well as between agency autonomy and political steering and control across welfare sectors and countries. A series of reforms granting autonomy to welfare institutions and responsibility to public managers has been introduced to address this challenge, and has hence created the confusion over to whom public welfare managers are accountable to.
Accountability is not inconsistent with administrative reforms in the welfare state. However, rather than ask whether government officials are more or less accountable after NPM reforms, one should focus on what kind of accountability the actors perceive as appropriate. The welfare state reforms have complicated the already broad notion of accountability in the public sector and have made accountability a more ambiguous and complex issue (Mulgan 2003). It is important to recognize the various dimensions of accountability, the complex context of public accountability and the multiple overlapping accountability relations of administrative reforms (Romzek 2000, Behn 2001). Rather than reducing or increasing accountability, the welfare state reforms imply a change in the mixture of different accountability relations. Although new interpretations of accountability have proliferated, older interpretations have not disappeared. The reforms have affected accountability relations, but it is difficult to make sweeping claims about changes in accountability. Managerial accountability varies from one reform program to another and across countries and there is a complex mixture of political, legal, professional, hierarchical and market accountability.
After three decades of reforms in the welfare state it is rather evident that the relationship between accountability and performance is contested in many countries and that we have to operate with a multi-dimensional accountability concept going beyond hierarchical principal-agent accountability. This is especially clear in the ambiguous and unsettled situations which often characterize reform periods (Olsen 2013). Accountability in a multi-functional welfare state means being answerable to different stakeholders in order to achieve multiple and often ambiguous objectives. Thus accountability relations tend to become shared, resulting in unclear accountability lines (Boston and Gill 2011).
We are facing compound welfare state reforms that have shifted accountability to different fora. The most recent reforms of market and management orientation and agencification have not replaced the old system of public administration but merely supplemented it and produced more complex and hybrid organizational forms. Instead of choosing between different accountability mechanisms we have to treat them as supplementary and complementary in a mixed political order that combines and blends different modes of governance (Olsen 2010). We have revealed a multiple accountability regime in which different accountability mechanisms do not substitute for one another (Schillemans 2008) and are redundant rather than segregated (Scott 2000). A new accountability regime with more complex, dynamic and layered accountability forms is emerging. A key challenge is how to handle hybrid accountability relations embedded in partly competing institutional logics. Multiple accountabilities may be appropriate solutions for an increasingly pluralistic governance system. Accountability is about managing diverse and partly conflicting expectations (Romzek and Dubnick 1987).
We have to rethink democratic accountability in ways that resonate with the new reality of modern governance systems. Just to reinstall conventional hierarchical principal agent accountability relations is problematic in the current more fluid state (Flinders 2012). We need to supplement the hierarchical principal-agent approach of delegation and vertical channels of accountability with analyses of how multiple and hybrid accountability relations interact and change over time between countries and across welfare state areas.