The DOI matches its Crossref record; 80 of the 80 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Two Concepts of Accountability: Accountability as a Virtue and as a Mechanism
Open accessAbstract
This paper distinguishes between two main concepts of accountability: accountability as a virtue and accountability as a mechanism. In the former case, accountability is used primarily as a normative concept, as a set of standards for the evaluation of the behaviour of public actors. Accountability or, more precisely, being accountable, is seen as a positive quality in organisations or officials. Hence, accountability studies often focus on normative issues, on the assessment of the actual and active behaviour of public agents. In the latter case, accountability is used in a narrower, descriptive sense. It is seen as an institutional relation or arrangement in which an actor can be held to account by a forum. Here, the locus of accountability studies is not the behaviour of public agents, but the way in which these institutional arrangements operate. The present paper argues that distinguishing more clearly between these two concepts of accountability can solve at least some of the current conceptual confusion and may provide some foundation for comparative and cumulative analysis.
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Cited by
Accountability in artificial intelligence: what it is and how it works
Novelli, C., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2024) · AI & SOCIETY · doi:10.1007/s00146-023-01635-y · Cited by 495
“From this stance, as Bovens points out, accountability: “is used as a normative concept, as a set of standards for the behavior of actors, or as a desirable state of affairs […] Accountability in this very broad sense […] comes close to ‘responsiveness’ and ‘a sense of responsibility’, a willingness to act in a transp…”
Wieringa, M. (2020) · Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency · doi:10.1145/3351095.3372833 · Cited by 321
The Reputational Basis of Public Accountability
Busuioc, E. M., & Lodge, M. (2016) · Governance · doi:10.1111/gove.12161 · Cited by 306
Mapping accountability: core concept and subtypes
Lindberg, S. I. (2013) · International Review of Administrative Sciences · doi:10.1177/0020852313477761 · Cited by 250
Buhmann, A., Paßmann, J., & Fieseler, C. (2020) · Journal of Business Ethics · doi:10.1007/s10551-019-04226-4 · Cited by 167
Metadata
- Authors
- Bovens, M.
- Venue
- West European Politics
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2010-08-10
- Volume
- 33
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 946-967
- ISSN
- 0140-2382 (ISSN-L)
- 1743-9655
- OpenAlex
- W2045518222
- Cited by
- 1,018
- References
- 80
- FWCI
- 56.10
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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