The DOI matches its Crossref record; 48 of the 48 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
What happens when transparency meets blame-avoidance?
Abstract
This article explores what happens when the much-discussed doctrine of transparency as a key to good governance meets the widely observed behavioural tendency of blame-avoidance in politics and public administration. It begins by discussing transparency as an idea and distinguishing different strains of the doctrine, proceeds to discuss blame-avoidance and to identify three common types of blame-avoidance strategy, and then explores what can happen when a widely advocated governance doctrine meets a commonly observed type of behaviour. The article identifies ways in which that conjunction can produce nil effects, side-effects and reverse-effects in the pursuit of transparency. It concludes that the tension between the pursuit of transparency and the avoidance of blame is at the heart of some commonly observed problems in public management, and suggests that something other than the ‘bureaucratic’ strain of transparency may be called for when those problems are serious.
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Cites
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Rozin, P., & Royzman, E. B. (2001) · Personality and Social Psychology Review · doi:10.1207/s15327957pspr0504_2 · Cited by 4,342
The Audit Society: Rituals of VerificationPreprint
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The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification
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The Politics of Blame Avoidance
Weaver, R. K. (1986) · Journal of Public Policy · doi:10.1017/s0143814x00004219 · Cited by 2,145
Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research
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The Politics of the Budgetary Process
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Cited by
Coping During Public Service Delivery: A Conceptualization and Systematic Review of the Literature
Tummers, L. L. G., Bekkers, V., Vink, E., & Musheno, M. (2015) · Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory · doi:10.1093/jopart/muu056 · Cited by 756
The lessons of failure: learning and blame avoidance in public policy-making
Howlett, M. (2012) · International Political Science Review · doi:10.1177/0192512112453603 · Cited by 331
de Fine Licht, K., & de Fine Licht, J. (2020) · AI & SOCIETY · doi:10.1007/s00146-020-00960-w · Cited by 334
“Decision-makers and professionals might also become more interested in avoiding blame than in finding optimal solutions (Hood 2007), meaning that the open discussion may become shallow (Chambers 2004, 2005) and fail to produce the best possible outcomes.”
BackgroundBattaglio, R. P., Belardinelli, P., Bellé, N., & Cantarelli, P. (2019) · Public Administration Review · doi:10.1111/puar.12994 · Cited by 312
Government Openness and Public Trust: The Mediating Role of Democratic Capacity
Schmidthuber, L., Ingrams, A., & Hilgers, D. (2021) · Public Administration Review · doi:10.1111/puar.13298 · Cited by 180
Metadata
- Authors
- Hood, C.
- Venue
- Public Management Review
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2007-06
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 191-210
- ISSN
- 1461-667X (ISSN-L)
- 1471-9037
- 1471-9045
- OpenAlex
- W2121004042
- Cited by
- 573
- References
- 48
- FWCI
- 10.01
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
