Dubnick, Melvin J., and Barbara S. Romzek. “Accountability and the Centrality of Expectations in American Public Administration.” Prepared for delivery at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, The Washington Hilton Hotel, August 29–September 1, 1991.
Abstract: For students of public administration, the issue of accountability cuts two ways. On the one hand, public administration poses a significant challenge to democratic systems by evading or wearing away at the many accountability mechanisms and methods which were designed to tame it. Traditional controls over American bureaucracy eroded drastically over the past six decades of the twentieth century, and recent efforts to find new devices or to resuscitate old ones have brought forward means that provided only occasional brakes on the bureaucracy. This paper develops the argument that accountability in American public administration is fundamentally about the management of expectations — that various forms of accountability emerge as responses to the multiple, diverse, and often conflicting expectations that public administrators face.
Author’s Note: This conference paper preceded the published article: Dubnick, Melvin J., and Barbara S. Romzek. “Accountability and the Centrality of Expectations in American Public Administration.” In Research in Public Administration, edited by J. L. Perry. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1993: 37–78.