An IAD perspective on administrative accountability

Accountability is the control side in a relationship of delegation. Its devices elicit information from the agents to prove that they meet key values and legitimate concerns. Expected to yield effective and democratic policies, it can spoil them instead — and the debate is still open on which facets exactly matter. The Institutional Analysis and Development framework suggests that convincing reasons lie in the institutional design. To it, institutions are effective as enforced instructions that restrain the players’ strategies in an action situation — and their power varies with the contents and the completeness of their syntax. Following the framework, the article locates the critical juncture of accountability in the administrative sphere, and the roots of the dilemma in the distrust that accountability designs entail when they conceive the bureaucracy as an agent instead than as a trustee. Finally, it applies the Institutional Grammar Tool to the procedures that can mark the difference between the agent’s and the trustee’s design, in the prospect of empirical adjudication.