The Black Box of Bureaucracy: Interrogating Accountability in the Public Service
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bolstering accountability among civil servants has been at the centre of public governance reform efforts for well beyond the past decade. A critical gap has been the lack of empirical understanding of the actual accountability practices, especially below the deputy minister level. This article presents initial findings from a larger research study comparing Canada, Australia and the Netherlands aimed at addressing this gap. The study seeks to understand both how, and for what, individual executive, managerial and working‐level public servants are held to account. The research tests an adapted version of Aucoin and Heintzman's and Bovens, Schillemans and 't Hart's respective frameworks on the purposes of accountability. The results suggest that while there is evidence that all four normative purposes of accountability examined – democratic control, assurance, learning and results – are reflected in the actual practice of accountability, practice is wanting in some respect with regard to each of the four.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it