Accountability, Rationality, and New Structures of Governance: Making Room for Political Rationality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This article argues that the new institutional arrangements and results- or performance-based accountability run the risk of overlooking several political realities and considerations. The new arrangements and processes represent a preference for economic rationality over bureaucratic rationality. They give little consideration to political rationality, which is concerned with collective values and power relationships. In managerial terms, it is not clear that the new arrangements will be any more durable than their numerous predecessors. The focus on performance targets has led to a decline in program evaluation. It tends to marginalize a number of ethical concerns, reduces the role and scope of citizens, and ignores the conflicts that frequently arise when clients’ interests are at odds. Performance management and results-based accountability represent a constitutional revolution, but there is little sign that Members of Parliament are interested in or able to make good use of the new management reports. Accountability, at any rate, is a word that should probably be used only for the relationship between a subordinate agency and the authority from which it obtains its mandate and resources. Accountability also implies a theory of motivation. It is worth considering the strength of motivation for executive agency leaders to conform to what their political masters want from them. Finally, a postmodern look at agency suggests that targets cannot replace attention to public-sector ethics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.039 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.078 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".