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Davies responds to discussion on accountability from Issue 8 by highlighting questions facing media practitioners.

Davies responds to discussion on accountability from Issue 8 by highlighting questions facing media practitioners.

Accountability is critical in international policing. In order to be able to carry out its policing mandates, the UN needs to have competent and disciplined police officers subject to the rule of law. The UN has undertaken a host of measures to enhance accountability post reports of sexual exploitation and abuse in West African refugee camps in 2003. While prevention of misconduct is key, significant deficiencies remain in the legal framework for the accountability of UN police serving in post conflict countries. The UN needs to continue its work with Member States to close legal loopholes and ensure the accountability of its police so as to strengthen its ability to carry out its policing mandates. Further, the responsibility of the Organization may be incurred in respect of the acts and omissions of its police personnel.

In contemporary public governance, leaders of public organizations are faced with multiple, and oftentimes conflictual, accountability claims. Drawing upon a survey of CEO's of agencies in seven countries, we explore whether and how conflictual accountability regimes relate to strategic behaviors by agency-CEO's and their political principals. The presence of conflictual accountability is experienced as a major challenge and is associated with important behavioral responses by those CEO's. This article demonstrates empirically how conflictual accountability is related to (a) controlling behaviors by principals, (b) constituency building behaviors by agencies, and (c) a general pattern of intensified contacts and information processing by both parties.

Most theoretical studies of coalition politics have focused on, selection, rather than accountability: Coalition partners are selected according to the proximity of their positions in a Euclidean policy space. This proximity, together with institutional attributes of the party systems or the coalitions, serves also to explain, the duration of the coalition. Empirical studies of retrospective voting, often with little connection to accountability theory, have generally concluded that the political survival of coalitions is, considerably independent from elections. Such results, however, refer to governments as a whole. In this work, voters allocate rewards and punishments for past outcomes focusing on the prime ministers and their parties. If differences in clarity of responsibility exist, they do not seem to produce greater economic accountability of single-party governments-it is similarly limited under both coalition and single-party governments. Coalitions, however, increase the risks of losing office due to political crises, rather than elections. Prime ministers can respond to challenges by reshuffling the government or the coalition. Because such crises are launched under economic conditions that improve the welfare of citizens, coalitions may undermine democratic accountability. Adapted from the source document.

World politics has never been a democratic realm. Now, with interdependence and globalization prompting demands for global governance, the lack of global democracy has become an important public issue. Yet the domestic analogy is unhelpful since the conditions for electoral democracy, much less participatory democracy, do not exist on a global level. Rather than abandoning democratic principles, we should rethink our ambitions. First, we should emphasize, in our normative as well as our positive work, the role played by information in facilitating international cooperation and democratic discourse. Second, we should define feasible objectives such as limiting potential abuses of power, rather than aspiring to participatory democracy and then despairing of its impossibility. Third, we should focus as much on the powerful entities that are the core of the problem, including multinational firms and states, as on multilateral organizations, which often are the focus of criticism. Finally, we need to think about how to design a pluralistic accountability system for world politics that relies on a variety of types of accountability: supervisory, fiscal, legal, market, peer and reputational. A challenge for contemporary political science is to design such a system, which could promote both democratic values and effective international cooperation.

1. Introduction : rethinking presidential power -- 2. Incoherent presidential accountability -- 3. The unconscious presidential accountability system -- 4. Presidential wars of choice -- 5. Bringing the PAS to life : the presidential accountability project -- 6. Prospective accountability for wars of choice : policy trials.

AbstractAccountability is said to be about the management of expectations. Empirical studies reveal considerable variation in organizational interest, intensity, and investment in accountability relationships. Less is known, however, about what explains these observed variations. Drawing on accountability and reputation‐concerned literatures, this article argues that a reputation‐based perspective on accountability offers an underlying logic that explains how account‐giving actors and account‐holding forums actually manage these expectations and how organizations make sense of and prioritize among accountability responsibilities. Reputational considerations act as a filtering mechanism of external demands and help account for variations in degrees of interest in, and intensity of, accountability. The resulting accountability outcomes are coproduced by the reputational investment of both account‐giver and account‐holder, resulting in distinct accountability constellations and outcomes.