Suchergebnisse

The delivery of public services increasingly operates under hybrid accountability regimes, but we have much to learn about how these regimes interrelate. I develop a framework for systematic analysis of hybrid public, market, and professional accountability arrangements, looking at the compatibility of their content, steering mechanisms, and relationships. The analysis is informed and illustrated by empirical studies on accountability in welfare state services, which offer evidence on hybrid accountability arrangements. The article concludes by discussing the interplay between accountability regimes and the conditions in which they undermine or reinforce each other. I argue that compatibility between regimes depends on the content of accountability rather than on the accountability mechanisms, and I highlight the importance of the trust between the parties entering into accountability relations and the proximity of their institutional logics.

This study explores what happens to administrative justice and to the acceptability of frontline decisions in privatized and marketized models of service. Through the case study of privatized welfare‐to‐work in Israel, it shows the fundamental tension between outsourced discretion and traditional conceptions of administrative justice in which the trustworthiness of decisions relies on the idea that decision makers have no personal interest in the outcome of their decisions. It finds that in the Israeli case, contractors' financial interests were widely perceived as putting their professionals into a conflict of interest, thereby undermining trust in their decisions. At the same time, the study finds the program's managerial performance mechanisms did not provide an alternative legitimacy argument for the acceptability of decisions. The study also analyzes the ways policy makers reconstructed the decision‐making systems to regain public acceptance of frontline decisions, while discussing both the potential and the limits of legitimizing outsourced discretion in such complex public services.

AbstractThis article examines the regulation–participation nexus in social care services. Participatory forms of social care regulation have been expanding over the past 20 years, but the literature on this trend remains scarce. To fill this gap, we developed an analytical framework for classifying participatory regulation methods. This framework is based on two axes, one drawn from the literature on regulation (the regulatory tasks), and the other from the literature on service user participation (the levels of participation). Using this framework and combining a systematic review of the literature with a case study of the Care Quality Commission in England, we identified and classified 12 participatory methods in three main regulatory tasks (monitoring, standard setting and enforcement). Our classification shows most of the participatory methods are concentrated in monitoring tasks, less in standard setting and least of all in regulatory enforcement. It also highlights the uniqueness of the goals and logics of participation in the regulatory context and the tendency towards the instrumental aspect of information gathering rather than the political aspect of participation. The article concludes by explaining our findings and suggesting future directions in developing the research agenda on the regulatory‐participation nexus.