An IAD Perspective on Administrative Accountability Designs

The IAD framework has been mainly developed and applied to tackle with issues in production and consumption of common goods. It entails the twofold assumption that tragedies are contextual occurrences and depend on the institutional design in use; and that the working of the institutional design is decided by how the rules in use are set. The Institutional Grammar Tool complements the framework with operational guidelines about the key dimensions and properties of the rule-setting that, combined, shape the action arena and hence define the different productivity of actual institutional designs. The contribution argues that the IAD/IGT can fruitfully support the research on the institutional designs for administrative accountability, because of theoretical and empirical reasons. A IAD reading provides a stronger theoretical foundation to the relevance of accountability designs for ‘efficient’ institutions, by suggesting a connection between accountability and the generation of a special common good – trust. A definition of trust maintains that A trusts B if she believes that B’s incentive structure is such that it is in B’s interest to fulfill A’s expectations – which implies that A has reliable information on B’s preferences and intentions. In the administrative domain, rational theories understand the problems in the relationship between the political principal and the bureaucratic agent as a matter of trust and moral hazard. Accountability theory assumes that B is accountable to A when B is obliged to inform A about her actions and decisions, to justify them, and to suffer punishment in the case of eventual misconduct. Thus, accountability designs become relevant as the set of institutional constraints that provide the principal with the information required to trust the agent, while modifying the agent’s incentive structure so to align their decisions with the principal’s preferences. Moreover: the IGT allows for exploration and empirical adjudication of the institutional diversity in accountability designs. Principal-agent and delegation theories maintain opposite beliefs about the design for administrative accountability. The former prizes tight coupling and control from above; the latter assumes that the political principal may be affected by credibility problems so that higher efficiency results when the agent is properly built as a trustee – and the alignment is secured by an accountability design that exposes the trustee to the same relevant pressures experienced by the principal. The former hence prescribes that the account-holder and the principal overlap; the latter commends a distribution of the rights to be accounted to an array of enfranchised interests. IGT suggests that differences across accountability designs can be operationalized along different fine-grained dimensions of the rules that shape the administrative “action arena”, thus refining the usual analytical framework applied in accountability studies and opening to the empirical assessment of the policy productivity associated to differences in design. Main references: Hardin (1998), Majone (1996), McNollgast (1987), Ostrom (2009), Schedler (1999), Carter et al (2015).