Ministerial advisers’ accountability frameworks: different systems, common weaknesses

In recent decades, multiple scandals and controversies in which ministerial advisers played a prominent role piqued the interest of researchers across the world. Accountability frameworks emerged to delineate ministerial advisers’ roles and to put clear limits to their behaviour. However, recent scandals suggest that these frameworks are still unable to hold advisers accountable in critical moments. This paper seeks to explain the weakness of accountability frameworks and identify their common determinants. Using the Most Different Systems method, it compares the framework of accountability in the Napoleonic (France & Belgium) and Anglo-American (Australia & the United Kingdom) administrative traditions. This paper explores three hypotheses: 1) ministerial advisers’ transparency is low regarding their generalised accountability; 2) external/horizontal mechanisms of accountability lack adequate sanction/enforcement capacities; and 3) accountability frameworks do not consider the defining characteristics of ministerial advisers. The three main findings of this paper are: 1) ministerial advisers’ transparency regarding their generalised accountability is not low across all four countries. However, none of the frameworks examined allows accessing ministerial advisers’ most important information: their advisory work. This feature undermines severely their diagonal accountability. 2) Lack of sanction/enforcement capacities is sometimes part of the problem but not the main explanation of the frameworks’ weakness. 3) Across all four countries, frameworks tend to treat ministerial advisers as regular civil servants and forget to consider their core specificities. It stems from the fact that, often, they were not created for ministerial advisers but applied to them. This feature results in discrepancies between the provisions of the law and the reality of ministerial advisers’ nature. In critical moments, these loopholes allow escaping accountability.