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AbstractBelief in evil and hidden supernatural forces, generally referred to as witchcraft, is widespread in many parts of the African continent. In addition to affecting individual health, perceived security, and social relations, witchcraft allegations may be used as covert political instruments, resulting in governance challenges such as lack of trust, transparency, administrative delegation, and political accountability. Since witchcraft is commonly associated with physiological and psychological violence, some citizens may be less willing to participate in political activities, including seeking elected office or criticizing political elites for fear of falling victim to witchcraft. The focus of our study is Malawi where large groups in the population believe in the power of witchcraft. We aim to unpack how local witchcraft beliefs have a bearing on governance – whether, and the extent to which, witchcraft influences how citizens understand and practice transparency and accountability in everyday life. Particularly, the belief in witchcraft among Malawian elites’ warrants closer scrutiny, especially since existing literature and local discourse on the impact of witchcraft tend to largely focus on rural and less educated groups in the population. As the highly secret and complex dimensions of witchcraft resist clear-cut definitions, representations, and analysis, it is not our intention to describe witchcraft in everyday life. Rather, we explore the potential political implications of not addressing elite discourses of and belief in witchcraft. We find that belief in witchcraft can influence citizens’ perceptions of power and authority and can potentially undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions and processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on African legislatures, once considered rarely autonomous, has found that some broad-scale mass movements, including pro-poor campaigns, hold legislators accountable. This article meanwhile examines the conditions under which narrow local constituency issues, shaping partisan differences, can hold relevant representatives and parties accountable while prioritizing over executive pressures and clientelist personal gains. I argue that this sort of political accountability in legislatures can be observed concerning sectoral policy interests, which, in Africa, are often geographically concentrated along ethnicity and party support lines. Drawing on a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches including interviews, news coverage reviews, and a statistical analysis of legislative debates on the 2019 Sugar Bill in Kenya, I show that the growing and collective efforts of sugar farmers to influence their local representatives and parties to support the legislation, tying them to the same electoral fate, prompt legislators to speak in favor of their local interests. This implies that sector-based policy concerns, when addressed by organized policy backers, are used as an effective mechanism for maintaining party unity and accountability in the legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media's capacity to quickly and inexpensively reach large audiences almost simultaneously has the potential to promote electoral accountability. Beyond increasing direct exposure to information, high saturation campaigns—which target substantial fractions of an electorate—may induce or amplify information diffusion, persuasion, or coordination between voters. Randomizing saturation across municipalities, we evaluate the electoral impact of non-partisan Facebook ads informing millions of Mexican citizens of municipal expenditure irregularities in 2018. The vote shares of incumbent parties that engaged in zero/negligible irregularities increased by 6–7 percentage points in directly-targeted electoral precincts. This direct effect, but also the indirect effect in untargeted precincts within treated municipalities, were significantly greater where ads targeted 80%—rather than 20%—of the municipal electorate. The amplifying effects of high saturation campaigns are driven by citizens within more socially-connected municipalities, rather than responses by politicians or media outlets. These findings demonstrate how mass media can ignite social interactions to promote political accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how citizens’ legitimacy perceptions are affected when decision makers deviate from the recommendations of a deliberative mini‐public (DMP), and what can be done to mitigate negative consequences. The results of a preregistered vignette experiment in Belgium (N = 2659) support our two main expectations. First, citizens’ legitimacy perceptions decrease when politicians do not follow the outcome of a DMP. Second, when politicians communicate responsively about this – meaning that they show respect for the recommendations and publicly justify why they deviated from them – legitimacy perceptions substantially increase, generally reaching the level of those cases where recommendations are followed. Diving deeper into this result also shows that for this effect to occur, citizens must find the provided reasoning valid and acceptable. Finally, the results hold among both policy winners and policy losers. These findings have implications for the literature on democratic innovations, empirical legitimacy, and political representation, but also for policymakers striving to combine arrangements of public participation that go beyond triviality, with political responsibility for the whole, and sustained mechanisms for accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text analyzes the crimes of misuse of subsidies intended for political parties and falsification in the background of electoral processes and parties accountability, particularly regarding the premises under which their interpretation has been proposed or their application has been intended to date. Based on that, it presents the reasons and arguments that support the claim that both figures respond to a different sense than the one assigned to them. In particular, the crime of misuse or improper application of quarterly subsidies granted to political parties sanctions their use in political campaigns, as such usage alters the rules under which public funding for these activities is allocated under conditions of equality. Furthermore, the crime of using false backgrounds in electoral or political party accountability materializes a special and qualified form of subsidy fraud. It then presents the implications that can be draw from each of these definitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/context: This article has three objectives: to differentiate the theoretical arguments on the empty chair policy in Latin America, to analyze the process of institutional change that culminated with its implementation in Colombia, and to describe how it has been carried out between 2010 and 2024. Methodology: The methodological approach has three components: a theoretical part, a documentary component, and an empirically based analysis. The first describes the contrast between two approaches to the autonomy, control, and accountability of political parties and parliamentarians. The second reviews how these approaches are reflected in the rules on seat ownership (of parties or congresspersons/deputies), accountability, and sanctions for parties and congresspersons when they violate the law. The third consists of identifying cases of loss of seats, their analysis, and the determination of their effects. The principal sources of the study are constitutional reforms, Supreme Court rulings, and decisions of the Attorney General's Office on convictions of congressmen. The information is complemented with journalistic reports and electoral data. Conclusions: The empty chair policy is established in two Latin American countries (Colombia and Peru). It is an effective legal norm to sanction political parties and legislators convicted for their links with criminal groups, corruption, electoral fraud, and other crimes. It has been applied in eighteen cases due to links to paramilitarism, drug trafficking, and corruption. The affected parties have decreased their electoral performance and their seats in Congress. Originality: This is the first empirical study on the subject in Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transparency is expected to strengthen electoral accountability. Yet, initiatives disseminating politician performance information directly prior to elections have reported mixed results. We argue that to be effective, transparency needs to be sustained: The dissemination of politician performance information needs to occur early, regularly, and predictably throughout the term. Using a formal model of electoral accountability under nonprogrammatic and uneven party competition, we study how sustained transparency affects a string of decisions by various actors in advance of elections: incumbents' running choices, parties' nomination strategies, and potential challengers' entry decisions. We show how these effects shape the candidate slate and ultimately electoral outcomes, conditional on incumbent performance and the incumbent party's relative strength. We test our theory using a field experiment involving 354 subnational constituencies in Uganda, and find robust support for the idea that sustained transparency can improve electoral accountability even in weakly institutionalized electoral settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing affinity for audits as a tool to promote political accountability and reduce corruption. Nevertheless, knowledge about the mechanisms through which audits work remains limited. While most work on audits shows that they can work via citizen sanctions of bad performers, we emphasize that audit effects can also run through prospective incentives, that is, the desire to avoid poor audit results in the first place. We distinguish audits' impact on prospective incentives and sanctions using a field experiment in Ghana; districts were randomized into audit treatment conditions targeting district procurement and oversight of development projects. We assess the effect of audits on political officials using survey experimental data and show that officials respond powerfully to prospective incentives. In districts treated with top‐down audits, in‐party favoritism falls from 60 percent at baseline to 20 percent at midline, and rates remain at 19 percent at endline. This suggests that the audit's main effect occurred before the audit results were made public, and that prospective mechanisms play an important role in audit efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many democratic systems supplement periodic elections with checks and balances. Yet, elected executives typically have some influence on one important check, the judicial branch, through their power to nominate justices. How do electoral and judicial constraints influence which policies executives pursue and which justices they nominate? We study a game-theoretic model of electoral accountability in which an executive chooses policy and appoints a justice, who can overturn policy today and (potentially) after the election. We highlight how judicial appointments provide executives a tool for signaling and commitment and also affect their incentives to signal with policy. We characterize how executives combine policy and appointments differently depending on judicial turnover, polarization, office motivation, or ideologies of sitting justices. We find that elections can moderate appointments but can also polarize them, reforms increasing justice turnover can backfire and reduce voter welfare, and distinct forms of polarization can have critically different effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'campaign-style enforcement' is a forceful policy instrument employed by Chinese authorities to address emergencies and intractable issues. However, the accountability embedded in campaign-style enforcement is largely overlooked, leading to the unclear dynamics of political mobilization at the grassroots level. While prior studies suggest that cadres in China are primarily motivated by promotion opportunities based on their political performance, this study, through a grounded-theory approach involving 557 penalized cadres in Hubei Province, argues that grassroots cadres are more likely mobilized by the stringent accountability system rather than by career promotion. Furthermore, this research develops a theoretical framework to elucidate what conditions may trigger accountability and how it drives grassroots political mobilization in the campaign-style enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fossil industry has greatly contributed to the increase of the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This evidence and five morally relevant facts establish its moral responsibility for climate harm. This responsibility imposes on fossil fuel companies a duty of reparation for the climate crisis which requires them to redress their wrongful actions that have led to climate harm by disgorging funds. The article justifies and develops such duty of reparation in terms of financial rectification of climate-related harm. This duty provides a framework for an informed dialogue with civil society and between political representatives on the accountability of fossil fuel companies in the climate crisis and on their role in rectifying the harm they have concurred to create. Fossil fuel companies' duty of reparation is a moral determination with direct relevance for the ethics, politics, and policy of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has had tremendous impacts on political, economic and social developments across the globe. Although some studies show that voters tend to hold incumbent parties accountable for managing the pandemic, the results of others suggest that the rally-round-the-flag strategy might be at plan. We contend that voters tend to hold the incumbent party accountable, even during an exogenous shock, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We hypothesize that more stringent government responses to tackle the pandemic and more COVID-19 casualties tend to decrease the electoral support for incumbent parties. Using original data from 67 national elections in 56 electoral democracies from mid-March 2020 to May 2022, the empirical results support our hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the leadership ethics of Director of Central Intelligence William Colby within the context of the release of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) "family jewels," the internal record that listed how the CIA had been involved in a number of illegal activities, including domestic spying. It explores the moral dimension of bureaucratic leadership and illustrates its presence in Colby's thinking and actions through three indicators: his understanding of the regime values of American democracy; his adherence to his oath of office as a high-ranking civil servant, which he viewed as a positive duty; and his recognition that, in a contest between the executive and legislative branches, counterintuitively, Congress is the party on which the future existence of the CIA rests. Beyond an assessment of Colby's personal characteristics, this article explores issues of moral leadership in the realm of intelligence and contributes to an understanding of the role of accountability in a fraught political landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This short article investigates how violations of civility norms by politicians affect attitudes about the importance of norms and demand for political accountability after wrongdoing. Results: Our main findings are twofold: (1) support for norms and (2) demand for punishing norm‐breaking increases when parties hold political officials accountable for their actions—especially in the case of in‐group norm‐breaking. Conclusions: These findings contribute to a growing literature on Americans' support for norms by implying that elites play an important role in sustaining the standards of democratic exchange. When elites impose punishment on copartisan elites, they signal to the public that accountability is acceptable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do politicians attribute responsibility for good and poor policy outcomes across multiple stakeholders in a policy field where they themselves can affect service provision? Such ‘diffusion’ decisions are crucial to understand the political calculations underlying the allocation of blame and credit by office-holders. We study this issue using a between-subjects survey experiment fielded among local politicians in Norway (N = 1073). We find that local politicians attribute responsibility for outcomes in primary education predominantly to school personnel (regardless of whether performance is good or bad) and do not engage in local party-political blame games. However, we show that local politicians are keen to attribute responsibility for poor outcomes to higher levels of government, especially when these are unaligned with the party of the respondent. These findings suggest that vertical partisan blame-shifting prevails over horizontal partisan blame games in settings with a political consensus culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (“ATF”) utilized its regulatory power to ban bump stocks. Given its long history of congressional marginalization and political demonization, the ATF has historically been hesitant to engage in binding forms of regulation. However, with the support of the public and a Republican president, the ATF interpreted “machine guns,” which were already banned under the National Firearms Act, to include bump stocks. The legal challenges that ensued questioned the ATF’s regulatory authority by invoking the rule of lenity. The litigation that has percolated throughout the courts of appeals has distilled into a fundamental question about agency deference: when an agency, such as the ATF, retains both criminal law enforcement and regulatory power, what level of deference should be given to its interpretations of statutes? With the Supreme Court set to hear oral arguments in Garland v. Cargill this term, one of the cases that challenges the ATF’s regulatory authority, this Note explores the primary justifications for the rule of lenity and explains why they do not apply when agencies engage in notice and comment rulemaking. Furthermore, this Note argues that, as an agency with technical expertise in an area that experiences rapid technological advancement and is subject to continual political accountability, the ATF presents the prototypical case for agency deference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies the factors that contributed to the persistence of food insecurity (FI) in sub-saharan Africa (SSA) between 1990 and 2019. The sample consists of 29 countries with data obtained from the Food and Agricultural Organisation 2021, World Development Indicators 2021, International Country Risk Guide 2021 and Polity IV 2021 databases. We use the principal component analysis (PCA) to construct the composite food insecurity index. We then employ the average bayesian model (ABM) and the general to specific (GETS) approach for robustness to identify the main determinants of food insecurity in SSA. The PCA result reveals that FI in SSA results from the dimensions of food availability, food utilization and food stability. As for the ABM, results confirmed by the robustness of the GETS approach, indicated that income level, Arable land, demography and lack of democracy are the main determinants that favour FI in SSA. In contrast, rural population and education reduce FI. There is an urgent need in strengthening agricultural strategies and an inclusive distribution of national wealth followed by political accountability in other to fight against FI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political appointment of bureaucrats is typically seen as jeopardizing development by selecting worse types into the bureaucracy or by depressing bureaucratic effort. I argue that political appointments also affect outcomes through a third, less studied channel, namely, by changing how bureaucrats work. Patronage provides connections between bureaucrats and politicians, and thereby grants access to material and nonmaterial resources, enhances monitoring, facilitates the application of sanctions and rewards, aligns priorities and incentives, and increases mutual trust. Political appointments can thus enhance bureaucrats' accountability and effectiveness, not just for rent‐seeking purposes but also, in certain conditions, for public service delivery. I test this theory using data on Brazilian municipal governments, leveraging two quasi‐experiments, two original surveys of bureaucrats and politicians, and in‐depth interviews. The findings highlight the countervailing effects of connections on bureaucratic governance in the developing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantifying the value that legislators give to reelection relative to policy is crucial to understanding electoral accountability. We estimate the preferences for office and policy of members of the U.S. Senate, using a structural approach that exploits variation in polls, position‐taking, and advertising throughout the electoral cycle. We then combine these preference estimates with estimates of the electoral effectiveness of policy moderation and political advertising to quantify electoral accountability in competitive and uncompetitive elections. We find that senators differ markedly in the value they give to securing office relative to policy gains: While over a fourth of senators are highly ideological, a sizable number of senators are willing to make relatively large policy concessions to attain electoral gains. Nevertheless, electoral accountability is only moderate on average, due to the relatively low impact of changes in senators' policy stance on voter support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have recently sought to explain why some voters remain loyal to "their" parties or candidates "no matter what they do" – an attitude that has been labeled as obstinate partisanship (OP) and limits electoral accountability. We argue that the development of OP may have to do, at least partly, with people's (in)ability to critically evaluate political information and their tendency to isolate themselves in online bubbles of congenial information and interactions. Building on this framework, we use two-wave panel survey data (NW1 = 1,259; NW2 = 982) to explore direct and indirect associations between information evaluation – a key component of information literacy – and OP. We find that information evaluation is negatively associated with OP in cross-sectional and autoregressive regression models. Analyses also support an indirect relationship between information evaluation and OP through political homophily in social media and online. We discuss possible implications for democracy and information literacy initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares Indian and United Kingdom (UK) parliamentary devices available to backbench Member of Parliaments (MPs) highlighting their role in scrutiny and accountability. In India, MPs can utilize procedures like Parliamentary Questions, Calling Attention, and Zero Hour to address public grievances and critique government actions. Conversely, UK backbenchers benefit from devices such as Early Day Motions, Question Time, and Ministerial Statements for similar purposes.

Several efforts have been undertaken to uphold the liability for atrocity crimes in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Even though the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and domestic courts opened proceedings against alleged perpetrators of atrocity crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central Africa Republic, Uganda, Kenya, Sudan, Burundi, and Rwanda, these prosecuting efforts are viewed as pursuing political strategies. Based on documentary analysis and an online research survey, this research paper shows evidence of accountability logic and political strategies. Although the undertaken efforts are in line with the logic of accountability, they remain under the influence of political strategies. The research findings highlight that political strategies have been influencing criminal law codification and its enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a speech by Michael Scharf welcoming attendees to the 2023 Klatsky Distinguished Lecture, highlighting Bruce Klatsky's contributions to human rights. Topics include the impact of the Klatsky endowment on the law school's human rights program, achievements such as the Yemen Accountability Project and the Asylum and Refugee Clinic, and the significance of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In India, undernutrition among children has been extremely critical for the last few decades. Most analyses of undernutrition among Indian children have used the administrative boundaries of a state or a district level as a unit of analysis. This paper departs from such a practice and focuses instead on the political boundaries of a parliamentary constituency (PC) as the unit of analysis. The PC is a critical geopolitical unit where political parties and party candidates make election promises and implement programmes to improve the socio-economic condition of their electorate. A focus on child undernutrition at this level has the potential for greater policy and political traction and could lead to a paradigm shift in the strategy to tackle the problem by creating a demand for political accountability. Different dimensions and new approaches are also required to evaluate the socio-economic status and generate concrete evidence to find solutions to the problem. Given the significance of advanced analytical methods and models embedded into geographic information system (GIS), the current study, for the first time, uses GIS tools and techniques at the PC level, conducting in-depth analysis of undernutrition and its predictors. Hence, this paper examines the spatial heterogeneity in undernutrition across PCs by using geospatial techniques such as univariate and bivariate local indicator of spatial association and spatial regression models. The analysis highlights the high–low burden areas in terms of local hotspots and identifies the potential spatial risk factors of undernutrition across the constituencies. Striking variations in the prevalence of undernutrition across the constituencies were observed. Most of these constituencies that performed poorly both in terms of child nutrition and socio-economic indicators were located in the northern, western, and eastern parts of India. A statistically significant association of biological, socio-economic, and environmental factors such as women's body mass index, anaemia in children, poverty, household sanitation facilities, and institutional births was established. The results highlight the need to bring in a mechanism of political accountability that directly connects elected representatives to maternal and child health outcomes. The spatial variability and pattern of undernutrition indicators and their correlates indicate that priority setting in research may also be greatly influenced by the neighbourhood association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about complaint-making as a form of political participation in the NGO sector. It focuses on public scrutiny of Oxfam's use of Barclays Bank during the anti-apartheid boycott of the bank in the 1970s and 1980s and analyses pro-boycott and anti-boycott correspondence to Oxfam during this period. The article uses the Barclays boycott case to illustrate the dynamics of public-institution relationships during a period in which the NGO sector rapidly expanded and professionalised. It argues that not all donors favoured shallow or passive relationships with the NGOs that they supported. In this example, donors mobilised as a distinct type of 'consumer-supporter-activist'. Finally, the article shows how the Barclays controversy stimulated public debate around the ideal boundaries between the 'charitable' and the 'political'. It argues that apartheid South Africa stimulated far greater public engagement on this issue than other areas of Oxfam's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since March 2020, a huge quantity of data, rankings, charts and tables has been informing the ways we speak and act in the pandemic. This article focusses on the centrality of numbers in a major national controversy: the quantification of avoidable deaths by COVID-19. Launched by scientists who first addressed the omissions of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in the management of the pandemic, estimations of avoidable deaths rapidly transitioned into the political arena with the installation of a parliamentary enquiry committee on the coronavirus crisis. The article examines the emergence and development of these estimates, as well as the role they have played and continue to play in constructing the pandemic as passed as they vie for a place in the memory of the COVID-19 crisis in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The idea that paying taxes makes politicians more accountable to citizens has long drawn the attention of scholars. This article contributes to the understanding of this relationship from a novel perspective: that it is elections rather than negotiations between politicians and elites—as most of the previous literature has assumed—that serve as the primary mechanism by which citizens discipline politicians. I build a voting agency model that considers two effects of income taxes on voters' decisions: how changes in voters' disposable income affect their political demands and how increments in tax revenues affect voters' beliefs about the ability of institutions to affect incumbents' decisions. I find that increments in taxes always strengthen voters' political demands. Nevertheless, it would not necessarily prove useful for disciplining incumbents—in terms of a higher expected provision of public goods and lower captured rents. Gains in political accountability, in turn, positively affect the equilibrium income tax rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Scopus, China is the nation that produces the highest volume of scientific research but is also the nation with the highest number of retractions, suggesting there are issues connected to research and publishing ethics within the Chinese publishing infrastructure. One source of negative reputation may be the selection of journals with questionable reputation, including "predatory" journals. In 2020, the Center of Scientometrics (CoS) in China established a list of "problematic" journals, called the Chinese Early Warning Journal List (EWJL), the only national watchlist in China, to support Chinese academics and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China. EWJL ranks journals as either low, medium or high risk. There are benefits if EWJL is accurate, valid and complete. However, close examination of the CoS website and EWJL functionality revealed several deficiencies. This paper debates those weaknesses within the wider context of publication in low-quality journals, offering suggestions for improvement that would be necessary for EWJL to become more trustworthy, and to better enable the continual reform of Chinese publishing culture. This issue is important to academic librarians because they can use EWJL in the process of collecting library funds and providing library information, and advice, to researchers. • Accountability Blacklists or watchlists Completeness Faulty criteria Opacity versus transparency [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – This paper aims to conceptualize and empirically illustrate the challenges that financial market regulation presents to politicians and the organization tasked with specifying regulations and supervising their implementation in the interest of users and consumers of financial instruments. It analyses the problem from the viewpoint of the governor's dilemma and the control/competence conflict, the linked problem of the rent-seeking of agents/intermediators and consumers of financial instruments. Political accountability problems are enhanced by the materiality of the technologies used, i.e. algo trading. Design/methodology/approach – The paper theoretically conceptualizes and empirically illustrates the argument. Findings – The paper finds that regulators of digitalized financial markets are faced with considerable problems and depend on private agents when regulating financial transactions. However, the new technological instruments also offer new possibilities for securing compliance. Research limitations/implications – Further research should focus more in-depth on the cooperation between public and private actors in the specification and implementation of regulatory details. It should further investigate the conditions which allow regulators to use RegTech in the surveillance of financial firms. Practical implications – Since financial market transactions are opaque for most users, the creation of more transparency is crucial to hold regulators accountable in their activity of surveillance of financial firms. New algorithm-based technologies may lend important support in doing so. Originality/value – By linking the different analytical perspectives, i.e. the governor's dilemma vis-à-vis the intermediator or agent and the possible rent-seeking of intermediators, under the condition of a highly developed technology of financial transactions as well as the market structure, the paper offers new insights into the limits as well as new opportunities of regulating financial markets allowing for political accountability of regulators and financial firms.

Purpose: The paper provides a theoretical framework for interdisciplinary accounting scholars interested in performances of accountability in front of live audiences. Design/methodology/approach: This is a processual case study of "Falkirk in crisis" that covers the period from September 2021 to September 2022. The focus of this paper is two-fan-Q&A sessions held in October 2021 and June 2022. Both are naturally occurring discussions between two groups such as are found in previous research on routine events and accountability. This is a theoretically consequential case study. Findings: A key insight of the paper is to identify the practical and symbolic dimensions of accountability. The paper demonstrates the need to align these two dimensions when responding to questions: a practical question demands a practical answer and a symbolic question requires a symbolic answer. Second, the paper argues that most fields contain conflicting logics and highlights that a complete performance of accountability needs to cover the different conflicting logics within the field. In this case, this means paying full attention to both the communitarian and results logics. A third finding is that a performance of accountability cannot succeed if the audience rejects attempts to impose an unpalatable definition of the situation. If these three conditions are not met, the performance is bound to fail. Research limitations/implications: An important theoretical coontribution of the study is the application of Jeffery Alexander's work on political performance to public performances of accountability. Practical implications: The phenomenon explored in the paper (what the authors term "grassroots accountability") has broad applicability to any situation in organizational or civic life where the power apex of an organization is required to engage with a group of informed and committed stakeholders – the "community". For those who find themselves in the position of the fans in this study, the observations set out in the empirical narrative can serve as a useful practical guide. Attempts to answer a practical complaint with a symbolic answer (or vice versa) should be challenged as evasive. Social implications: This paper studies an engagement of elite actors with ordinary (or grassroots) actors. The study shows important rules of engagement, including the importance of respecting the power of practical questions and the need to engage with these questions appropriately. Originality/value: This paper offers a new vista for interdisciplinary accounting by synthesizing the accountability literature with the political performance literature. Specifically, the paper employs Jeffery Alexander's work on practical and symbolic performance to study the microprocesses underpinning successful and unsuccessful performances of accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their vast relevance to democracy, scholars have paid little systematic attention to the scrutiny function of local councils. To stimulate such research, this study theorises the concept of council scrutiny. First, we outline the rationale, wider policy context, and conceptualisations. Next, we present and discuss an actor-centred institutionalist approach to introduce an analytical framework that depicts council scrutiny as a loop comprising eight interrelated parts. These parts include the institutional context and policy environment, intrinsic motivations and actor properties, scrutiny objects, objectives, constellations, the scrutiny process as such, and its effects and personal rewards. Finally, we explain how this analytical framework may serve as a vehicle for a more comprehensive and detailed study of the various aspects of council scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the deployment of digital tools in pushing citizen activism on political accountability and empowerment using the 2018 #EndSARS campaign in Nigeria as point of reference. In so doing, the article explores the utility of digital activism and analyze the successes and challenges associated with the effectiveness of its use to advance citizens' voices in transitional democracies. The study deployed Chorus Analytics to harvest and thematically analyze 13,000 tweets of Nigerians that relate to the 2018 #EndSARS campaign. The article argues that the campaign can be deemed successful given that it elicited and raised public discourse on police abuse in Nigeria. The study observes the absence of strong institutions as a challenge to digital activism in transitional democracies. The individuality of activism leaders also poses a significant danger to digital activism. The findings demonstrate the weaknesses associated with transitional democracies in the area of building strong institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how algorithmic innovation in contemporary warfare unfolds through new alliances and contestations among civil and military actors in the face of an overarching rhetoric around the need to lead in "information manoeuvre". Drawing on assemblage thinking and applying it to the case of the Land Information Manoeuvre Centre (LIMC)—a data centre founded by the Dutch Army that unlawfully tracked and algorithmically predicted its citizen's sentiment and behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic—the authors identify three logics that held this centre together and helped ward off critique: entrepreneurialism, informality, and experimentation. Emulating innovation practices elsewhere, together, these logics have important political repercussions beyond the Dutch case, pushing the expansion of military surveillance, pattern-finding and targeting, while undermining the rule of law and democratic accountability within algorithmic warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transitional justice, a movement devoted to bringing accountability to departed political regimes, has been the engine of the international human rights community in the past four decades. But while much has been said about how transitional justice enables successful democratic transitions, some of the movement's legacy is more checkered—from endangering such transitions to rekindling old feuds and undermining the rule of law. Acknowledging this seldom discussed darker side of transitional justice is not an argument against holding an old regime to account for its actions, but rather a recognition of the limits of what justice can do to advance democratization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature highlights the complexities of the relationship between voting, protest action and service delivery within Southern African democracies. We explore the relationship between these variables for South Africa by generating a new dataset from various sources. Although this relationship has been explored before, the existing evidence is mixed. The results from this study therefore bring a fresh perspective, especially at a time during which the political power of the incumbent African National Congress has been declining. We find that improvements in service delivery are not significantly associated with an increase in votes for the incumbent party, indicating that accountability is not the main motivation for South Africans' voting decisions. However, we find a statistically significant negative correlation between protest action and service delivery, providing evidence of the increasing importance of protest action as a form of political accountability in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how an endogenous change in political trust affects the performance of a representative democracy. To this end, we construct a two-period political agency model in which voters face uncertainty about the distribution of politicians' types (trust uncertainty) as well as each individual politician's type. Such trust uncertainty allows political trust to endogenously change over time. In its presence, the incumbent's action has a spillover effect on the challenger's value through changes in political trust. We show that because of this mechanism, trust uncertainty weakens electoral accountability. Furthermore, it generates multiple self-fulfilling equilibria: a high-accountability and a low-accountability equilibrium coexist. In countries briefly experiencing democracy, trust uncertainty is severe. Our results indicate that democratic performance tends to be low and even similar countries can experience different performance levels in such new democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study extensively explores the opportunities presented by the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in legal practices, the challenges encountered, and the ethical issues that emerge in this process. AI technologies offer unique advantages to legal professionals across a broad spectrum, from lawyering activities to forensic enforcement applications and judicial activities. These advantages include innovative applications such as rapid analysis of large data sets, decision support systems, and prediction of case outcomes. However, the use of AI in the legal field also raises significant issues such as algorithmic transparency, biases in data sets, accountability, and responsibility. The research provides strategic recommendations on how AI technologies can be effectively integrated into legal practice while assessing the impact of AI applications on judicial processes and individuals' fundamental rights. Specifically, it focuses on the legal framework and ethical principles of AI-supported decision-making processes. The study discusses the steps needed to increase transparency during the development and use of algorithms, reduce biases, and strengthen justice. In conclusion, this research focuses on the ethical, legal, and political frameworks that will shape the applications of AI in the legal field; it develops management strategies and policy recommendations necessary for the fair, transparent, and accountable management of AI technologies. Within this framework, it presents a vision on how AI can transform judicial systems and the long-term effects of this transformation on legal processes, professional practices, and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recovery and resilience dialogues were introduced by the regulation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility, and the first of such dialogues took place in May 2021. The European Parliament invites the Commission, approximately every two months, to exchange views on matters relating to the national recovery and resilience plans and progress in their implementation. Through an analysis of an original dataset composed of the questions asked by the MEPs in the 10 dialogues held between May 2021 and April 2023, this article provides a systematic empirical assessment of the European Parliament's capacity to hold the Commission accountable. Drawing on the literature on the economic and monetary dialogues and adapting the operationalisation of key variables to the new instrument, this article shows that the recovery and resilience dialogues are an effective instrument for information exchange and debate, but they serve as a weak instrument of political accountability. Additionally, it casts new light on significant differences between MEPs: South and East European members are considerably more active than members from Northern Europe. At the same time, parliamentarians only occasionally ask questions targeting other member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In yardstick competition, the availability of information pertaining to neighbouring jurisdictions is crucial for enabling voters to increase political accountability. Using a three-jurisdiction yardstick competition model and three measures of incumbent performance, the present study shows that politicians in isolated jurisdictions (i.e. ones that do not experience media spillover) are more likely to capture private rents. In contrast, in a jurisdiction connected to two neighbouring jurisdictions (i.e., ones with media spillovers), politicians are less likely to engage in rent extraction. An interesting finding is that the number of links (media spillovers) has a direct influence on status quo bias, namely that the more the voter is exposed to yardstick competition, the less status quo bias she exhibits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on theorists of jurisdiction to make visible how democratic self-government and the rule of law take effect in the modern administrative state. Through the lens of Caring Society v Canada, a Canadian human rights case about the funding of social services for Indigenous children, I explore an idea of jurisdictional justice that is inherently connected to the quality of democratic engagement and focuses attention on political, legal and human relationships. I argue that in the face of challenges posed by populist politics and the colonial administrative state, this relational understanding of jurisdiction provides resources for building a sense of legality that can sustain shared public meaning and promote practices of political accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the right to vote is fundamental because it is preservative of all rights, and yet in many cases legal protections for the right to vote fall short of protections for the other rights that voting is meant to preserve. Redefining the right to vote cannot solve this problem alone. Election administration has at least as much consequence on the right to vote as any particular definition or legal theory. In Democracy's Bureaucracy, Michael Morse draws our attention to one of the most important yet understudied issues of election administration: voter list maintenance. In addition to his descriptive account of the novel way states have cooperated to perform list maintenance, Morse's analysis provides a window into three pathologies of America's election administration more generally. First, the mechanics of elections directly implicate the fundamental right to vote, raising questions of how stringently these procedures should be evaluated by courts. Second, political interference in the administration of elections can flip representative government on its head by insulating elected officials from political accountability and making elections less secure. Finally, several challenges related to the administration of elections are rooted in our electoral system that narrowly links geography and political representation. Relaxing this link may foster a more effective, responsible, and inclusive system of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the scholarly literature on journalism and political communication, there has been an expectation that fact-checkers would play an important role in ensuring democratic accountability, especially during pivotal political moments. This piece scrutinizes the level of agreement between five Brazilian fact-checking groups and the reasons for divergences in their verdicts during the presidential debates of the 2022 campaign. The emphasis is on claims checked by two or more organizations. Through a mixed-methods approach, it shows a widespread lack of consistency among fact-checkers, which is explained by their conflicting methods and interpretations of candidates' words. This study adds to the existing scholarship by challenging the dominant framework on fact-checking, putting into question its democracy-building role in critical circumstances, as well as the epistemology it relies on to assess the veracity of political discourse. Complementary, it introduces a valuable methodology for studying the rationale underlying fact-checking ratings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

England's 'shock' exit from the Euro 2016 Football Championship and the UK electorate's decision to (Br)exit from the EU occurred almost simultaneously, providing an interesting lens through which to examine unfolding tensions in the UK and its component identities – all the more so given the presence of two of the three other component countries of the UK, Wales and Northern Ireland, at the Championship. Our analysis of 34,324 original tweets featuring both the hashtag #Euro2016 and #Brexit shows a clear tendency to conflate British and English identities in the context of Brexit, a conflation coloured by largely negative characteristics. We pay particular attention to how recurring themes concerning leadership, accountability and immigration are articulated in the context of both sporting and political events. In addition, we examine the significance of the structural logic of social media in these discussions of the sport-nation nexus, with reference to vortextuality and mediatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arrival of the Anthropocene requires a profound rethinking of business accountability. A central challenge in this age is the possibility of pushing past planetary boundaries, which may irreversibly propel the Earth system into a new equilibrium that is less hospitable for human civilization. Businesses drive many of the processes contributing to such boundaries, and are powerful political actors who may shape or obstruct the necessary transformations to our socio‐economic systems. We therefore need to reconsider their accountability, focused on the following guiding question: Who (in business) should be accountable to whom for what? The answer to this question has important implications for environmental policy and governance. Drawing on a range of recent conceptual and policy developments, I present four major lines of thinking for reconsidering business accountability in the Anthropocene context: to rethink the purpose of business; to acknowledge companies' expanded but shared accountability for productive activities; to heighten collective and individual liability for past and future actions linked to overshooting planetary boundaries; and to recognize business accountability for influencing political and societal processes. Each of these lines of thinking imply policy changes related to, inter alia, corporate governance, due diligence, liability, and lobbying laws. I further call on businesses to actively participate in the large‐scale transformation necessary to keep within planetary boundaries by changing not only their production processes, but also product portfolios, business models, legal forms, and political and societal engagement; and highlight avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]