30 lines
6.6 KiB
Markdown
30 lines
6.6 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Accountability"
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chunk: 4/6
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source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accountability"
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category: "reference"
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tags: "science, encyclopedia"
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date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:30:58.181172+00:00"
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instance: "kb-cron"
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---
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== Accountability and corruption ==
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Political corruption refers to "the misuse or the abuse of public office for private gains". Corrupt practices include fraud, appropriation of public funds, and accepting bribes. Corruption can cause people to negatively evaluate politicians, since citizens may perceive corruption as a signal of poor performance, motivating them to sanction an incumbent. As the model of retrospective voting suggests that voters incentivize good politicians' behavior by rewarding good performance and punishing bad performance, citizens are expected to sanction corrupt politicians. However, studies suggest that though voters have a distaste for corruption, they often fail to punish corrupt incumbents; some of them receive benefits from their representatives' corrupt practices, and prefer to retain this type of politician. In high-corruption contexts, voters may become more tolerant of or even prefer corrupt politicians because others are also perceived as corrupt, leading to a corrupt equilibrium "where voters are generally willing to retain corrupt politicians", referred to as a "political corruption trap". This high corruption equilibrium is difficult to break due to interaction between corrupt politicians, voters who tolerate and retain corrupt politicians, and potential entrants or challengers who also engage in corrupt practices, leading to the maintenance of corruption. Economic development is associated with a decrease in corruption. Freedom of the press contributes to the reduction of corruption by exposing corrupt actions. Documentation on how a corrupt government (e.g. Alberto Fujimori's government from 1998 to 2000 in Peru) can strategically undermine checks-and-balances institutions, suggests that the news media—i.e. newspapers and mainly television—is crucial to the dissemination of information to the public. There is also evidence about the importance of local media, such as local radio stations, in holding corrupt incumbents accountable and in promoting non-corrupt politicians. Information about corruption may not only lead to vote losses for the incumbent parties, but also for challenging parties, as well the erosion of partisan attachments, which implies that information about corruption also provokes citizens' disengagement from the political process.
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Scholarly literature about corruption finds mixed results about the role of political institutions on the level of a country's corruption. For example, some scholarly research suggests that more horizontal accountability, or oversight across branches of government, would generally decrease corruption. However, other research shows that increased oversight could increase corruption when actors in one branch can pressure actors in another to collude; in Ghana, bureaucrats are more likely to engage in corruption on behalf of politicians when politicians have higher levels of discretion to oversee the bureaucracy (e.g., by threatening to transfer noncompliant bureaucrats).
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Low accountability for corruption is difficult to combat, and some anti-corruption activities may also lead to perverse consequences. For example, in places where private sector work pays better than public sector work (e.g., China), highly qualified individuals engaging in public sector work may only find such work attractive because it allows for further compensation through corrupt activities. Government anti-corruption activities can therefore decrease the quality and overall representativeness of the bureaucracy as a result. On the other hand, there is evidence that, despite strategic evasion and unintentional consequences, anti-corruption initiatives are beneficial, as they lower malfeasance and increase social welfare, even where strategic evasion is relatively large.
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== Police accountability ==
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== Organizational ==
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=== Ethical ===
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Within an organization, the principles and practices of ethical accountability aim to improve both the internal standard of individual and group conduct as well as external factors, such as sustainable economic and ecologic strategies. Also, ethical accountability plays an important role in academic fields, such as laboratory experiments and field research. Debates around the practice of ethical accountability on the part of researchers in the social field – whether professional or others – were explored by Norma R.A. Romm in her work on Accountability in Social Research, and elsewhere. Researcher accountability implies that researchers are cognizant of, and take some responsibility for, the potential impact of their ways of doing research – and of writing it up – on the social fields of which the research is part. Accountability is linked to considering carefully, and being open to challenge in relation to, one's choices concerning how research agendas are framed and the styles in which research results are written.
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=== Security ===
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The traceability of actions performed on a system to a specific system entity (user, process, device) also affects accountability. For example, the use of unique user identification and authentication supports accountability, and the use of shared user IDs and passwords degrades accountability.
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=== Individuals within organizations ===
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Because many individuals in large organizations contribute in many ways to decisions and policies, it is difficult even in principle to identify who should be accountable for the results. This is what is known, following Dennis F. Thompson, as "the problem of many hands". It creates a dilemma for accountability. If individuals are held accountable or responsible, individuals who could not have prevented the results are either unfairly punished, or they "take responsibility" in a symbolic ritual without suffering any consequences. If only organizations are held accountable, then all individuals in the organization are equally blameworthy or all are excused.
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Various solutions have been proposed. One is to broaden the criteria for individual responsibility so that individuals are held accountable for not anticipating failures in the organization. Another solution, recently proposed by Thompson, is to hold individuals accountable for the design of the organization, both retrospectively and prospectively.
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Accountability is an element of a responsibility assignment matrix which indicates who is ultimately answerable for the correct and thorough completion of a deliverable or task, as well as the delegation of the work to those responsible. |