Accountability through mutual attunement: How can parliamentary hearings connect the elected and the unelected?

Andreas Eriksen,Alexander Katsaitis

doi:10.1177/0952076720977606

Andreas Eriksen, Alexander Katsaitis

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/0952076720977606

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Abstract

The increased authority delegated to independent agencies raises questions about the conditions of politically accountable governance, and specifically parliament’s role as a representative institution. Focusing on committee hearings as an accountability mechanism, we ask: How can a parliament employ hearings to ensure that the ends pursued by agencies have a democratic foundation? We propose a model of “mutual attunement” where accountability relations presuppose a process of working-out shared understandings of the ends, means and circumstances of policy needs. We test our argument through a case study assessing the interaction between the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic & Monetary Affairs and the European Securities and Markets Authority. Theoretically, we contribute to discussions on agency accountability and European governance, while providing a novel conceptual model and the first analysis of its kind.

Highlights

Independent agencies wield public authority at arm’s length from elected representatives and partisan politics
Before presenting the details of how accountability is served by mutual attunement, it is worth situating it in the theoretical accountability landscape
New governance confronts us with the issue of how to understand new modes of authority and accountability in dynamic settings

Summary

Introduction

Independent agencies wield public authority at arm’s length from elected representatives and partisan politics. Accountability can be conceptualized in terms of a principal-agent relationship, where safeguards are institutionalized ex ante and performance control is exercised ex post On this account, independent agency expertise cannot be used to frame the political mandate itself, it is rather restricted to identifying empirical constraints: “expertise acts as a kind of external filter on the deliberations of other parts of the division of labour such as politicians and ordinary citizens” (Christiano, 2012: 42). Traditional principal-agent frameworks expect mechanisms such as written questions directed to agencies, agencies’ annual parliamentary reports, and budgetary control to be used by the political actors as a source of technical information or reports on performance (Bach and Fleischer, 2012; van Rijsbergen and Foster, 2017) In a slogan, it is about the means of policy, not its ends. What matters is that agencies pursue ends in ways that are appropriately attuned to the reason-giving processes of politically representative bodies, such as parliamentary committees

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