GVPT Associate Professor Piotr Swistak Explores the Impact of Organizational Hierarchy on Accountability in APSR Article

GVPT Associate Professor Piotr Swistak and his coauthor Jonathan Bendor, have published a new article in the American Political Science Review titled "On Accountability and Hierarchy." The article provides a new analytical framework and new insights into the relationship between democracy, meritocratic bureaucracy, and accountability. While democracy achieves accountability through elections and bureaucracy provides coordination via hierarchical structures, the two are typically seen as conflicting. The authors prove that accountability is, in fact, what unifies democratic systems and meritocratic (Weberian) bureaucracies. More specifically, Bendor and Swistak prove that a system where all individuals and groups are accountable must also be democratic. Thus, meritocratic hierarchy, accountability, and democracy are intertwined.

An important challenge to accountability in modern institutions is a complex system of highly specialized members. Since specializations are limited to some but not all members of an institution, the full accountability of democracies entails review of specialists by non-specialists.  The authors prove that modern political systems necessarily exhibit this tension. It is a hallmark of modern institutions rather than a problem to be solved.

Read the full article here: On Accountability and Hierarchy

 

 

Published on Mon, 11/11/2024 - 17:09