Accountability and Transparency: A Nuanced Response to Etzioni

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12303
• Date: 01 January 2015
• Published date: 01 January 2015

Perspective

Laurence Ferry has held senior roles in

the British civil service, municipalities, and

consultancy, including as head of f‌i nance

and resources and special advisor to chief

executive off‌i cers. A qualif‌i ed chartered

accountant, he now lectures in accounting

at Newcastle University in the United

Kingdom.

E-mail: laurence.ferry@newcastle.ac.uk

Peter Eckersley worked for the United

Kingdom’s Chartered Institute for Public

Finance and Accountancy in various roles

from 2001 to 2012. He is now a doctoral

student in political science at Newcastle

University focusing on public policy,

performance management, accountability,

and local government.

E-mail: p.m.eckersley@ncl.ac.uk

11

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited,

the use is non-commercial and no modif‌i cations or adaptations are made.

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 75, Iss. 1, pp. 11–12. © 2014

The Authors. Public Administration Review

published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

on behalf of The American Society for Public

Administration. DOI: 10.1111/puar.12303.

citizens has enabled them to bypass questionable audit

processes and actually increase the accountability of

public bodies. After grassroots organizations demanded

that the details of f‌i nancial transactions be published

outside public buildings in the spirit of transpar-

ency, they taught groups of young people (many of

whom had little education) to interpret the data and

to telephone colleagues in outlying areas to determine

whether the promised goods and services had actually

been delivered and used. In this way, they were able to

challenge the results and formal audits as a means of

combatting corruption, leading to signif‌i cant amounts

of rupees being returned to the area.

 e second example illustrates how informal transpar-

ency processes enabled Chinese citizens to call time on

corrupt of‌f‌i cials.  e issue of governance underpinned

with accountability and transparency is often discussed

as important to China’s ongoing economic success and

social cohesion. However, although corruption has led

to the downfall of senior f‌i gures such as Bo Xilai, the

Communist Party’s attempts to tackle the issue have

been largely unsuccessful (Saich 2011). In response

to this, members of the public have sought to take

the matter into their own hands and posted images

and videos on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter,

to highlight these abuses of position and try to set the

news agenda (Jiang 2014). One memorable example

of this concerns Yang Dacai, a government of‌f‌i cial who

was pictured at the scene of a fatal bus crash wearing an

expensive watch and grinning widely. Weibo users sub-

sequently found and posted numerous other pictures

of the individual online, in which he sported a range of

dif‌f erent expensive designer watches, and questioned

how such a lavish lifestyle could be af‌f orded on a gov-

ernment “iron rice bowl” salary. Yang was subsequently

removed from his position and imprisoned for 14 years

after admitting to charges of corruption and “possess-

ing a huge amount of property of unclear origin” (BBC

News 2013).  erefore, informal transparency and data

publication processes can enable members of the public

to hold public f‌i gures to account—even in a relatively

authoritarian state such as China.

Transparency and accountability are key issues

of our times, especially in the way that they

relate to good governance and anticorruption.

However, in the November/December 2014 issue

of this journal, Amitai Etzioni, in “ e Limits of

Transparency,” criticized the U.S. government’s

reliance on transparency as a substitute for regula-

tion. He argued that most citizens do not have the

skills, time, or energy to evaluate data pertaining to

public institutions, with the result “that transparency

provides users with the illusion of openness while

actually serving to obfuscate.”

We concur with Etzioni in our own analysis of how

the U.K. government’s transparency agenda has

af‌f ected the accountability of English local authori-

ties. As part of this agenda, ministers have replaced

formal performance audits with the requirement that

councils publish various data sets (including details

of all transactions worth £500 or more), ostensibly so

that “armchair auditors” can analyze public spending

and hold of‌f‌i cials to account. Yet, as Etzioni suggests,

it is very dif‌f‌i cult for most citizens to analyze these

data because they are presented in a raw format with

very little contextual information. As Member of

Parliament Margaret Hodge, chair of the inf‌l uential

House of Commons Public Accounts Committee,

has pointed out, this has weakened accountability for

local public services (see  atcher 2014).

However, as the following examples illustrate, trans-

parency initiatives are helping to reduce corruption

in non-Western jurisdictions because they represent

an important mechanism through which citizens can

access information that has not been edited or shaped

by powerful political actors.

 e f‌i rst example shows how demands for formal

transparency in rural India led to greater public account-

ability. In 2012, the lead author discussed the shortcom-

ings of the U.K. government’s transparency agenda with

the political and social activist Aruna Roy.  is revealed

that making public data freely available to Indian

Accountability and Transparency: A Nuanced

Response to Etzioni

Laurence Ferry

Peter Eckersley

Newcastle University, United Kingdom