IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/padxxx/v33y2013i3p161-174.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Fighting Corruption With Social Accountability: A Comparative Analysis Of Social Accountability Mechanisms' Potential To Reduce Corruption In Public Administration

Author

Listed:
  • Florian Schatz

Abstract

SUMMARY Given the poor track record of traditional anti‐corruption initiatives, donors and governments are increasingly looking at how civil society can fight corruption in public administration. Social accountability mechanisms intend to perform this role by holding officials directly accountable through citizen engagement. However, this article argues that social accountability mechanisms are only capable of reducing corruption systemically if they activate horizontal accountability and sustain it through the sanctioning mechanisms of electoral accountability. A comparative case study analysis using the cases of the Ugandan Public Expenditure Tracking Survey and the Bangalore Citizen Report Card is applied to test this hypothesis. The Tanzanian Public Expenditure Tracking Survey and an example of citizen engagement in Mumbai are employed as shadow cases to provide additional evidence for the hypothesis. The results indicate that social accountability mechanisms must be inclusive, broad, with public effect and embedded in other accountability relationships to fight corruption effectively. Electoral accountability is key, and support to social accountability mechanisms should therefore always be well placed within a broader agenda aimed at strengthening democratic governance. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Suggested Citation

  • Florian Schatz, 2013. "Fighting Corruption With Social Accountability: A Comparative Analysis Of Social Accountability Mechanisms' Potential To Reduce Corruption In Public Administration," Public Administration & Development, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 33(3), pages 161-174, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:wly:padxxx:v:33:y:2013:i:3:p:161-174
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Eva Sørensen & Jacob Torfing, 2021. "Accountable Government through Collaborative Governance?," Administrative Sciences, MDPI, vol. 11(4), pages 1-20, November.
    2. Bertrand Venard & Kezang Tshering, 2021. "Barriers to transparency in Bhutan's public administration: A new typology of opacity," Public Administration & Development, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 41(4), pages 203-216, October.
    3. Hui Li & Ting Gong & Hanyu Xiao, 2016. "The Perception of Anti-corruption Efficacy in China: An Empirical Analysis," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 125(3), pages 885-903, February.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:padxxx:v:33:y:2013:i:3:p:161-174. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0271-2075 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.