Accountability is said to be about the management of expectations. Empirical studies reveal considerable variation in organizational interest, intensity, and investment in accountability relationships. Less is known, however, about what explains these observed variations. Drawing on accountability and reputation‐concerned literatures, this article argues that a reputation‐based perspective on accountability offers an underlying logic that explains how account‐giving actors and account‐holding forums actually manage these expectations and how organizations make sense of and prioritize among accountability responsibilities. Reputational considerations act as a filtering mechanism of external demands and help account for variations in degrees of interest in, and intensity of, accountability. The resulting accountability outcomes are coproduced by the reputational investment of both account‐giver and account‐holder, resulting in distinct accountability constellations and outcomes.
This article proposes a reputation‐based approach to account for two core puzzles of accountability. The first is the misfit between behavioral predictions of the hegemonic political science framework for talking about accountability, namely, principal–agent, and empirical findings. The second puzzle is the unrivaled popularity of accountability, given evidence that supposedly accountability‐enhancing measures often lead to opposite effects. A “reputation‐informed” theoretical approach to public accountability suggests that accountability is not about reducing informational asymmetries, containing “drift,” or ensuring that agents stay committed to the terms of their mandate. Accountability—in terms of both holding and giving—is about managing and cultivating one's reputation vis‐à‐vis different audiences. It is about being seen as a reputable actor in the eyes of one's audience(s), conveying the impression of competently performing one's (accountability) roles, thereby generating reputational benefits.
This article aims to explain two contrasting cases of bureaucratic cooperation: the cooperation practices of two similar European agencies – Europol and Frontex – with corresponding national‐level structures. To understand why cooperation has proceeded smoothly in one case (border management), while triggering strong turf‐protective tendencies in the other (law enforcement), the article develops a theoretical approach to cooperation that is both ‘turf’ and reputation sensitive. Drawing on a variety of documents and interview material, the article demonstrates that the divergent outcomes are shaped to a large extent by the different reputational impact of cooperation for the national authorities concerned. In one case, cooperation depletes important reputational resources of national authorities, threatening their ‘reputational uniqueness’ and triggering turf‐protective tendencies. In the other, vertical and horizontal cooperation efforts bring important gains to national authorities' ability to discharge their tasks successfully and, thus, to their reputation‐building efforts. Crucially however, they do so without threatening their ‘reputational uniqueness’.
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