Accountability, in terms of ethics and governance, is equated with answerability, culpability, liability, and the expectation of account-giving.
In the fields of sociology and political science, authority is the legitimate power of a person or group over other people. In a civil state, authority is practiced by the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government.
Imperial presidency is a term applied to the modern presidency of the United States. It became popular in the 1960s and served as the title of a 1973 book by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who wrote The Imperial Presidency to address two concerns: that the presidency was uncontrollable and that it had exceeded its constitutional limits. According to professor of political science Thomas E. Cronin, author of The State of the Presidency, the imperial presidency is a term used to define a danger to the American constitutional system by allowing presidents to create and abuse presidential prerogatives during national emergencies. This was based on: (1) presidential war powers vaguely defined in the Constitution, and (2) secrecy – a system used that shielded the Presidency from the usual checks and balances afforded by the legislative and judicial branches.
The tyranny of the majority is an inherent weakness to majority rule in which the majority of an electorate pursues exclusively its own objectives at the expense of those of the minority factions. This results in oppression of minority groups comparable to that of a tyrant or despot, argued John Stuart Mill in his 1859 book On Liberty.
The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory first developed by the German-born Italian sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book Political Parties. It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of the organization.
Public Administration or Public Policy and Administration is the implementation of public policy, administration of government establishment, management of non-profit establishment, and also a subfield of political science taught in public policy schools that studies this implementation and prepares people, especially civil servants in administrative positions for working in the public sector, voluntary sector, some industries in the private sector dealing with government relations, regulatory affairs, legislative assistance, corporate social responsibility (CSR), environmental, social, governance (ESG), public procurement (PP), public-private partnerships (P3), and business-to-government marketing/sales (B2G) as well as those working at think tanks, non-profit organizations, consulting firms, trade associations, or in other positions that uses similar skills found in public administration.
Domestic policy is a type of public policy overseeing administrative decisions that are directly related to all issues and activity within a state's borders. It differs from foreign policy, which refers to the ways a government advances its interests in external politics. Domestic policy covers a wide range of areas, including business, education, energy, healthcare, law enforcement, money and taxes, natural resources, social welfare, and personal rights and freedoms.
In politics of the United States, "fourth branch of government" is an unofficial term referring to groups or institutions perceived variously as influencing or acting in the stead of the three branches of the US federal government defined in the Constitution of the United States. Views as to whether the influence is due or undue or the actions are for good or ill also vary.
Federalist No. 70, titled "The Executive Department Further Considered", is an essay written by Alexander Hamilton arguing for a single, robust executive provided for in the United States Constitution. It was originally published on March 15, 1788, in The New York Packet under the pseudonym Publius as part of The Federalist Papers and as the fourth in Hamilton's series of eleven essays discussing executive power.
The unitary executive theory is a normative theory of United States constitutional law which holds that the President of the United States possesses the power to control the entire federal executive branch. The doctrine is rooted in Article Two of the United States Constitution, which vests "the executive Power" of the United States in the President. Although that general principle is widely accepted among legal scholars, there is disagreement about the strength and scope of the doctrine. Steven Calabresi and Christopher Yoo (2008) described the unitary executive theory as ensuring “… the federal government will execute the law in a consistent manner and in accordance with the president’s wishes.” This stands in contrast to other scholarly literature that stresses the fact that federal employees have to faithfully execute the laws enacted according to the process prescribed in the U.S. Constitution.
Clifford Dwight Waldo was an American political scientist and is perhaps the defining figure in modern public administration. Waldo's career was often directed against a scientific/technical portrayal of bureaucracy and government that now suggests the term public management as opposed to public administration. Waldo is recognized the world over for his contributions to the theory of bureaucratic government.
Street-level bureaucracy is the subset of a public agency or government institution where the civil servants work who have direct contact with members of the general public. Street-level civil servants carry out and/or enforce the actions required by a government's laws and public policies, in areas ranging from safety and security to education and social services. A few examples include police officers, border guards, social workers and public school teachers. These civil servants have direct contact with members of the general public, in contrast with civil servants who do policy analysis or economic analysis, who do not meet the public. Street-level bureaucrats act as liaisons between government policy-makers and citizens and these civil servants implement policy decisions made by senior officials in the public service and/or by elected officials.
Open government is the governing doctrine which maintains that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight. In its broadest construction, it opposes reason of state and other considerations which have tended to legitimize extensive state secrecy. The origins of open-government arguments can be dated to the time of the European Age of Enlightenment, when philosophers debated the proper construction of a then nascent democratic society. It is also increasingly being associated with the concept of democratic reform. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16 for example advocates for public access to information as a criterion for ensuring accountable and inclusive institutions.
Liberal democracy, substantive democracy or western democracy is a form of government that combines the structure of a representative democracy with the principles of liberal political philosophy. It is characterized by elections between multiple distinct political parties, a separation of powers into different branches of government, the rule of law in everyday life as part of an open society, a market economy with private property, universal suffrage, and the equal protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties and political freedoms for all people. To define the system in practice, liberal democracies often draw upon a constitution, either codified or uncodified, to delineate the powers of government and enshrine the social contract. The purpose of a constitution is often seen as a limit on the authority of the government.
Peter Milo Shane is a law professor and writer. His best-known scholarly work focuses mainly on two subjects. The first is separation of powers law, especially law and the presidency. His work often explores what he calls an institutional conception of the rule of law in a separation of powers regime. See, e.g., Peter M, Shane, When Inter-branch Norms Break Down: Of Arms-for-Hostages, 'Orderly Shutdowns,' Presidential Impeachments, and Judicial 'Coups,' 12 Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 503 (2004). Under Shane's antiformalist conception, the rule of law is sustained not only by formal legal rules, but perhaps most importantly, by informal norms and conventional behaviors designed to maintain interbranch accountability even when public officials could ignore formal rules with impunity. Peter M. Shane, Madison's Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy 116. Checks and balances in such a system likewise "depend on an assemblage of norms, cooperative arrangements, and informal coordination activities." Id. Following political scientist Kenneth Shepsle, Shane thus calls the rule of law "an unstructured institution." Id. at 117.
New Public Administration is an anti-positivist, anti-technical, and anti-hierarchical reaction against traditional public administration. A practiced theory in response to the ever changing needs of the public and how institutions and administrations go about solving them. Its focus is on the role of government and how it can provide these services to citizens who are a part of the public interest, by means of, but not limited to, public policy.
Alfred Diamant was an Austrian-born American political scientist. His main contribution was in the field of comparative politics and comparative public administration. He was a member of the Comparative Administration Group (CAG) and a co-chairperson of the Council for European Studies based at Columbia University. According to Peter Alexis Gourevitch, Diamant was both "on the Executive Committee of the Council for European Studies and the Interuniversity Center for European Studies in Montreal". Diamant's areas of expertise were "Comparative Western European Politics and Social Policy". Together with his colleague, James Christoph, he "established Indiana University as a major site of the study of European culture, society and politics". John D. Martz called the works of Maurice Duvergier, Sigmund Neumann and Diamant that focus on the study of political parties "Western European-oriented classics". D.B. Robertson saw Diamant as "a gifted and humane scholar".
Bureaucratic drift in American political science is a theory that seeks to explain the tendency for bureaucratic agencies to create policy that deviates from the original mandate. The difference between a bureaucracy's enactment of a law and the legislature's intent is called bureaucratic drift. Legislation is produced by elected officials, but is implemented by unelected bureaucrats, who sometimes act under their own preferences or interests. Bureaucratic drift is often treated as a principal–agent problem, with the House, Senate and Presidency acting as principals and bureaucracy acting as the agent. The government seeks to control bureaucratic drift in a number of ways, most notably congressional oversight and procedural controls.
The politics-administration dichotomy is a theory that constructs the boundaries of public administration and asserts the normative relationship between elected officials and administrators in a democratic society. The phrase politics-administration dichotomy itself does not appear to have a known inventor, even after exhaustive research, the combination of words that make up the phrase was first found in public administration literature from the 1940s with no clear originator.
Oral democracy is a talk-based form of government and political system in which citizens of a determined community have the opportunity to deliberate, through direct oral engagement and mass participation, in the civic and political matters of their community. Additionally, oral democracy represents a form of direct democracy, which has the purpose of empowering citizens by creating open spaces that promote an organized process of discussion, debate, and dialogue that aims to reach consensus and to impact policy decision-making. Political institutions based on this idea of direct democracy seek to decrease the possibilities of state capture from elites by holding them accountable, to encourage civic participation and collective action, and to improve the efficiency and adaptability of development interventions and public policy implementation.
