The Culture of Accountability: A Democratic Virtue

This important book explores the cultural conditions that favour political accountability.

It examines the channels through which accountability can be secured and the role that accountability plays in ensuring good governance. In addition to problematizing the notion of accountability, the book suggests that it is the product of three different--albeit, related--processes: taking account of voters’ preferences, keeping account of voters’ preferences, and giving account of one’s performance in office. It further explores the relationship between accountability and political culture by analyzing the relationship between accountability and religion, religious denomination, familism, civicness, secularism and postmaterialism, revealing that the level of accountability is influenced by the diffusion of post-material values and by the level of civicness in a given country.

This book will be of key interest to scholars, students, and practitioners in governance, the political economy of institutions and development, democracy, and more broadly to political science, international relations, political theory, comparative politics, sociology, and cultural studies.

Chapter 1 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Gianfranco Pasquino is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Bologna, Italy, and Former Senator of the Italian Republic (1983-1992; and 1994-1996).

Riccardo Pelizzo is an Associate Professor and the Vice Dean of Research in the Graduate School of Public Policy at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan.