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Accountability In Government
Key American ideas And Insights

M.R. Josse

Most of us are, of course, familiar with Abraham Lincoln’s much quoted excerpt from his Gettysburg Address in 1863 wherein he expounded on the significance of "government of the people , by the people and for the people."

ACCOUNTABILITY: Lincoln believed, as indeed did the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution, that for the people to truly govern, government must be accountable—not merely through periodic elections but through a complex of safeguards, including those that respond to continually evolving realities.

Below we take up a few key ideas and insights on the theme of accountability in government provided in illuminating write-ups by distinguished Americans in the August 2000 Electronic Journal of the US Department of State and made available by the USIS.

Firstly, as the central theme of the Journal underlines, "a written constitution assuring accountability is an insufficient guarantee – that promoting accountability also requires a rededication of purpose by each generation as it responds to changing circumstances."

Secondly, holding government accountable is naturally difficult, if not impossble, without essential information which arm citizens with the ability to access official conduct.

While in any democracy the most salient instrument to ensure governmental accountability is the right of citizens to control their government through elections, polls are not the only means for doing so.

In fact, according to law professor, Robert S. Barker, "the right of citizens to take action against those officials whose conduct the citizens consider unsatisfactory is an essential element, perhaps the essential element of democracy."

Notably, access to information permits citizens to challenge government actions which with they disagree and to seek redress for official misconduct. James Madison, fourth president of the United States, clearly saw the relationship between democracy, accountability and access to government information.

In Madison’s opinion, quoted by law professor, Robert G. Vaughn: "A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both."

In America, the best known and most effective means of ensuring open government is the federal Freedom of Information Act which requires that some types of documents be made available without request and placed in public reading rooms – with nine exemptions to disclosure including those "properly classified in the interest of national defence or foreign policy."

PRESS AS WATCHDOG: Professor of American Studies, Robert Schmuhl, focuses on "external watchdogs" of government accountability, including the press, beginning with this penetrating quotation from Alexis de Touqueville’s seminal 19th century study Democracy in America:

"The more I observe the main effects of a free press, the more convinced am I that, in the modern world, freedom of the press is the principal and, so to say, the constitutive element in freedom."

While Schmuhl refers to Madison’s view that "a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives", he adds the caveat that, today in America, "although access to political and government news and reports is now relatively easy, sorting through the volume of daily information poses a serious, potentially debilitating problem for the average citizen."

In that connection, he refers to noted ABC television journalist Ted Koppel’s incandescent remarks in a recent lecture:

"There are at least two kinds of extreme ignorance. For centuries we have been familiar with the first kind – an ignorance that covered most of the world like a dark cloud; an ignorance that exists in a vacuum, where no information is available.

The second kind is a more recent phenomenon, one which presents itself in the form of a paradox. The second from of ignorance exists in a world of electionic anarchy, where so much information abounds that the mind doesn’t know what to believe. Information does not always lead to knowledge; and knowledge is rarely enough to poduct wisdom."

Valuable as the press is as a watchdog on government accountability, Schmulh underlines the need to recognise the limitations in relying on the media alone for guidance.

In that context, he also quotes Walter Lippman, one of America’s greatest columnists and political thinkers:

"The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like a beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents and eruptions. It is only when they work by steady light of their own that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision."

WHISTLEBLOWER PROTECTON: "Whistleblower" protection laws, a feature of the American democracy ladscape, are another vital element in ensuring government accountability, the most important of which is the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989.

(Whistleblowers are individuals who are willing to risk reputation and livelihood to expose government malfeasance by blowing the whistle on illicit government actions.)

Clearly, such legislation would be beneficial to all democracies, ours being no exception. Other American intiatives that hold great promise for democracies the world over are those dealing with promoting greater ethics in government through codes of conduct, conflict of interest and financial disclosures. Reliance on the written constitution is of course necessary; it by no means sufficient to ensure accountability in government.

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