RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATOR

Although responsibility, like the public interest, is a nebulous, often honorific term, it is a basic democratic ideal, bound up with the of one’s obligation to some external body or standard of behavior. Public administrators, for example, are responsible to the rule-of-law doctrine, which provides a fairly effective standard for judging some administrative decisions. Political responsibility is similarly involved with the idea of government’s control by public opinion, political parties, and the community. Responsibility is also commonly used to denote the obligation of an individual to behave according to certain ethical and technical norms. In public administration, responsibility has often had a negative connotation: we have usually

Responsibility and accountability should be differentiated. Accountability refers to the hierarchical or legal locus of responsibility. Responsibility, on the other hand, has personal, moral connotations and is not necessarily related to formal role, status, or power, although it is probably true that greater power brings greater responsibility. Thus, a department head is accountable for the actions of his entire subordinate, although in the actual fact he is not responsible for their use of the power, which he must delegate to them. This, in part, is the basis upon which President Nixon defended his position regarding the Watergate affair.

On the other hand, in exercising discretion every official is morally responsible for his decisions, although he is often not legally accountable. In practice, responsibility must be shared; it percolates throughout the entire administrative apparatus. Accountability, which concerns the formal relationships among and within the executive, legislative and judicial branches, can never be shared. The bureaucracy is regarded as being accountable to elected representatives and to the courts that apply the rule of law doctrine. Within the executive branch, accountability is sought through a hierarchy of offices and duties that seems to make possible a line of command from the top to bottom. The heads of the various departments must answer to the President as general manager. Bureau, section, and division chiefs are legally accountable in turn to department heads. Upon the President falls the monumental job of coordinating and directing the whole executive branch, under the constitutional mandate that gives him executive power and directs him to insure that the laws are faithfully cited.

This appreciation of accountability, however, is formalistic and misleading. Although senior executives appoint subordinates and thus exercise some control over their character and behavior, in specific cases they exercise little or no control. The President’s control is limited by the vast size and conflicting loyalties of the bureaucracy, as well as by the diffusion of power in our political system. He cannot hope to be aware of, much less supervise, all the activities of the some one hundred agencies for which he is constitutionally accountable. Executives at many levels face similar problem. As a result, legal accountability often becomes a mere façade, like the public interest rhetoric of a regulatory agency commissioner who is in fact the captive of his most vocal clientele group. In such cases, the authority and prestige of the state are bent to the service of private groups, and responsibility to the public and the chief executive becomes tenuous. As we have seen, this situation is encouraged by the size and scope of government, by the whirlpools of power that form in our political system, and by the unofficial representative apparatus provides by private interest groups.