Responsibility is central to public management; indeed, it is the purpose of public management in a democratic society (Bertelli and Lynn, 2006, 146). The concept is most commonly construed as synonymous with accountability in the way that the epigraph implies; the will of the people must be transformed into the governance tasks that government undertakes. A useful definition for our present purposes is to consider accountability as comprising “those methods, procedures, and forces that determine what values will be reflected in administrative decisions” (Simon et al., 1950, 513). Thinking of accountability in this way connects institutions, or rules and procedures, as discussed in Chapter 1, to values that are folded into ideology arrayed on a spatial dimension in Chapter 4. Responsible public managers maintain accountability when performing each governance task. This produces democratic governance.

Because of its importance, responsibility has been the subject of a very large literature. Most students of public management have probably read this book with some ideas from that literature in mind; that is a good thing. It is important to keep in mind that the political economy of public sector governance has core interests in common with traditional public administration literatures. In this chapter, we begin our discussion by thinking about responsibility in theory and then analyze examples of mechanisms that have been put in place to incentivize it in practice.