Transparency and Accountability in Science and Politics

Transparency and Accountability in Science and Politics PDF Author: K. Andersson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230227767
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book challenges the role of scientists in policy making and the idea of deliberative democracy. The author argues that awareness must increase among both politicians and the citizens who elect them. We must revitalise the decision-making processes in representative democracy. The book proposes new institutional structures.

Transparency and Accountability in Science and Politics

Transparency and Accountability in Science and Politics PDF Author: K. Andersson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230227767
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book

Book Description
This book challenges the role of scientists in policy making and the idea of deliberative democracy. The author argues that awareness must increase among both politicians and the citizens who elect them. We must revitalise the decision-making processes in representative democracy. The book proposes new institutional structures.

Reclaiming Accountability

Reclaiming Accountability PDF Author: Heidi Kitrosser
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022619163X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Americans have long treated government accountability as a birthright. However, accountability is frequently tossed about in a rhetorically effective but substantively empty way. We often feel that those in government “work for us” and therefore must “answer to us,” but fail to grapple with the conditions under which we can really assess how accountable our government is. This is especially true with respect to matters of secrecy and transparency in government as, while we routinely voice support for transparency and accountability, we too often tolerate secrecy when associated with “national security.” The government plainly needs to keep some information secret, and there are ways to reconcile secrecy with accountability. In Reclaiming Accountability, unchecked secrecy is the primary concern as insufficient checking breeds unnecessary, even counterproductive, secrecy and is also deeply antithetical to accountability. Heidi Kitrosser shows how, for all of its influence, “presidentialism” badly misreads the Constitution. The book first explains presidentialism and its major component parts – “supremacy” and “unitary executive theory.” It then details how supremacy and unitary executive theory manifest themselves as arguments for a broad presidential power to control information. The descriptive elements lay the groundwork for Kitrosser's two normative arguments. The first is that the Constitution situates the presidency within a substantive accountability framework that entails substantial congressional and judicial leeway to impose and enforce external and internal checks on presidential power to foster transparency and accountability. And, closely related, the second argument is that supremacy and unitary executive theory misread the Constitution.

Transparency in Politics and the Media

Transparency in Politics and the Media PDF Author: Nigel Bowles
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857734598
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Increasingly governments around the world are experimenting with initiatives in transparency or 'open government'. These involve a variety of measures including the announcement of more user-friendly government websites, greater access to government data, the extension of freedom of information legislation and broader attempts to involve the public in government decision making. However, the role of the media in these initiatives has not hitherto been examined. This volume analyses the challenges and opportunities presented to journalists as they attempt to hold governments accountable in an era of professed transparency. In examining how transparency and open government initiatives have affected the accountability role of the press in the US and the UK, it also explores how policies in these two countries could change in the future to help journalists hold governments more accountable. This volume will be essential reading for all practising journalists, for students of journalism or politics, and for policymakers.

Zero Accountability

Zero Accountability PDF Author: Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Natural Resources U.s. House of Rep
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781539827764
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
Quality research benefits the country when it is sound, reliable, authentically peer-reviewed, paired with transparent access to data, and available to policy makers. Science is not science at all when outcomes are manipulated to reach ends predesigned by government employees carrying the federal mantle. Egregious examples around the nation highlight the devastating impacts to jobs and human safety caused by unaccountable federal bureaucracies that often engage in delay and denial. There is not a level playing field between agents of the federal government and private individuals, small businesses, or even local governments. The federal government's regulations and enforcement tools often enables it to outspend and outwait any possibility that outcomes inconsistent with their agenda will ultimately prevail in a dispute. Recent concerning examples suggest that the Department of the Interior has tolerated and failed to address, what one United States Senator called "abuse of science" within its sub-agencies' actions, and that employees were "emboldened" to "fabricate the science" to justify their purposes. Even more troubling, some employees were apparently rewarded for this behavior. Federal employees should be discouraged, not encouraged from engaging in "advocacy."

Government Transparency

Government Transparency PDF Author: T. Erkkilä
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137035544
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
Transparency has become a global concept of responsible government. This book argues that the transnational discourse of transparency promotes potentially contradictory policy ideas that can lead to unintended consequences. It critically examines whether or not increased transparency really leads to increased democratic accountability.

The Oxford Handbook Public Accountability

The Oxford Handbook Public Accountability PDF Author: Mark Bovens
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199641250
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 737

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Book Description
Drawing on the best scholars in the field from around the world, this handbook showcases conceptual and normative as well as the empirical approaches in public accountability studies.

Fostering Integrity in Research

Fostering Integrity in Research PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309391253
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
The integrity of knowledge that emerges from research is based on individual and collective adherence to core values of objectivity, honesty, openness, fairness, accountability, and stewardship. Integrity in science means that the organizations in which research is conducted encourage those involved to exemplify these values in every step of the research process. Understanding the dynamics that support â€" or distort â€" practices that uphold the integrity of research by all participants ensures that the research enterprise advances knowledge. The 1992 report Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process evaluated issues related to scientific responsibility and the conduct of research. It provided a valuable service in describing and analyzing a very complicated set of issues, and has served as a crucial basis for thinking about research integrity for more than two decades. However, as experience has accumulated with various forms of research misconduct, detrimental research practices, and other forms of misconduct, as subsequent empirical research has revealed more about the nature of scientific misconduct, and because technological and social changes have altered the environment in which science is conducted, it is clear that the framework established more than two decades ago needs to be updated. Responsible Science served as a valuable benchmark to set the context for this most recent analysis and to help guide the committee's thought process. Fostering Integrity in Research identifies best practices in research and recommends practical options for discouraging and addressing research misconduct and detrimental research practices.

Full Disclosure

Full Disclosure PDF Author: Archon Fung
Publisher:
ISBN: 0521699614
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
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Making Politics Work for Development

Making Politics Work for Development PDF Author: World Bank
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 1464807744
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.

The Illusion of Accountability

The Illusion of Accountability PDF Author: Justin H. Kirkland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009219642
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Does open governance strengthen democracy? The Illusion of Accountability contends that it does not. Leveraging a wealth of data from decades of legislative politics in the American states, the book assesses the causes and consequences of 'open meetings laws,' which require public access to proceedings in state legislatures. The work traces the roots of these laws back to the founding constitutions of some states and analyzes the waves of adoptions and exemptions to open meetings that occurred in the twentieth century. The book then examines the effects of these transparency laws on a host of politically consequential outcomes both inside and outside the legislature. This analysis consistently finds that open meetings do not influence legislators' behavior or citizens' capacity to alter that behavior. Instead, a link between transparent legislatures and an expanded system of organized interests is established. This illuminating work concludes that transparency reform only creates the illusion of accountability in state government.