Accountability and inter-institutional respect: The case of independent regulatory agencies

It is often claimed that accountability is a threat to legitimacy: rather than promoting good decision-making, it can just as easily skew public expert organisations in undesirable directions. As a counterweight, one prominent suggestion is that we replace standard control mechanisms with professional ‘ethos’ and ‘culture’. This chapter challenges both the diagnosis and the medicine, so to speak; there is no ‘accountability overload’ and we cannot replace control mechanisms with ‘ethos’ and ‘culture’. Rather, the task is to embed control mechanisms in the appropriate mode of interaction. The argument of this chapter is that the basic norms of accountability interaction cannot be unpacked without an attitudinal component: accountability practices require an appropriate form of inter-institutional respect. Using the case of independent regulatory agencies, the chapter begins with an explanation of why we should be concerned with the attitudes that govern accountability practices. By connecting the theoretical approach to ‘expressive’ theories of law, it should be clear how evaluating institutions in terms of respectful interaction is both familiar in actual practice and fruitful in normative terms.