The Responsible Contract Manager: Protecting the Public Interest in an Outsourced World

4. Ensuring Accountability and Democratic Representation in Government Contracting

60 Chapter 4 Ensuring Accountability and Democratic Representation in Government Contracting IN A REPRESENTATIVE democracy the behavior of private parties under contract to government should be under the control of public officials accountable to the citizens they serve. Ensuring accountability to the public is made more complicated because the public officials supervising the contractors are appointed rather than elected. And who are contractors accountable to? This chapter explores these fundamental issues of representation and the issue of citizen-bureaucracy linkage, connecting the preferences of the public to unelected leaders and the private contractors who work for them. Many discussions of privatization and contracting out note the threat that private contractors pose to our system of accountability. We share that concern and decided to provide a detailed analysis of this issue. We ask four fundamental questions: 1. What is accountability? 2. Accountability to whom and what? 3. How does the public influence the work of its government —how is “linkage” performed? 4. How does the growth of private contracting influence this system of representation and linkage? If we are concerned about the impact of contracting upon representative democracy in America, we need a profound understanding of our system of representation , starting with the definition of representation itself. This chapter is meant to provide a close examination of the underlying issues of government accountability. It examines the logic and reality of representation and analyzes the institutions that influence the public policies made by unelected government officials and the private contractors that work for them. This inquiry is at a different level of analysis than the rest of this volume to provide an in-depth treatment of the fundamental issue of accountability. Accountability and Democratic Representation in Government Contracting 61 Representation We begin, then, with the issue of representation. When we discuss contractor accountability, we need to ask the question: accountable to what or whom? We believe that the answer to that question is: “accountable to the system of democratic representation and its elected officials.” To understand what we mean by representative system, we must first understand the concept of representation. Representation is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon. Various scholars have seen fit to interpret it in strikingly different fashions. According to Charles A. Beard and John D. Lewis, the origin of representative government can be found in Europe in the Middle Ages.1 Beard and Lewis document four phases of the development of representative government in England. The first did not provide for representation of people, but of estates, “nobility, clergy, landed gentry, and burgesses of towns” (Beard and Lewis 1932, 231). These early legislatures met to ratify the king’s taxes and did not actually legislate in the modern sense. During the second phase of development, the tax-approving assemblage gradually became a lawmaking body. The “estate representatives” eventually began to discuss their common problems and grievances. When they came to agree on a preferred solution to the problem at hand, these representatives would draft a petition and present it to the king. If the monarch approved the petition, it became law. The king could not casually dismiss these petitions, “since the parliament held the purse strings [and] it could often compel the king to consent” (Beard and Lewis 1932, 232). In the third phase, the estate representatives achieved primacy over the monarch , thus forming the constitutional, or limited, monarchy. The connection between democracy and representation is one that contemporary scholars find quite natural. There are, however, nondemocratic aspects to the historic and modern concepts of representation. In fact, as a move away from direct democracy, representation can be seen as intrinsically antidemocratic. The legitimacy of the representative’s power in this relationship, as we understand it today, derives from the representative’s accountability to those represented. The power relationship may be explicit or implicit, mutual , exclusive, or possibly a variable subject to fluctuation over time. There 62 Chapter 4 are many perspectives regarding the power relationships involved in each view of representation, which we will explore in the following analysis. Why does this matter for our purposes here? Let us assume that contractors must be accountable to elected representatives. Let us also assume that the policy perspectives of representatives vary and the very definition of representation itself varies. Obviously, this means that the operational definition of accountability is far from simple. Representation is not simply adherence to popular will, and accountability is therefore not simply responsiveness to the...