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This book offers the most comprehensive consideration of accountability in both government and the contemporary world of governance currently available. Twenty-five leading experts cover varying aspects of the accountability movement and apply them to governments, quasi governments, non-government organizations, governance organizations, and voluntary organizations.

Government accountability. --- Government accountability --- Public administration

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Government accountability. --- Legislative oversight

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What makes a government legitimate? Arthur Isak Applbaum rigorously argues that the greatest threat to democracies today is not loss of basic rights or despotism. It is the tyranny of unreason: domination of citizens by incoherent, inconstant, incontinent rulers. A government that cannot govern itself cannot legitimately govern others.

Legitimacy of governments. --- Government accountability. --- Political leadership. --- Political ethics. --- Despotism.

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The blame game, with its finger-pointing and mutual buck-passing, is a familiar feature of politics and organizational life, and blame avoidance pervades government and public organizations at every level. Political and bureaucratic blame games and blame avoidance are more often condemned than analyzed. In The Blame Game, Christopher Hood takes a different approach by showing how blame avoidance shapes the workings of government and public services. Arguing that the blaming phenomenon is not all bad, Hood demonstrates that it can actually help to pin down responsibility, and he examines different kinds of blame avoidance, both positive and negative. Hood traces how the main forms of blame avoidance manifest themselves in presentational and "spin" activity, the architecture of organizations, and the shaping of standard operating routines. He analyzes the scope and limits of blame avoidance, and he considers how it plays out in old and new areas, such as those offered by the digital age of websites and e-mail. Hood assesses the effects of this behavior, from high-level problems of democratic accountability trails going cold to the frustrations of dealing with organizations whose procedures seem to ensure that no one is responsible for anything. Delving into the inner workings of complex institutions, The Blame Game proves how a better understanding of blame avoidance can improve the quality of modern governance, management, and organizational design.

Sociology of organization --- Political sociology --- Government accountability --- Blame --- Political aspects --- Accountability in government --- Public administration --- Responsibility --- Criticism, Personal --- Blame - Political aspects --- Government accountability. --- Political aspects.

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South Africa is awash with policy failures, and policy confusion. We argue firstly, that our current discord over policy details has its origin in the (celebrated) negotiated transition. We hold that the vote count of an 85% majority in the Constituent Assembly in 1996 obscured the reality that the Constitution meant different things to different negotiators. The result was that South Africa, from the very start of the democratic era, lacked a national consensus on how to go about consolidating democracy. We keep on failing to build a proper roof over our democracy because the constitutional foundations are weak. In this book, we present a way out for South Africa from its persistent policy failures and policy confusion. We argue that in order to do so the major stakeholders in South Africa will have to jointly renegotiate the meaning of the Constitution. It is not a call for a new CODESA. CODESA was a conference to establish a new democracy. This is a call for a process to salvage that very democracy, where stakeholders will have to clarify what the pillars of the 1996 Constitution are: what does it stand for, what does it represent, what does it embody, and what kind of future does it authorise South Africans to try to construct.

Democracy --- Government accountability --- Nation-building --- Post-apartheid era --- South Africa --- Politics and government