More on politicians – accountability (praise and blame) and having 'blown it'

Further to my last posting on whether or not the jump in President Bush’s approval rating was attributable to him (i.e. provable that he caused most of it, rather than it just being the fact that he happened to find himself being President on September 11th), I came across a letter to Newsweek which relates to another aspect of the features of steps and outcomes in outcomes models as related to politicians. (The letter is the second letter listed here). This time it is the issue of accountability.Accountability in outcomes theory is whether or not someone should deserves to rewarded or punished for a change in a step or outcome (or more precisely, in the corresponding indicators). The correspondent in the letter attacks a statement in an earlier article in Newsweek. In the earlier article the author claimed that the Prime MInister of India – Manomhan Singh – had ‘blown it’ after four years in office.The correspondent lists a number of factors described in the earlier Newsweek article which highlighted the fact that Prime Minister Singh was very constrained in what he could, and could not, do. For instance, he does not have a political base of his own; his party does not have a majority of the lower house in Parliament; he has had to rely on representatives from the Communist Party to stay in power etc.The correspondent’s argument is that, in the light of these constraints, which the author of the earlier article had, himself, pointed out, in what way can Prime Minister Singh be said to have ‘blown it’.I have a lot of sympathy with the correspondent’s point of view, yet it is not one which people normally take when looking at politicians records.In terms of outcomes theory’s ideas of the features of steps and outcomes, the question is whether or not the Prime Minister should be held accountable for his failure to achieve the outcomes the author of the first article thought would be good for India (economic reforms etc.).There is a principle within outcomes theory that parties should only be held accountable where they have ‘reasonable autonomy of action’ in regard to bringing about desired outcomes. Where they do not have such autonomy, it does not really make much sense to blame them (hold them to account) because there is nothing they could have done about achieving the desired outcomes even if they had wanted to achieve them.There is obviously a lot of potential room for discussion about how much autonomy the Prime Minister had, but at face value, without knowing anything about Indian politics, I would side with the correspondent at least initially and agree that it is inappropriate to describe Prime Minister Singh as having ‘blown it’.To put it in technical outcomes theory terms, his potential accountability for desired outcomes was mitigated by the fact that he did not have reasonable autonomy of action in regard to those outcomes. Part of the mission of outcomes theory’s wider agenda is to critique and tidy up the way we talk about such issues in the interests of being fair to those who are on the receiving end of critiques such as the one referred to here.Paul Duignan, PhD (If you want to make comments on this blog posting you might like to make them on the outcomesblog.org site version of the posting so that everyone can see them there).(OutcomesBlog.org)