Chair: Prof.ssa Valentina Gentile (Luiss Guido Carli)

Abstract:

Institutional accountability is central to democratic governance, yet philosophical inquiry still lacks a conceptually refined map of its agents, modes, and implications. This article supplies such a map through a three-tier taxonomy. First, it distinguishes the agents of institutional accountability—individual officeholders or institutional collectives—showing how this axis intersects, without collapsing, into vertical individual-to-instiitution and horizontal inter-institutional relations. Second, it delineates two different but possibly integrated modes of institutional accountability: accountability as “answerability,” grounded in principal-agent oversight, outcome-based performance assessment, transparency and potential sanctions; and accountability as “addressability,” grounded in reciprocal reason-giving, shared commitments, mutuality, and co-authorship of joint projects. Third, it identifies the implications of accountability for institutional functioning, distinguishing between practices of sanction-based correction of institutional failures versus those that cultivate trust-based cooperation among agents. Integrating these dimensions, the taxonomy is useful to clarify how specific configurations of accountability can uphold institutional action, and why deficits along any dimension destabilises it. The resulting framework provides a common analytical vocabulary for accountability studies and normative desiderata for theories of accountable institutions.