Four Challenges to Accountability in Contemporary Public Administration: Lessons From the United States and China

Abstract

Using the Romzek-Dubnick typology of accountability, the authors analyze challenges that reinvention and new public management reforms in the United States and China present with regard to maintaining legal controls, protecting non-mission-based administrative objectives, pursuing public values, and sustaining hierarchical authority. The authors show that reforms—especially outsourcing and results orientation—have very different consequences in the dissimilar U.S. and Chinese legal and political settings. The analysis contributes to those public administrative theories holding that when it comes to reform, law and politics matter, and that even when administrative problems are similar across nations, their solutions may differ.

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