Accountability and Performance Management: The Norwegian Hospital, Welfare, and Immigration Administration

This article addresses the following questions: How are administrative and managerial accountability combined, and to what extent does it depend on agency characteristics? We study the performance management between parent ministries and five state agencies in Norway in the area of hospital administration, welfare administration, and immigration. Four combinations of administrative and managerial accountability are examined: accumulation, substitution, persistence, and absence by applying a structural and a task specificity perspective. To understand the hybrid forms of public accountability in performance management, we have to look at how the tasks agencies perform as well as at their structural affiliations to parent ministries.