Calibrating Public Sector Accountability: Translating experimental findings to public sector accountability

Accountability mechanisms are among the most important means with which governments guard and improve the performance of public sector organizations. However, research documents a plethora of accountability-failures. A key issue is: how can public sector accountability become more effective? This paper seeks to answer this question by connecting two largely separated strands of research: public administration research on real-world organizations and experimental research on the effects of different forms of accountability on decision-making. The paper develops the Calibrated Public Accountability-model (CPA-model) from experimental research findings which can be used to investigate how accountability can be calibrated to task requirements of organizations.