Democratic accountability: the third sector and all
Abstract
Because they are motivationally and organizationally distinct, Third-Sector organizations are capable of doing many things that neither the state nor the market sectors can do reliably or well. Markets notoriously fail in the face of positive externalities, for example. Profit-seekers prefer to free-ride rather than to contribute. But for community-oriented altruists of the Third Sector, the presence of positive externalities is merely an added inducement to contribute to such causes. Within the state sector, non-market failures notoriously arise from rentseeking, as profiteers attempt to co-opt the coercive power of the state to serve their private ends. But being voluntary organizations lacking any coercive powers, non-profits are immune to that threat as well. In short: the Third Sector works where the states and markets fail, for reasons that are by now fairly well understood. Note well, however, that what enables the Third Sector to play that role in supplementing the other two sectors is that that sector is motivationally and organizationally distinct from the other two. Recalling that fact ought make us wary of arrangements, whether of 'partnership' or 'competition', that straddle the various sectors. The worry must be that, in bringing different sectors under the same yoke, the very thing that made the Third Sector a useful adjunct to the other two sectors — its organizational and motivational distinctiveness — risks being lost. These concerns, too, are familiar. Faith-based organizations rightly worry that their sacred missions might be compromised by the conditions that the secular state imposes (and inevitably and rightly so) when subcontracting public functions to outside bodies.3 Non-profits rightly worry that, in competing against for-profit organizations for public contracts, they will become not just interchangeable with but perhaps even indistinguishable from for-profit organizations, doing the same things in the same ways as forprofits would have done. And perhaps that, too, is inevitably and rightly so, given the 'level playing field' standards of fair competition that properly govern public tenders quite generally. My focus here is on a particularly compelling case of that general conundrum: the implications for democratic accountability. Different sectors being accountable, each in its own complimentary way, can yield greater accountability across social institutions overall. But arrangements that straddle sectors (whether through partnership or competition) inherently blur the distinctions between the sectors. In so doing, those arrangements undermine the accountability of each sector in its own terms and, hence, the interlocking system of social accountability overall. The plan of the paper is as follows: After some preliminary remarks on the concept of accountability and its various conceptions (section I), I develop a basic typology of accountability regimes (section II), with each of the three sectors of society being predominantly associated with its own distinct type of accountability regime (section III). I then sketch complimentarities among these three accountability regimes, leading to greater accountability overall than if accountability was pursued in only one mode (section IV). Finally, I show (in section V) how certain ways of yoking the three sectors together in 'public-private partnerships' might undermine key features of the peculiarly non-profit accountability regime, thus diminishing its distinctive contribution to the overall grid of social accountability.