This PhD thesis is essentially a collection of six sequential articles on dynamics of accountability in the reformed employment and welfare administration in different countries. The first article examines how recent changes in the governance of employment services in three European countries (Denmark, Germany and Norway) have influenced accountability relationships from a very wide-ranging perspective. It starts from the overall assumption in the literature that accountability relationships are becoming more numerous and complex, and that these changes may lead to multiple accountability disorder. The article explores these assumptions by analyzing the different actors involved and the information requested in the new governance arrangements in all three countries. It concludes that the considerable changes in organizational arrangements and more managerial information demanded and provided have led to more shared forms of accountability. Nevertheless, a clear development towards less political or administrative accountability could not be observed. The second article analyzes how the structure and development of reform processes affect accountability relationships and via what mechanisms. It is distinguished between an instrumental perspective and an institutional perspective and each of these perspectives takes a different view on the link between reforms and concrete action and results. By taking the welfare reforms in Norway and Germany as an example, it is shown that the reform outcomes in both countries are the result of a complex process of powering, puzzling and institutional constraints where different situational interpretations of problems, interests and administrative legacies had to be balanced. Accountability thus results not from a single process of environmental necessity or strategic choice, but from a dynamic interplay between different actors and institutional spheres. The third article then covers a specific instrument of public sector reforms, i.e. the increasing use of performance management. The article discusses the challenges and ambiguities between performance management and different forms of accountability based on the cases of the reformed welfare administration in Norway and Germany. The findings are that the introduction of performance management creates new accountability structures which influence service delivery, but not necessarily in the direction expected by reform agents. Observed unintended consequences include target fixation, the displacement of political accountability and the predominance of control aspects of accountability. The fourth article analyzes the accountability implications of the increasingly marketized models of welfare governance. It has often been argued that relocating powers and discretion to private contractors involve a trade-off between democratic accountability and efficiency. However, there is limited empirical evidence of how contracting out shapes accountability or is shaped by alternative democratic or administrative forms of accountability. Along these lines the article examines employment service accountability in the era of contracting out in Germany, Denmark and Great Britain. It is found that market accountability instruments are complementary instruments, not substitutes. The findings highlight the importance of administrative and political instruments in legitimizing marketized service provision and shed light on the processes that lead to the development of a hybrid accountability model. The fifth and sixth articles focus on the diagonal accountability relationships between public agencies, supreme audit institutions (SAI) and parental ministry or parliament. The fifth article examines the evolving role of SAIs in Denmark, Germany and Norway focusing particularly on their contribution to public accountability and their ambivalent relationship with some aspects of public sector reform in the welfare sector. The article analyzes how SAIs assess New Public Management inspired reforms in the welfare sector in the three countries. The analysis shows that all three SAIs have taken on an evaluative role when judging New Public Management instruments. At the same time their emphasis on legality and compliance can be at odds with some of the operating principles introduced by New Public Management reforms. The sixth article focuses on the auditing activities of the German SAI in the field of labor market administration as a single in-depth case study. The purpose is to analyze how SAIs gain impact in diagonal accountability settings. The results show that the direct relationship between auditor and auditee based on cooperation and trust is of outstanding importance for SAIs to give effect to their recommendations. However, if an SAI has to rely on actors of diagonal accountability, it is in a vulnerable position as it might lose control over the interpretation of its results.

The article explores how recent changes in the governance of employment services in three European countries (Denmark, Germany and Norway) have influenced accountability relationships. The overall assumption in the growing literature about accountability is that the number of actors involved in accountability arrangements is rising, that accountability relationships are becoming more numerous and complex, and that these changes may lead to contradictory accountability relationships, and finally to multi accountability disorder'. The article tries to explore these assumptions by analysing the different actors involved and the information requested in the new governance arrangements in all three countries. It concludes that the considerable changes in organizational arrangements and more managerial information demanded and provided have led to more shared forms of accountability. Nevertheless, a clear development towards less political or administrative accountability could not be observed.