Decision-making Accountability And The Establishment Of Accountability System

Decision-making plays a critical role in government management, and is also one of the most-likely problematic parts of it. In realistic political life, though the decision-making mistakes can easily be seen in public policies at all levels of Chinese governments, few public officials are responsible for it still become a common phenomenon for the lack of effective accountability institution. Therefore, the matter of how to establish the decision-making accountability and correction institution then to achieve unification of decision-making power and decision-making responsibility, that can not only meet the needs of reducing or even avoiding decision-making mistakes but also play a significant role in strengthening the establishment of responsible government and promoting the modernization of state governance system and governance capacity. However, the contradiction between the universality of decision-making mistakes and the deficiency of decision-making accountability would inevitably lead people question about how could and how to realize decision-making accountability. And this doubt is exactly the core problem to be answered in this research.Accountability is a concept which depends on the surrounding circumstance, the raise of decision-making accountability has its own political environment and social context. From the aspect of political environment, the accountability practices in different political ecology between Chinese and Western proved that China is on a different way to realize accountability, which indicated the possibility to realize decision-making accountability under the political ecology of non-competitive election. From the aspect of social context, there are serious consequences and heavy prices of decision-making mistakes at all levels of Chinese government, which highlighted the significance to strengthen decision-making accountability. As a specific type of accountability, decision-making accountability is understood from the perspective of decision-making. There needs to be fully taken into account of its surrounding political environment and social context for seizing the connotation and denotation of decision-making accountability, and analyzed by integrating and absorbing different elements from various dimensions on that basis.In China’s political ecology and realistic context, accountability showed that the practice priors to the theory. The existing practice of accountability events indicated that the content of China’s accountability practice focuses on result accountability and execution accountability, while decision-making accountability is rarely seen. For this situation, through interviews could find that current problems of decision-making accountability manifested in two aspects of responsibility identification and responsibility investigation, especially the difficult to responsibility identification. Fundamentally, these problems in decision-making accountability are closely related with the deviation of decision-maker’s power-responsibility. Through case analysis could know that the deviation of decision-maker’s power-responsibility had different manifestations at different stages of decision-making process, and existed different causes at different levels of decision-making procedure. From the aspect of power-responsibility relationship, the decision-making accountability dilemma in China’s non-competitive politics can be explained through principle-agent theory, bureaucracy theory and decision-making theory. In practical terms, the inherent contradictions of Chinese principle-agent relationship affected the validity about the promise of decision-making accountability; the behavioral paradoxes of Chinese bureaucratic organization impacted the clarity about the relationship of decision-making power; the system defects of Chinese collective decision-making system influenced the certainty about the identification of decision-making responsibility.The goal of decision-making accountability is to establish a balanced and comprehensive accountability system. Under the chains of power-responsibility relationship, the organic combination of power chain, responsibility chain and accountability chain constituted the structural system of decision-making accountability. As for power chain, there needs to rationalize the relationship of decision-making power to solve the issue of "accountability to whom"; as for responsibility chain, there needs to clear the division of decision-making responsibility to solve the issue of "accountability for what"; as for accountability chain, there needs to improve the institution of decision-making accountability to solve the issue of "how to accountability". In short, the decision-making accountability system should be established by rationalizing the relationship of decision-making power as the premise, by clearing the division of decision-making responsibility as the foundation, by improving the institution of decision-making accountability as the fundamental, thus promoting the development of both theory and practice of decision-making accountability.