DOES PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY WORK? AN ASSESSMENT TOOL

In recent years, there has been a drive to strengthen existing public accountability arrangements and to design new ones. This prompts the question whether accountability arrangements actually work. In the existing literature, both accountability ‘deficits’ and ‘overloads’ are alleged to exist. However, owing to the lack of a cogent yardstick, the debate tends to be impressionistic and event‐driven. In this article we develop an instrument for systematically assessing public accountability arrangements, drawing on three different normative perspectives. In the democratic perspective, accountability arrangements should effectively link government actions to the ‘democratic chain of delegation’. In the constitutional perspective, it is essential that accountability arrangements prevent or uncover abuses of public authority. In the learning perspective, accountability is a tool to make governments effective in delivering on their promises. We demonstrate the use of our multicriteria assessment tool in an analysis of a new accountability arrangement: the boards of oversight of agencies.     

General job stress and job-specific stress in juvenile correctional officers

Measures of general job stress (Job Stress Index—JSI; Sandman, 1992) and appraisal of specific job-related stressors (SSOSQ; Anson et al., 1997) were administered to 413 juvenile correctional officers (JCOs) and to eighty-four of their supervisors. JCOs evaluated their work environment as more stressful on the JSI than workers in the normative sample on every job stress dimension except ‘time pressure’. The highest stress intensity score was in the area of ‘competence of others’, however, the highest score relative to workers in other vocations was for ‘physical demands and danger’. JCOs who had been employed longer and had higher educational attainment had higher JSI scores; no JSI differences were found as a function of JCO race or gender. Supervisor rankings of sources of stress for themselves were virtually identical to those of JCOs, although overall stress intensity ratings were significantly lower for supervisors. On the more job-specific SSOSQ, lack of support by agency, long hours, and inadequate tools for the job eclipsed physical danger as stressors. On this measure, non-Caucasians and those with longer tenure on the job had higher stress scores, particularly in the area of physical danger; females versus males reported higher stress stemming from lack of support by agency and everyday job duties. Supervisors rated JCOs' work environment as more stressful than JCOs did themselves, but rankings of stressors by JCOs, supervisors, and by adult officers in Anson et al.'s sample were not significantly different, indicating generalizability to a wide range of correctional settings. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for development of stress management interventions oriented around increasing officers' autonomy and sense of control.     

Effect of economic factors of perestro?ka on speeding-up the development of forensic medical services

The issues of intensification of medicolegal expert work on the basis of financial stimulation of competition between experts are considered. A new system of work distribution between experts, control and financial stimulation is developed. Three groups of objective indices are singled out and algorithms for different kinds of investigations are worked out. The system is approved in Medicolegal Bureau in Voronezh. Its use enlarged the volume of expert activities, increased the quality of expert investigations and shortened time of investigation performance.