ABSTRACT
Other chapters in this volume give an account of the developing literature on accountability in executive government (hereafter referred to as AEG), with its exploration of the dimensions and trade-offs of accountability (see, for instance, Bovens 2005). And over the past two decades (at least since Kent Weaver’s seminal paper on the subject in 1986), a literature has also grown up on the subject of “blame avoidance” by politicians and bureaucrats (hereafter referred to as BA). But, as so often happens in political and bureaucratic science, those two literatures tend to sit at separate tables in the epistemic dining room (Almond 1988), and the relationship between the two has mostly been left implicit.
