The accountability gap — the distance between the power institutions exercise and the accountability they face for how they exercise it — is the primary structural source of institutional failure.
The Gap's Structure
The accountability gap is the structural condition in which an institution exercises significant power over the lives of the people it affects without facing adequate accountability for how it exercises that power. The institution with the accountability gap is the institution that can fail the people it is supposed to serve without facing the consequences — the electoral accountability, the legal liability, the market competition, the regulatory sanction — that would create the incentive to serve them better. Every significant institutional failure identified in this blog's four years has an accountability gap at or near its centre: the police department without adequate accountability for the racial disparities in its use of force, the social media platform without adequate accountability for the harms its algorithms amplify, the private prison without adequate accountability for the conditions it maintains, and the pharmaceutical company without adequate accountability for the pricing decisions that limit access to medicines its patents control.
The accountability gap is not the only cause of institutional failure — capability failures and design failures operate independently of accountability. But it is the most consequential cause because it is the condition under which all other failure types are most likely to persist and compound. The institution with adequate accountability will be pressured to address its capability failures, to correct its incentive misalignments, and to reform its design flaws. The institution with an accountability gap will continue to fail until the gap is closed — because without the pressure that accountability creates, the internal incentives that perpetuate the failure will prevail.
The accountability gap is what allows institutional failure to persist. Every institutional failure that has lasted long enough to become a governance scandal was enabled by an accountability gap that allowed the failure to accumulate before it became impossible to ignore. Closing the gap before the failure accumulates is the governance investment that prevents the scandal — which is always harder to make than it looks from the scandal's aftermath.
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