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1. Introduction: The Idea of Accountable Public Office
‘Athenian leaders were called to account more than any other such group in history’.1 With this claim, historian Mogens Herman Hansen identifies a common idea of ‘calling to account’ that echoes across many places and times. Indeed, we may posit a fundamental relationship between office and accountability, considered as a form of controlling and delimiting rule, that is common to the ancient Greeks and to most other forms of constitutional rule, including the Scottish civil law and the common law of England and Wales and of the United States As two scholars have put it in a recent American law review article, ‘The concept of accountability serves as administrative law's organizing principle’,2 and looking back to older English common law principles, another scholar explains that ‘the concept of office’ was defined ‘by the accountability regime which attaches to it’.3 A recent Institute for Government report explains that ‘at heart’, still today in the United Kingdom, ‘accountability is about a relationship – between those responsible for something and those who have a role in passing judgement on how well that responsibility was discharged’,4 and I'll return to the four forms that report identifies that such a relationship might take: oversight, regulation, inspection, and scrutiny.5
But the other side of Hansen's assertion is that, while leaders in many times and places from ancient Greece to today have been called to account, there is something distinctive about ancient Athens, in that leaders there were called to account more than any other group in history. In Athens, accountability procedures and the control of public office more generally gave the people as a whole a meaningful voice in defining, revealing, and judging the misuse of office, and in holding every single official regularly and personally accountable for their use of their powers. And this is suggestive for thinking in our own time about how and why to maintain the meaningfulness of accountability, rather than letting it devolve into a matter of tick boxes or shadow play.
Just as an Annual General Meeting must establish offices, fill them, and hold their exercise accountable, so too did any classical Greek constitutional form of rule: in them hierarchical subordination intersected...