Democracy, accountability, accounting and trust: A critical perspective reflecting on a UK Parliamentary inquiry into the role of government accounts

Abstract

Democracy is a contestable concept. Variants have been mobilised/appraised in critical discourse. Concurrently, in efforts to operationalise democracy, accountability is demanded, and thus accounting, relying on a notion of trust. Advocating more studies into ‘democracy’ and ‘accountability’ in practice, we focus on the UK’s parliamentary democracy, entailing the UK legislature’s scrutiny of the executive, in turn entailing an accounting that in reasonable terms can be trusted vis-à-vis this role. We analyse hearings before the UK’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC) over 2017–19, encompassing a Parliamentary Inquiry into the role of Government accounts. We construct an immanent critique, seeking to uncover deficiencies in ‘democratic’ practices in the terms by which they are justified. Here, a working of Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995) conceptualisation of trust (considered integral to official discourse on Government accounting’s support role vis-à-vis democracy/accountability), informing analysis of PACAC’s discourse, help build critique. PACAC probed the Government’s annual reports and accounts, finding them deficient in terms of their promised integrity, benevolence and competence, entailing diminished trust: gaps in democratic purpose, accountability for democracy and competence were indicated. Elaborating, we suggest implied ways forward. We expand to consider further insights vis-à-vis radical orientation towards the democracy-accounting nexus.