1. An earlier, much longer version of this article was published as EUROGOV paper C-06-01. It built to some extent on a chapter on public accountability which has been published in E. Ferlie, L. Lynne and C. Pollitt (eds),The Oxford Handbook of Public Management(Oxford University Press, 2005) and a Dutch paper which was published in W. Bakker and K. Yesilkagit (eds),Publieke verantwoording(Boom, 2005). Earlier versions have been presented at Connex team meetings in Leiden, Belfast and Mannheim. I thank Carol Harlow, Paul ?t Hart, Peter Mair, Yannis Papadopoulos, Richard Rawlings, Helen Sullivan, Thomas Schillemans, Marianne van de Steeg and Sonja Puntscher-Riekmann for their valuable comments on previous versions of this article.
2. P. Schmitter,How to Democratize the European Union . . . And Why Bother?(Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
3. T. Bergman and E. Damgaard (eds),Delegation and Accountability in the European Union(Frank Cass, 2000); C. Harlow,Accountability in the European Union(Oxford University Press, 2002); D. Curtin,Mind the Gap: The Evolving European Union Executive and the Constitution, Third Walter van Gerven Lecture (Europe Law Publishing, 2004); W. van Gerven,The European Union: A Polity of States and People(Hart, 2005).
4. M. J. Dubnick,Seeking Salvation for Accountability, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (2002), pp. 7-9.
5. Harlow,op. cit.note 3supra, p. 19.