Mark Bovens’ legacy in the study of public accountability lies in his theoretical contributions, conceptual frameworks, and empirical research, which have enriched our understanding of accountability in contemporary governance and informed debates on how to improve accountability mechanisms in democratic societies. Bovens aspired to provide an empirical and social scientific dimension to the study of public accountability. Reviewing Bovens’ contribution as well as the contribution of the current generation of accountability researchers educated by Bovens demonstrates that this aspiration has come true. The analytical rigor of Bovens has provided the tools to assess and analyze public accountability. The contributions of his students fulfill the quest for a genuine social scientific establishment of the concept of public accountability.

Almost four decades ago Bovens raised the question on which basis public servants can voice concerns on how the government operates, and which risks it entails. This question is still very topical. Speaking truth to power remains challenging and whistleblowers often experience retaliation. In this article we reconstruct Bovens’ ideas about whistleblowers, how they should be protected and which role a whistleblower authority should have (or not). We first look back at the moment Bovens coined the concept of whistleblower (‘klokkenluider’ in Dutch). How was it defined and which connotations did he want to evoke? Then we describe whistleblowing protection in the Dutch law and the role of the Dutch Whistleblower Authority, of which Bovens was very critical. Because whistleblower legislation is not sufficient to protect reporters, we plea for a broader and better protection through integrity management systems, ethical leadership and speak-up cultures. We reflect on the risks Bovens foresaw in (overly) emphasizing integrity in the government. We conclude with three challenges: the negative connotation of the ‘whistleblower’ label, opportunities and risks of anonymous reporting and financial compensation (or rewards) for whistleblowers. While Bovens raised these issues already in the 1980s, they are still topical and unresolved.

In their starting years (in the early 1990s), Mark Bovens and Paul ’t Hart were driven by the ambition to formulate an all-encompassing theory of policy failure. A few papers were published and a book manuscript was written but never published. The rise of postmodernism gave rise to the realization that the concept of policy failure was highly subjective and it was therefore impossible to formulate a grand theory of policy failure. They went on to write a book about the many ways in which failure might be defined, interpreted and measured – abandoning their search for causes.
In this paper, we revisit their early work and contemplate whether research into the causes of policy failure is desirable and feasible. We summarize their early insights and apply them to the analysis of a recent case of dramatic policy failure: The Groningen earthquakes resulting from drilling gas fields. We conclude that the early theoretical insights are still effective and seductive. We argue that the search for causes and, indeed, a grand theory of policy failure is both warranted and desirable.

In 1998, Mark Bovens signalled in his Utrecht inaugural lecture that digitalisation poses a major challenge to the rule of law. Information has become volatile and intangible, the government has less and less control over it and citizens lack the information they need to properly participate in society. For that reason, Bovens argued that a new fundamental right to information would have to be added to the Netherlands Constitution.
Although the matter of access to information is no less relevant today, Bovens’ proposal to enshrine these rights in the Constitution was never acted upon. This article explores constitutional, conceptual and fundamental rights-theoretical explanations for this. It first sets out what the added legal-theoretical value is of enshrining fundamental rights in documents such as the Constitution. It illustrates this by revisiting a debate on a somewhat related right: the right of access to law. Finally, it is argued that even if a right to information itself may not be well-suited to codification, this might be different for a broader, more encompassing right to good administration. In the end, this would still serve the purposed defined by Bovens, which is to protect the rule of law in our turbulent digital society.

Around the turn of the century, government digitalization mostly consisted of the automation of relatively simple bureaucratic procedures and the digitalization of organizations’ client databases. In this article, we argue that the ‘system-level bureaucracy’ has been surpassed by the emergence of information infrastructures, in which (big) data is shared among a wide variety of organizations, and the increased use of machine learning algorithms to assist administrative decision-making. We call this the ‘data-bureaucracy’. Rather than mere technical innovations developed to improve government efficiency, these developments have profound consequences for the way government organizations use public and private data, organize decision-making processes, and can be held accountable for their actions and decisions by citizens. We speak of the emergence of a ‘coding elite’ – data professionals that design concrete AI-applications and, in doing so, make (implicit) trade-offs between relevant public values beyond political and public scrutiny. In order to recover public value deliberation in algorithmic governance, we argue for the importance of inclusive design processes of AI-applications and develop a concrete framework for realizing such processes (‘inclusive AI’).

This article offers a theoretical review of the concept and theory of diploma democracy. We build up the review along three lines. First, we center the extent to which diploma democracy can be labelled ‘democratic’. We position the idea of diploma democracy in the broader political and philosophical literature on representation, pillarization, and inequality. Second, we focus on the ‘diploma’ in diploma democracy. To that purpose, we discuss to what extent the findings in the literature on diploma democracy reflect meritocracy (which aims to reward intellectual or performative excellence) caused by success in higher education, or rather reflect more deeply rooted societal inequalities that only come to light in higher education. Third, we connect the two building blocks ‘diploma’ and ‘democracy’ together. We discuss the societal and political impact that the theory of diploma democracy has had in the Netherlands, and engage with institutional measures that may be considered to moderate diploma democracy and its effects.

Migration is a key topic in political and societal debates in Europe. Public administration is also showing interest in policy and the migration society, albeit slowly. This is important because migration is related to policy at almost all levels and provides unique insights into the way in which policy processes and political processes proceed on topics of very high complexity. Yet it took a long time before public administration started to play a role in interpreting, explaining and proposing policy solutions for migration-related problems. In this essay we consider the administrative significance of the contributions of Mark Bovens about policy in the migration society. First of all, we highlight a number of key points from his contributions, such as his role in rethinking policy categorizations, developing a new perspective on managing coexistence in a super-diverse society, and examining the way in which public administration knowledge and policy can be linked in a context that is (to a very high degree) politicized. We then identify a number of themes that are important for further development in public administration. We focus on the workings of migration policies on the local level and how these unfold in the work of street-level bureaucrats, we stress the importance of discourse and images and the effects on belonging of migrants and their descendants, and we finally reflect on the effects of not feeling accepted in society, amongst others on (institutional) trust.