Accountability in times of exception: an exploratory study of account-giving practices during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy

1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a global health crisis that affects all aspects of society (World Health Organization, 2020a, b). The speed of the pandemic's global spread has led many national governments to declare a state of emergency both to allow them to thoroughly understand the situation and to protect the people. As the disease continued to spread, this state of emergency was characterized by the adoption of various measures, including the limitation of individual freedom, the diversion of goods and services, the closure of public and private facilities and the use of mass-surveillance technologies (Ahrens and Ferry, 2020; Andrew et al., 2020; De Villiers et al., 2020; Nemec and Špaček, 2020). While they differ in terms of their implementation, these measures are exceptional within most governments' legal frameworks (Nay, 2020).

The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has required urgent reactions from national governments that, at times, have circumvented the usual deliberative processes. However, while accountability studies have become more sophisticated, little attention has been paid to how accountability is shaped by (and also shapes) unparallelled times such as these. The paper focuses on the Italian government's account-giving practices during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic (manifested by the communication between government officials and the wider public) and empirically analyses how the pandemic's evolution was related to accountability processes in response to abrupt, conflicting and extraordinary public governance challenges. In times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 outbreak, public governance arrangements play a critical role in governments' ability to respond immediately to contain the damages but also to recover and rebuild. For instance, governments are required to formalize and implement policy options and governance models that promote resilience investments such as health centres, test capacity and track and trace systems. Risk governance and crisis management models, however, must rely on digital infrastructures and live data repositories for evidence that can shed light on how different areas, sectors or individuals behave and implement the necessary regulations. At the same time, regulations adopted through fast-track procedures must comply with extant systems of law and must be subject to careful post-implementation reviews. These challenges illustrate the importance of defining principles that are broader than efficiency or cost-effectiveness to include governments' ability to uphold core values such as transparency and equity. Understanding how duties of accountability come to be discharged in such exceptional times, therefore, has important implications for understanding the potential and limitations of the public governance arrangements that are set out. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how these processes of rationalizing conduct have become more sensitive to the emerging demands of health, safety and security. Consequently, novel processes of accountability aimed at aligning organizational practice with wider societal discourses can be seen to emerge (Ahrens, 1996).

This paper aims to increase knowledge and understanding of accountability in times of exception. Drawing on the notion of styles of accountability, this paper classifies and analyses the ways in which governments' emergent reactions to the COVID-19 challenge can reveal wider accountability trends. This paper contributes to the accountability literature by showing that during times of exception (Agamben, 2005), the emerging “styles of accountability” do not depend so much on cultural determinism or the exigency of aligning “rhetoric and practice with wider public discourses” (Ahrens, 1996, p. 140) as on the need to enhance “shared responsibility” (Sciulli, 2018). The existing literature has shown how governments have mobilized political capital to alter the role of accountability in times of crisis (Demirag et al., 2020). This paper builds on this research by critically analysing the mechanisms through which the Italian government sought to combine public governance and public accountability issues as a means of urging shared responsibility. The notion of styles plays an important role in enhancing our understanding of how shared responsibility is promoted during various phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, people living in areas in which the virus is actively circulating should know the restrictions applied to the populations when the number of active cases is proportionally increasing (i.e. mandatory testing or self-quarantine for travellers; tighter mobility regulations and reduced social interaction). They should also be familiar with the criteria that governments use to determine whether such measures are appropriate. However, while restrictive measures are developed by experts from health authorities in conjunction with government representatives, trade unions and business associations, it is ultimately the population that makes the final decision as to whether or not to follow the recommended protocols. That is, people build their knowledge bases regarding the pandemic's evolution through the justification of operational proposals before deciding to take on (or not) a shared responsibility. The analysis reveals five styles of accountability (rebuttal, dismissal, reactive, proactive and coactive), with each style underlining the different ways in which accounting is used within the context of extraordinary public governance challenges.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. The next section will briefly introduce Agamben's “state of exception,” which has been used to frame the paper's conceptual underpinnings. It will also review key accountability scholarship to identify research gaps. Section 3 explains the research design, while Section 4 presents the analysis. The final section discusses the findings and draws conclusions.

2. States of exception and styles of accountability

States of exception have been framed as a government's immediate response to extreme and imminent threat. The concept has recently been studied by Agamben (2005) and earlier by Schmitt (1922), and it is used in this paper as a heuristic to frame the context in which account-giving practices occurred. This state is characterized by an extraordinary condition, wherein the conventional order is suspended. One of the key tenets of the state of exception concerns the indistinction between the private lives of citizens and the public sphere. This governmental process results in the transformation of the individuals' identity from citizens of a state to subjects over which the state has complete authority (Agamben, 2005; Foucault, 2008).

States of exception entail exceptional measures resulting from a state of crisis that includes a political dimension and may be described as “a point of imbalance between public law and political facts” (Saint-Bonnet, 2001, p. 28 as cited in Agamben, 2005, p. 1). These exceptional measures can range from suspension of the constitution and assumption of full powers by government to the loosening of the distinction between different powers (legislative, executive, etc.). Fundamental to explaining the existence of a state of exception is the theory of necessity, which implies an exception (dispensatio) with respect to the current legal order aimed at ensuring the “well-being of men” (Agamben, 2005, p. 25). Agamben (2005) characterized a state of exception as “an empty space” (p. 86), implying several risks that should be managed and addressed. This empty space must be filled with unconventional and unused practices or with known practices that assume new meanings and forms. Among these practices, accountability plays a key role, as the suspension of the usual rule of law can create uncertainties regarding the attribution of responsibilities to specific actors regarding key issues, such as human rights protection (Welch, 2007) regarding healthcare for frail and vulnerable people.

The state of exception concept has rarely been invoked in accounting and accountability studies. From an institutional perspective, systems of accountability (Roberts and Scapens, 1985) become not just subjective formulations but rather socially constructed phenomena that provide actors with a common framework for the shared understanding of social reality, and consequently they can be used by governmental actors to construct a shared understanding of social reality.

Analyses of accountability have long been developed in accounting research, yielding considerable insights into the competing types of accountability logics and rationales (Baker, 2014; Dillard and Vinnari, 2019; Everett and Friesen, 2010; Grossi et al., 2019; Rana and Hoque, 2020; Sargiacomo, 2015; Sargiacomo et al., 2014; Sargiacomo and Walker, 2020; Sciulli, 2018; Walker, 2016). Indeed, demands for increased institutional accountability have been regularly framed to assume that it is always and unambiguously desirable (Munro and Mouritsen, 1996). In this realm, the importance of accountability topics has often been considered in terms of the volume of disclosure related to the disclosed issues (Beattie and Thomson, 2007; Unerman, 2000).

A connection between the state of exception and accountability has been established in risk management studies, whereby accountability has been considered capably of reducing or amplifying risks when an empty legal space exists (Huber and Scheytt, 2013). The state of exception poses challenges and requires a reconsideration of the risk management of uncertainties at the institutional level (Tan and Enderwick, 2006) and the reconsideration of accountability as a critical issue.

During states of exception, accountability may be connected with the specificities of leadership and culture or with the adoption of tailored plans to face the emergency (Wilson, 2020). In effect, the spread and impact of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is here to stay (Kissler et al., 2020) and the idea of exception in relation to the pandemic may require that accountability be articulated in different ways, depending on the spread of the virus within a specific context to address protean needs. One stream of this body of the literature portrays accountability as a subjectively constructed notion that changes with context (Garfinkel, 1894; Pesci et al., 2020) and consequently can translate into different ways of being shaped. This literature studies the many forms that accountability may take, whose dimensions of meaning depend on the social institutional conditions in which relations of accountability are enacted and experienced (Sinclair, 1995).

The changing nature of accountability has been well documented in the area of management accounting. Ahrens (1996), for example, introduced the notion of the “style of accountability,” defining it as “a heuristic device to explicate some of the ways in which […] notions of “good management”, to which organisational members hold themselves and each other accountable, can be implicated in the shaping of very different roles for management accountants and their practice” (Ahrens, 1996, p. 140). This construct has helped to theorize the specific “ways in which accounting was implicated in processes of accountability” (Ahrens, 1996, p. 170).

This paper uses the concept notion of “styles of accountability” to empirically illustrate the ways in which an exceptional public governance challenge can reveal wider accountability trends. In this empirical context, each style is embedded in a distinct mode in which the Italian government has discharged its duties of accountability for the exceptional measures taken as well as in the individual actions and individual responsibility required for the measures' success. In particular, the main features of possible styles of accountability related to these modes can be inferred by referring to the literature that, in contexts where humanitarian issues are involved, tries to point out how accountability has been and/or should be shaped.

Sargiacomo (2015) used Agamben's (2005) notion of states of exception to examine how calculative practices and classification systems helped guide emergency responses to the 2009 earthquake in Italy's Abruzzo region. The study highlighted that, during the state of exception, “provisional exceptional measures are transformed into “a technique of government”” (Sargiacomo, 2015, p. 70; Agamben, 2005, pp. 2–3). The evolution of calculative practices and the exceptional measures that translate in government techniques may be regarded as key features in relation to the development of different styles of accountability during a state of exception.

Theoretical enquiries have also challenged some positions set out in the existing accountability literature. These challenges are represented by the “burden that accountability may place on the accountable self who is expected to provide a convincing account even in situations where this is extremely difficult or even impossible” (Messner, 2009, p. 919). The provision of convincing accounts can acquire particular urgency during times of exception that originate from the need to protect human beings. Nevertheless, established and sound accountability practices for facing such situations are lacking; moreover, accountability practices – even those relating to humanitarian fields – have been criticized for their focus on accounting only for positive performances and for their lack of focus on true compassion. Thus, an examination of the apparent lack of accountability in such contexts can help in understanding which elements accountability should encompass in states of exception relating to humanitarian issues. In particular, the literature (Everett and Friesen, 2010) suggests that a proper accountability style when dealing with humanitarian needs should focus on sentiments such as “compassion”. The word “compassion” derives its original meaning the Latin cum pateo, which suggests identification with the pain of others, which is particularly crucial when humanitarian needs are at stake.

Similarly, some authors have noted that accountability during times of exception may not be effective owing to the excessive emphasis on technical devices and calculations that are unable to assess the impact on responsibility. Baker (2014), for example, studied breakdowns in accountability during and after Hurricane Katrina and concluded that governments “relied to an excessive extent on a calculative accountability… instead of a calculative accountability they should have relied more on the “potential of accountability to enhance levels of responsibility for the other”” (Baker, 2014, p. 621; McKernan, 2012, p. 259). Consequently, accountability styles in time of exception should also include the development of a linkage between calculative accountability (or accounting practices) and their effective use in enhancing responsibility.

Other papers have investigated accounting in the context of disasters that determine a state of exception, emphasizing the role of individuals who participate in the accountability process (Sargiacomo and Walker, 2020) and introducing the notion of “shared responsibility” (Sciulli, 2018), wherein each actor “has a responsibility for their well-being” (Sciulli, 2018, p. 42). Sciulli's (2018) work focuses on the fact that “shared responsibility” must be communicated to the community to allow actors to assume an active role in public risk governance (Sciulli, 2018, p. 41). The individual participation in the accountability process that culminates in a shared responsibility could be considered a key desirable feature of the styles of accountability that may develop during a state of exception associated with humanitarian issues.

In sum, these studies indicated that accountability could constitute one technique for enhancing citizens' responsibility in facing humanitarian problems in times of exception. Certainly, the difficulty in translating accountability into effective responsibility at the individual level suggests that in order to build styles of accountability that can be considered effective in time of exception, it is fundamental that an approach reaches the individual sphere to enhance a shared responsibility.

Notably, the COVID-19 pandemic has not had the usual temporal characteristics of disasters (which tend to occur within a limited period and have a clear beginning and end) and consequently, in a similar context, it is argued that different styles of accountability are developed and evolve over time. The following section sets out the research design.

3. Research design

This paper is based on a single exploratory case study that examines the Italian government's account-giving practices during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. This approach was selected for the flexibility it allowed in acquiring new insights into the emerging phenomenon under investigation (Yin, 2004). Italy represents a suitable context for this analysis because it was the first European country to be significantly impacted by SARS-CoV-2 and thus had to cope with this unprecedented situation before other Western nations (Boccia et al., 2020; Molinari, 2020).

The analysis addressed by this research covers the period from January 1, 2020 to August 7, 2020. The starting date was chosen because it represents the development of global awareness that China was experiencing a new and dangerous health crisis. The end date coincides with the date on which the Italian government issued a decree outlining economic support measures to assist the country's recovery and resumption of activities. It also represents the conclusion of the first cycle of the state of exception (Agamben, 2005) caused by the spread of COVID-19. In this first cycle, it is possible to observe a progressive development of norms and calculative practices in response to the spread of the pandemic, the institutionalization of a shared responsibility among all citizens and the first results of the application of norms and the assumption of shared responsibility, thanks to which the gravity of the health emergency fades, leaving more room for economic recovery measures.

This case study analyses publicly available government data, including reports, press conferences, websites, legal acts and speeches. The classification of the data focused primarily on the material obtained through analysis of the press conferences held by the Prime Minister and the Italian Civil Protection Department (hereafter CPD), which were subsequently complemented by, and integrated with, other material. The CPD supports the Italian Prime Minister and the Italian government in coordinating all national resources to protect the population in the event of a serious emergency. Within this study timeframe, the CPD arranged 68 press conferences, while the Prime Minister arranged 26 press conferences, thus developing the Italian government's accountability to the population during the period under analysis (see Appendixes 1 and 2).

The researchers transcribed all press conferences given by the CPD and Prime Minister using publicly available online subtitle extractor software and downloaded video recordings. The transcriptions of the 94 press conferences served as input for the coding process, resulting in five overarching phases consolidation, each representing a separate analytical dimension of enquiry and, consequently, a different style of accountability. The content of the conferences was classified according to the development of specific issues identified by the literature: the development of norms and calculative techniques (Sargiacomo, 2015); the volume of topics related to informing the population on the spread of the virus (Beattie and Thomson, 2007; Unerman, 2000; Baker, 2014); the use of rhetorical language addressed to foster compassion (Everett and Friesen, 2010; Baker, 2014) and the exigency of sharing responsibility (Sargiacomo and Walker, 2020; Sciulli, 2018). The study's inductive nature permits the detection of differences in the development of the aforementioned issues and leads to the definition of five styles of accountability: rebuttal, dismissal, reactive, proactive and coactive.

In addition, a quantitative content analysis supported the definition of the five styles of accountability. This analysis was performed using the downloaded press conference videos to capture duration, topics discussed, speakers and the number and length of questions allowed. The number and length of the press conferences was a key object of investigation in this study as a proxy for the “volume” of disclosure, which is considered in the literature as directly linked to the importance attributed to a certain topic (Beattie and Thomson, 2007; Unerman, 2000). Analysis of the videos yielded output on how many minutes speakers spent on each discussed topic. From the Prime Minister's conferences, six main topic categories emerged (health, safety, economics, national policy, education and foreign policy), while, from the CPD's conferences, six categories emerged (health, safety, economics, national policy, education and foreign policy). This approach allowed the researchers to obtain a first impression of the importance of communicating COVID-related information. In this regard, particular emphasis should be placed on the repetition of forms of communication and concepts that are considered able to “impress” the information's receiver (Pesci et al., 2015).

The second source of data was the public online databases through which the Ministry of Health and the CPD updated data on the evolution of the pandemic. This database contains data on the spreading of the infection, such as the epidemiological curve and data on the virological testing undertaken. These conferences and databases were considered the main accountability tools adopted to inform the Italian population regarding the state of exception arising from the COVID-19 pandemic (Agamben, 2005). Other documents that were analysed included two reports from international health bodies (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDPC), 2020; WHO, 2020a) and one report from the Italian National Social Security Institute [Istituto Nazionale della Previdenza Sociale (INPS), 2020].

The last source of data was the legal acts enacted by the Italian government and Parliament during the period analysed. A total of 30 regulatory sources were downloaded and summarised (see Appendixes 1 and 2).

The following section presents the analysis of the five phases in the context of the styles of accountability heuristics (Ahrens, 1996).

4. Empirical analysis and discussion

This section examines how the CPD discussed the circumstances surrounding the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic by revealing five styles of accountability – rebuttal, dismissal, reactive, proactive and coactive.

In particular, the different styles of accountability show a progressive development along some issues:

1. Techniques of governance (the CPD's role and technicians' role) and accounting (development of dashboard showing the numbers of the spread of the pandemic) that, as suggested by Sargiacomo (2015), are tools for governing the state of exception;

2. The volume and topics of accountability devoted to informing the population on norms and reasons for them (Beattie and Thomson, 2007; Unerman, 2000; Baker, 2014);

3. The willingness to establish an emotional link with the population (Everett and Friesen, 2010; Baker, 2014);

4. The development of a concept of shared responsibility between government and citizens (Sargiacomo and Walker, 2020; Sciulli, 2018).

The fact that a style of accountability embeds points 3 and 4 represents an evolution of that style in contrast to those that do not embed such points because, as previously explained, the failure of accountability systems in the humanitarian context has been attributed to the absence of such conditions (Everett and Friesen, 2010; Baker, 2014; Sciulli, 2018; Sargiacomo and Walker, 2020).

Table 1 summarises several key findings that help interpret the evolution of accountability in five phases.

5. Conclusions

This paper aimed to increase our knowledge and understanding of accountability in times of exception. To achieve this aim, the paper critically analysed the mechanisms through which the Italian government sought to combine public governance and public accountability issues in an attempt to urge shared responsibility in times of exception. Drawing on the styles of accountability concept, this paper demonstrated how the government responded to the COVID-19 challenge. Through the analysis of publicly available government data complemented by, and integrated with, other material, the paper provides empirical evidence of how the evolution of the pandemic was related to accountability. The analysis revealed five overarching phases, each representing a different style of accountability. By identifying five styles of accountability (rebuttal, dismissal, reactive, proactive and coactive), the findings show that the state of exception was characterized by the different ways in which the government justified their conduct. In particular, during the initial phases of the pandemic, the accountability styles were focused on the government's responsibility, while in the last two phases, accountability focused on citizens' responsibility (Everett and Friesen, 2010; Baker, 2014) by creating a stronger sense of “shared responsibility” (Sciulli, 2018).

This paper contributes to the literature by offering the understanding that times of exception lend distinguishing features to accountability; in particular, it shows that the protean (Walker, 2016) nature of accountability in times of exception related to humanitarian needs must develop towards more shared forms that can result from a previously established emotional link with the actors involved. The more the process of communication is effective in creating an emotional ground for entrusting responsibility to citizens, the more successful the result is likely to be. In this regard, the paper builds on the existing literature that evidenced the need for an accountability that was more focused on compassion (Everett and Friesen, 2010; Baker, 2014), but in this paper, the role of the government in enhancing such sentiments is investigated. This paper also advances existing research on shared accountability (Sciulli, 2018) by showing that accountability can translate into an effective tool to help citizens assume responsibility when the individual emotional level is involved in the process. “Shared responsibility” when the need to protect the population surpasses the usual legal boundaries can also exert a powerful impact by protecting the population through drifts in authoritarian forms (Welch, 2007) of governing the state of exception. Finally, the paper also contributes to developing studies on the effects of governments' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic (Grossi et al., 2020), showing that accountability styles may influence the ability to govern by enhancing the responsibility of the whole of society in relation to the necessary promotion and protection of universal health care (De Villiers et al., 2020).

This paper has limitations that open up avenues for future research. An important limitation is that the analysis developed in this paper is specific to the Italian setting and concerns a limited time window. In addition, future studies should consider the linkages between accountability styles and factors such as leadership, culture and plans to manage the state of exception in one or more countries (Wilson, 2020).