The accountability of non‐governmental actors in the digital sphere: A theoretical framework

• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Author: Mark Dawson
• Date: 01 January 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12420

VARIETY: VORIGINAL ARTICLE

The accountability of non-governmental actors in

the digital sphere: A theoretical framework

Mark Dawson

*

Abstract

The last decade has seen increasing demands for greater accountability in digital governance. What,

however, does accountability require and what normative goods does it serve? This article develops a

general framework for assessing digital accountability focused on four normative goods: openness,

non-arbitrariness, effectiveness and publicness. As the article will evidence,claims for digital account-

ability often refer to deficits relating to one or more of these goods. While scholarly attention has

deservedly focused on tying powerful digital actors to rule of law guarantees, the article argues that

accountability offers an important normative yardstick to allow citizens to contest digital decisions

beyond strict legality. The framework therefore provides a basis for both conceptually disaggregating

and normativelyforwarding accountability claimsin the digital sphere.

1|INTRODUCTION

At some point in the late twentieth century, accountability became the cure for all of society's evils. By now,

we are used to calls for everyone, from politicians to teachers to pop stars, to answer for and be accountable

for their conduct. The attractiveness of accountability in modern democracies (and even in non-democratic

states) lies in its ability to demand something from public officials without demanding too much. What is

demanded is that policy-makers explain their actions. Accountability is thus one piece of the emerging ‘culture

of justification’under which coercion can be legitimately demanded in modern societies only where it is backed

up by good reasons.

1

What is not demanded, however, is control. By most definitions of accountability, an

* Professor of European Law and Governance, Hertie School, Berlin. This paper was initially presented at the Conference “Democracy and Human Rights

in the Digital Age”on 19-20 February 2020 at the Law Department of the College of Europe, Bruges. I am very grateful to the conference organisers and

participants, to Karine Caunes, and to the anonymous reviewers for their extensive comments on the paper; as well as to Adina Maricut-Akbik, with

whom I developed a number of concepts discussed in the paper.

1

S. Gardbaum, ‘Proportionality and Democratic Constitutionalism’, in G. Huscroft, B. Miller and G. Webber (eds.), Proportionality and the Rule of Law: Rights,

Justification, Reasoning (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Received: 26 October 2021 Revised: 24 March 2022 Accepted: 25 March 2022

DOI: 10.1111/eulj.12420

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,

distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

© 2022 The Author. European Law Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

78 Eur Law J. 2023;29:78–90.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/eulj