Formal and Informal Mechanisms of Accountability in Local Governance. Towards a New Authoritarian Governance Model.

'Accountability crisis' followed by a series of recent global chaos has put a lot of pressure on all governments to adopt international best practices and innovations in their governance. A lot of authoritarian regimes are in democratic transition, adopting modern institutions in a prudent fashion and to the extent that their legitimacy is not endangered. Accountability is one of such a case. In this transitional stage, authoritarian governments accept the functioning of informal accountability mechanisms in complementary with formal ones. Our case study and empirical analysis of all legal documents made by 35 provincial governments of Vietnam published in their Official Gazettes from 2006 to 2009 show the positive impact of informal individual accountability and policy-making culture on responsive policy output while the influence of formal institutions is insignificant. Given this policy allocation, those provinces making more public administrative reforming legal documents have higher public trust in their responsiveness. Our findings imply that the legitimacy of the single-party regimes should be better guaranteed by modern management instruments rather than avoiding them by centralizing its power.