Politics can be viewed as the search for consensus on underlying values to foster a sense of community. This search challenges contemporary political and administrative leadership because the policy process increasingly involves interactions among amorphous and unstable issue-oriented coalitions rather than a smaller number of actors with more stable and predictable roles. This article discusses politics, administration, and markets as separate ways of thinking—as decision-making perspectives—that produce a variety of expectations of accountability, often at odds. It presents a case study involving the contracting out of foster care services in Kansas to illustrate these competing perspectives and examines how market-based challenges to traditional political and administrative perspectives complicate expectations of accountability. The result is a situation in which the challenge of accommodating three crosscutting expectations of accountability (derived from the three competing perspectives of politics, administration, and markets) makes the already complex job of public management even more difficult.
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