One important but rarely explained issue is the lack of a long time view. The reasons for this can be divided into two. First, with regard to overall accountability, most of the complementary frameworks for managerial accountability have developed dichotomous category pairs which cross-sect the concept, thereby neglecting the longitudinal dimension. Second, with regard to democratic accountability, analytical frameworks have not been fully developed to mold future citizens into the understandings of political representation that has been shaped by public values. To sum up, the long-term perspective has not been well formulated with regard to accountability and financial accountability, and therefore, further work is needed to address questions concerning the neglected time dimension and neglected future citizens in their frameworks.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the evolution of the concepts of accountability and financial accountability. In Section 3, I review the conceptual frameworks on accountability and their dichotomous attributes in order to explain how the time dimension was overlooked with regard to the two concepts. Section 4 analyzes the trends in analytical frameworks for democratic accountability and describes how future citizens were excluded from democratic accountability. This section also includes practical implications based on a systematic review of the literature. Section 5 concludes.

2. THE EVOLUTION OF ACCOUNTABILITY AND FINANCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY

2-1. From financial accounting to managerial accountability

The nature of financial accountability is deeply embedded in its origin from the word “accounting.” The term is supposed to be derived from the stem “count” with the added prefix “ac” and suffix “ing.” From this standpoint, “accounting” stems primarily from two components: the root word, “count,” which means “[to] reckon money received and paid,” and the suffix “ing,” which indicates “describing the act or conse