A Thin Blue Democratic Line? Organization, Interest, and Ethical Compatibility as Foundations of External Accountability Credibility

ABSTRACT In the context of rising authoritarian and populist political movements, scholars have increasingly identified external agency as a bulwark for liberal values. However, its capacity to protect such values may be contingent upon its acceptance within the profession—specifically, upon attitudes we conceptualize as “accountability credibility.” Trust in regulators by front‐line civil servants remains a neglected area of regulatory studies. Hence, we propose three contrasting sets of hypotheses and test them to explain the credibility of external accountability among a sample of police and gendarmerie officers in France in a context of meta‐regulation/multiple accountability. Credibility seems to be shaped by organizational rules—credibility being higher in military‐status than in civilian forces and when human rights education is provided—by expected personal (dis)satisfaction with the mechanism, and by the compatibility of attitudes concerning internal and external accountability. We propose to retain an integrated theoretical framework termed “OIAC” which combines three logics—of organization, interests and compatibility of attitudes—to analyze how public agents perceive the credibility of the regulatory systems governing their professional ethics.