Numbers that count: public accountability during crises

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show how, in the public sphere, counts and accounts create meaning and legitimate decision-making and action as well as providing the basis for public accountability. Public accountability is generally viewed as an administrative and stable relationship between the state and its citizens. However, during a crisis or disaster responsibility for what and/or who counts reveals the dynamic nature of public accountability. Design/methodology/approach To understand how counts and accounts are mobilised as a mechanism of public accountability during and after a crisis, they adopt an ethnostatistical approach. The authors’ use the death counts associated with the COVID-19 crisis as an illustrative case study to trace how the initial practice of simple quantification can be transformed into a novel metric through a process of remediation and recounting numbers that already exist. Findings Crises and disasters provide a unique context to study public accountability since the normal “rules of the game” and standard practices are subsumed by exigent circumstances. The COVID-19 crisis demonstrates that holding the state accountable for a crisis through death counts is not as straightforward as numerical representation implies. The classification schema, anomalies and misdiagnoses, incomplete and inaccurate data and lack of transparency or national reporting infrastructure all impacted on the reliability and comparability of COVID-19 death counts across jurisdictions and over time. While statistical modelling overcame some of the limitations of simple counts of COVID-19 deaths in the initial stages of the COVID-19 crisis, the adoption of a proxy measure, “excess deaths” with its rhetorical appeal enabled a shift in the focus of public accountability. The sensemaking associated with the term excess deaths normalised COVID-19 and served to dehumanise its long-term effects. Originality/value The COVID-19 crisis provides a unique case study to assess and adjudicate public accountability in times of a crisis and its aftermath. State actors are held accountable for a myriad of decisions and actions and often lean on statistics as a mechanism to deliver public accountability. Adopting an ethnostatistical approach to analyse the process of creating bespoke COVID-19 counts, accounts and recounts provides valuable insights into the social, political and institutional dimensions of “doing” statistics. They contribute to the public accountability literature by highlighting the dynamic nature of public accountability during a crisis or disaster. They also show how different statistics deliver accountability as a tool of bureaucratic administration, provide a basis for reflection and signal an end to the disaster or crisis.