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Title: Accountability without Saints

Abstract: Can the power to replace leaders sustain good governance when no leader is intrinsically motivated? I study a dynamic accountability game in which an evaluator retains or replaces an incumbent based on public performance reports. When at least one type governs well by nature, Bayesian learning selects for good leaders. Without such "saints," accountability collapses: accumulated trust erodes the evaluator's willingness to replace; career incentives vanish, and no coherent equilibrium sustains effort. Committed periodic review, that is, a fixed rule that holds every incumbent to the same standard regardless of reputation, restores positive governance by preserving career incentives across terms. The governance frontier, the best achievable governance under such rules, falls short of what saints achieve and is characterized in closed form. The impossibility extends beyond the baseline finite-signal model to Gaussian signals, suggesting the trust trap is a general feature of Bayesian accountability.