The Accountability Sequence: from De-Jure to De-Facto Constraints on Governments

Abstract

Accountability is one of the cornerstones of good governance. Establishing accountable governments is a top priority on the international development agenda. Yet, scholars and democracy practitioners know little about how accountability mechanisms develop and thus can be supported by international and national actors. The present study tackles the questions of how, and in what sequence accountability sub-types develop. We consider not only vertical (elections and political parties) and horizontal accountability (legislature, judiciary, and other oversight bodies) but also diagonal accountability (civil society and media) in both their de-jure and the de-facto dimensions. By utilizing novel sequencing methods, we study their sequential relationships in 173 countries from 1900 to the present with data from the new V-Dem dataset. Considering the long-term dimensions of institution building, this study indicates that most aspects of de-facto vertical accountability precede other forms of accountability. Effective institutions of horizontal accountability-such as vigorous parliaments and independent high courts-evolve rather late in the sequence and build on progress in many other areas.Keywords Accountability . Sequencing . Democratization . Government oversight . De-facto power Political accountability is both one of the cornerstones of good governance and a key topic in academia. This power of the people to hold political leaders to account is fundamental to representative democracy, hence a key feature of most definitions of democracy (e.g., Dahl 1971Dahl , 1989Schmitter and Karl 1991). It is also a top priority on St Comp Int Dev (2019) 54:40-70 https://doi.org/10.1007 Authors contributed equally and are listed in reverse alphabetical order. * Valeriya MechkovaValeriya.mechkova@gu.se 1 V-Dem Institute, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden the international development agenda, e.g., as a target of the Sustainable Development Goals (UN Resolution: A/Res/70/1). Yet, we know little about how and in what sequence different aspects of accountability evolve. The extant literature provides some suggestions on the sequence of democratization-thus how accountability starts to evolve. Dahl (1971) famously argued that it is conducive if competition among elites evolves before the expansion of participation, and there is some empirical support for this (Wilson 2015, p. 234). And while there are contributions on how one aspect of accountability may strengthen other aspects (e.g., Keane 2009), this study is the first of its kind by investigating if there are generalizable sequences in the evolution of accountability across 35 highly specific institutions with data covering 176 countries and 113 years.Taking Dahl's (1971) famous axiom as a point of departure, we argue that governments are more likely to allow for de-facto accountability if the costs of supplying accountability decrease and the costs of suppressing the demand for accountability increase. Distinguishing between i...

Sequential Requisites Analysis: A New Method for Analyzing Sequential Relationships in Ordinal Data*

“…To explore whether certain states of one variable are systematically conditional on certain states of other variables in existing data, we here extend the method termed “dependency analysis” from an earlier paper (Lindenfors et al., ; used in Wang et al., ; Mechkova, Lührmann, and Lindberg, ). The extension consists of illustrating how dependency tables can be compared using Monte Carlo simulations to test hypotheses.…”

“…Elsewhere, we have suggested a set of methods to identify sequences within a set of variables (Lindenfors et al., ; used in Wang et al., ; Mechkova, Lührmann, and Lindberg, ). There also exist a number of other approaches to identify sequences in ordinal and categorical time‐series data, many more or less inspired by evolutionary biology.…”

“…The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data set has solved the first issue by providing data on over 350 variables across 173 countries and the period from 1900 to 2012 (Coppedge et al, 2017;Pemstein et al, 2017). A first effort at solving the second issue was presented in Lindenfors et al (2018) (utilized in Wang et al, 2017;Mechkova, Lührmann, and Lindberg, 2019). The present article takes that framework significantly further and presents what we believe to be a viable solution to the second problem.…”

“…A first effort at solving the second issue was presented in Lindenfors et al. () (utilized in Wang et al., ; Mechkova, Lührmann, and Lindberg, ). The present article takes that framework significantly further and presents what we believe to be a viable solution to the second problem.…”

Successful and Failed Episodes of Democratization: Conceptualization, Identification, and Description

“…These studies are nevertheless oriented towards explaining the timing of individual factors rather than longer chains of interdependent institutional reforms. Our approach to identifying a sample of democratization episodes, however, makes it possible to draw upon methods that borrow from genomics and evolutionary biology to differentiate and analyze processes associated with democratization (Lindenfors, Krusell & Lindberg, 2016;Lindenfors et al, 2018;Mechkova, Lührmann & Lindberg, 2018;Wang et al, 2017). Here, we briefly illustrate one way to use the variables that comprise the electoral democracy index to explore differences in successful and failed democratization episodes.…”