Regulatory agencies are highly relevant in many sectors of today’s politics. Their increasing importance along with restricted democratic control represents a challenge for their legitimacy. It has been argued this challenge could be tackled by keeping agencies independent, yet accountable. But what does that mean exactly and how can we measure that? Are all agencies accountable and to whom? And are there differences between them?
The paper tackles these questions by first presenting factors from theoretical literature that are considered likely to hamper or promote agency accountability, such as the number of accountability fora, the public interest in a policy field, or the resources fora have available for agency monitoring. Based on these considerations, agency accountability is then assessed empirically for the cases of telecommunications and financial regulation in four countries (Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, and the UK). The resulting eight cases provide a wide range of institutional and sectoral variation, allowing for an exploratory test of the hypothesized causal mechanisms.
To assess agency accountability, in a second step, a newly developed regime approach to agency accountability is utilized (Biela/Papadopoulos, forthcoming). The approach aims to combine advantages of quantitative and qualitative approaches: It takes care of the cases‘ individual characteristics by using qualitative methodology, but applies an highly abstract and generalizable analytical framework in order to facilitate meaningful comparisons across time, sectors, and countries. First results indicate intriguing differences in accountability structures and their effectiveness, which indeed can at least partly be assigned to differences in the hypothesized scope conditions.
References
Biela, Jan and Ioannis Papadopoulos, forthcoming: The empirical assessment of agency accountability: A regime approach and an application to the German Bundesnetzagentur. International Review of Administrative Sciences.
