Accountability and Development: Introducing the V-Dem Accountability Indices

Accountability is one of the cornerstones of good governance. Establishing accountable institutions can ensure that public officials and bodies provide public goods in a committed, impartial and effective manner, as well as respond to the will of the people and respect the rule of law. However, a lack of disaggregated data sources has limited cross-national research on the role of different types of accountability. Instead, scholars have generally used aggregated measures of democracy writ large to proxy accountability. To address this research gap we develop new accountability indices utilizing data from the V-Dem dataset for virtually all countries in the world from 1900 to today. We specify three sub-types of accountability: vertical (formal political participation), horizontal (checks and balances between institutions), and diagonal (media and civil society), and we create an overall measure of accountability. We validate the indices by both exploring the different accountability indices in key countries and investigating the effect of different types of accountability on multiple governance outcomes.