Assessing the Role of Stakeholders, Public and Political Institutions in Government Accountability

Although in the last decades there has been an increasing demand for making governments more accountable, until now accountability has been addressed as an overall assessment of governments. In contrast to conventional studies on accountability, this article seeks to investigate empirically and comparatively accountability for social policies across multilevel governance structures in four countries with considerable variation in their institutional structures: Spain, Denmark, Austria, and Switzerland. This article is based on a novel survey conducted by the authors to academic experts on social policies (340 respondents) working at public universities/research institutes in the four countries here examined. The study examines how experts perceive and assess: (a) the participation of the private sector in the implementation of social policies; (b) the role of different political institutions (i.e. parliaments and political parties) in processes related to accountability for social policies; (c) the participation of different independent institutions (i.e. courts of accounts at the international, national and regional levels) and diverse type of societal actors (i.e. trade unions, the private sector, and civil society organizations) in processes related to accountability for social policies. By focusing on experts’ perceptions and attitudes towards multiple actors involved in the accountability of social policies, the study not only examines the role of governments, but also the role of the independent institutions created to monitor government performance.