Figure 1. Types of accountability

citizens can each exercise accountability, and it can exist even in nondemocratic regimes (Lindberg 2013). Another close concept is responsiveness, which means responding to citizen demands. Although accountability differs from responsiveness, a government accountable to its citizens must also respond seriously to their interests and demands (Ackerman 2005).

Schedler (1999) defines accountability as a relationship between an accounting party and an accountable party, with the latter required to inform and justify its actions to the former and suffer possible punishment in case of misconduct. Based on this definition, accountability has two main dimensions: answerability (which refers to the accountable party’s obligation to inform and explain its decisions to the accounting party) and enforcement (which refers to the ability of the accounting party to punish misconduct) (Schedler 1999). Behn (2001) also incorporates punishment into his definition of accountability, saying that “accountability means punishment.” Examples of accountability can include answerability, enforcement, or both. For example, in many countries, the legislative body can question government members and hold a vote of no confidence to remove them from office, whereas citizens are not able to question and investigate public officials but can punish them by voting them out of office (Schedler, Diamond, and Plattner 1990). Lindenberg (2013) defines accountability as constraints on the use of power.

Building on these definitions, Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova. (2020) focus on the accountability of the executive branch of the government or political accountability and define it as de facto constraints on the government’s use of political power through requirements for justification of its actions and potential sanctions. They conceptualize accountability by identifying to whom the government should be accountable. They organize accountability into three subtypes (see Figure 1):

• Vertical accountability refers to the ability of citizens to hold their government accountable through elections. • Horizontal accountability refers to checks and balances between state institutions. • Diagonal accountability refers to oversight by civil society organizations and the media.

Vertical accountability captures how citizens hold their Figure 1. Types of accountability government accountable through formal political participation, which involves fair and free elections Government and freedom to organize political parties. Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova (2020) measure vertical accountability as electoral accountability and freedom of political parties. Electoral accountability captures the existence and quality of elections, the percentage of the population with the right to vote, and whether the head of executive is directly or indirectly elected. The quality of elections is modeled as a function of having an electoral Voters and Parties regime, as well as seven variables measuring various aspects of the electoral process, including the autonomy of the election commission, the accuracy of the voter registry, and a measure of how free and fair elections are. Vertical accountability also captures whether it is possible to organize political parties, barriers to forming parties, and how independent opposition parties are from the government (Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova 2020; Coppedge et al. 2022b). Vertical accountability in the form of free and fair elections is a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieve

Oversight Bodies V ertical

Media and CSOs

Horizontal Diagonal

Diagonal Source: Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova 2020.

good governance. Electoral accountability has important deficiencies such as asymmetry of information between citizens and elected officials, and elections as an accountability mechanism operate ex-post and external to public institutions (Ackerman 2005). Therefore, accountability from within public institutions or horizontal accountability must accompany accountability by voters.

Horizontal accountability refers to the ability of other state institutions to monitor the government’s activities by demanding information, questioning officials, and punishing improper behavior. This form of accountability reflects the existence of checks and balances between public institutions and prevents the abuse of power (Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova 2020; O’Donnell 1998). Horizontal accountability includes oversight by the judiciary, the legislature, and other government agencies (Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova 2020). Judicial oversight captures whether the government respects the legitimate authority of the judiciary, which is measured according to whether the executive power complies with the courts’ decisions and how independent the courts are. Legislative oversight captures the legislative constraints on the executive, reflected by how often the legislative power questions the government and how likely it is for it to sanction the government’s illegal actions. Oversight by other public agencies measures how other public agencies such as the comptroller general, general prosecutor, or ombudsman investigate the executive branch (Coppedge et al. 2022b; Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova 2020). The previous two types of accountability reflect the role of formal political institutions—elections, political parties, parliament, and the courts—but there is a third type of accountability—diagonal accountability—which operates through informal channels.

Diagonal accountability captures the role that citizens, civil society organizations, and the media play in holding the government accountable. Their role involves use of informal tools such as social mobilization and investigative journalism to improve vertical and horizontal accountability (Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova 2020; Mechkova, Lührmann, and Lindberg 2017). The media and civil society organizations have no direct authority or power to punish misconduct by government officials, but they play a key role by providing information to other actors such as voters and other public institutions, which increases vertical and horizontal accountability. They can also directly pressure the government through social mobilization campaigns (Goetz and Jenkins 2001). Diagonal accountability includes measures of media freedom, freedom of expression, civil society characteristics, and the extent of citizen engagement in politics. Media freedom captures such things as media censorship by the government, harassment of journalists, and whether the media can criticize the government. Freedom of expression includes variables measuring the degree to which citizens are free to discuss different topics and indicators of freedom of expression. The third measure is whether the civil society holds public discussions before major policy changes. The final measure captures whether citizens are interested in participation in civil society and the restraints that the government places on civil society organizations (Coppedge et al. 2022b; Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova 2020).

Measuring Accountability

Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova (2020) construct the accountability index and its three sub indicators using variables from the V-Dem dataset,2 which is considered the most comprehensive and granular dataset on democracy measures. It offers a multidimensional, disaggregated approach to measuring democracy and includes more than 400 indicators of democracy, covering more than 200 countries from 1789 to 2019. Country experts are asked to rate various

2 The V-Dem Dataset. https://www.v-dem.net/vdemds.html

dimensions of democracy, and each country has a minimum of 25 experts, each of whom codes indicators in their area of expertise. The V-Dem project uses more than 3,500 country experts who provide expert information via online surveys. Country experts are usually academics or professionals with detailed knowledge in one or more areas; approximately two-thirds are nationals or residents of the country on which they provide information, so they are familiar with the political and institutional developments in these countries (Coppedge et al. 2022c). Nevertheless, expert-coded data can be problematic because rating complex concepts requires judgment, which can vary between experts (Maxwell, Marquardt, and Lührmann 2018). Variation between experts, especially in scale perception and reliability, can lead to measurement errors (Marquardt 2020). The V-Dem project uses an item response theory model3 to convert ordinal answers by experts to continuous estimates. These models have been found to outperform simple averages when experts’ answers vary in reliability or exhibit differential item functioning (Marquardt and Pemstein 2018). The V-Dem dataset also uses other methodological tools to ensure rating reliability and provide confidence intervals in the experts’ ratings (Coppedge et al. 2022c).

Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova (2020) operationalize accountability as a composite of multiple indicators from the V-Dem dataset. These indicators are aggregated using a Bayesian hierarchical model4 to estimate the accountability index and its three subtypes (Coppedge et al. 2022c; Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova 2020). The accountability indices are normalized to range between 0 and 1, with higher scores indicating greater accountability. Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova’s (2020) new measure of accountability has several advantages. First, it offers a novel conceptual framework with which to define accountability. Second, it uses a Bayesian hierarchical structural modelling strategy to construct the aggregate accountability index and its three subtypes, which addresses the data’s nested structure and missing observations. Third, it has very good coverage globally. The indices cover almost all countries from 1900 to the present. Fourth, it differentiates between sub-types of accountability (vertical, horizontal, diagonal). Fifth, Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova (2020) show that the new measure of accountability demonstrates content,5 convergent,6 and construct7 validity, following Adcock and Collier’s (2001) framework.

The accountability indices that Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova (2020) developed fill an important gap in the literature. The only previously existing accountability index with global coverage is the worldwide governance voice and accountability indicator (Box 1), which is an aggregation of perception-based indicators from various sources (Kaufmann and Kraay 2008). It has been criticized for lack of a conceptual framework (Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova 2020; Thomas 2010) and only goes back to 1996. Other accountability indices cover accountability for only a limited number of countries and years. For example, the accountability index that Williams (2015) developed measures accountability and transparency for 190 countries from 1980 to 2010, with variable coverage across countries. Democracy indices have also been used to measure accountability, but they are conceptually different from accountability measures (Lührmann, Marquardt, and Mechkova 2020).

3 An item response theory model is a type of statistical model that explains the relationship between unobservable characteristics and observed outcomes (Cai & Thissen, 2014). 4 A Bayesian hierarchical model is a type of statistical model written in hierarchical form (multiple levels) and estimated using Bayesian methods (Allenby, Rossi, and McCulloch. 2005). 5 Whether the new measure is a good representation of the proposed conceptual framework of accountability. 6 Whether the new measure is correlated with other related measures. 7 Whether the new measure produces the theoretically expected results.