Regulation has in many cases been delegated to independent agencies, which has led to the question of how democratic accountability of these agencies is ensured. There are few empirical approaches to agency accountability. We offer such an approach, resting upon three propositions. First, we scrutinize agency accountability both de jure (accountability is ensured by formal rights of accountability 'fora' to receive information and impose consequences) and de facto (the capability of fora to use these rights depends on resources and decision costs that affect the credibility of their sanctioning capacity). Second, accountability must be evaluated separately at political, operational and managerial levels. And third, at each level accountability is enacted by a system of several (partially) interdependent fora, forming together an accountability regime. The proposed framework is applied to the case of the German Bundesnetzagentur's accountability regime, which shows its suitability for empirical purposes.
Since independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) became key actors in European regulatory governance in the 1990s, a significant share of policy-making has been carried out by organizations that are neither democratically elected nor directly accountable to elected politicians. In this context, public communication plays an important role. On the one hand, regulatory agencies might try to use communication to raise their accountability and thereby to mitigate their democratic deficit. On the other hand, communication may be used with the intent to steer the behavior of the regulated industry when more coercive regulatory means are unfeasible or undesirable. However, empirical research focusing directly on how regulators communicate is virtually non-existent. To fill this gap, this paper examines the public communication of IRAs in four countries (the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, and Switzerland) and three sectors (financial services, telecommunications, and broadcasting). The empirical analysis, based on qualitative interviews and a quantitative content analysis, indicates that the organization of the communication function follows a national pattern approach while a policy sector approach is helpful for understanding the use of communication as a soft tool of regulation.
Studies evaluating the effects of territorial state organization on the performance of democratic political systems produce ambiguous results. The authors argue that research so far has suffered from insufficiently conceptualizing federalism and decentralization as two distinct dimensions. This article makes use of the advantages of a nested design and detects micro-level causal mechanisms underlying statistically confirmed effects. The authors conduct in-depth case studies comparing policy processes in four countries (Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, and Denmark) in the area of regional development policy, an area that exhibits typical effects in a macro-quantitative analysis, to back their hypothesized and corroborated macro-level relationships by micro level causal evidence. The case studies show that federalism induces subnational actors to adopt divergent positions and push through individual interests in processes of decision making, thus increasing transaction costs and preventing substantial policy shifts. Decentralization and subnational discretion induces actors to vary service delivery in an efficiency-enhancing way.
La régulation est bien souvent déléguée à des agences indépendantes, ce qui soulève la question de savoir comment l’imputabilité démocratique de ces agences est assurée. Les approches empiriques en ce qui concerne l’imputabilité des agences sont cependant peu nombreuses. C’est une approche de ce type que nous proposons ici, qui s’appuie sur trois propositions. Premièrement, nous examinons l’imputabilité des agences tant de jure (l’imputabilité est assurée par le droit formel des « instances » d’imputabilité de recevoir des informations et d’imposer des conséquences) que de facto (la capacité des instances à faire valoir ces droits varie selon les ressources et les coûts de décision qui influencent la crédibilité de leur capacité à imposer des sanctions). Deuxièmement, l’imputabilité doit être évaluée séparément aux niveaux politique, opérationnel et managérial. Et troisièmement, à chaque niveau, l’imputabilité est mise en œuvre par un système composé de plusieurs instances (partiellement) interdépendantes qui, ensemble, forment un régime d’imputabilité. Le cadre proposé est appliqué au cas du régime d’imputabilité de la Bundesnetzagentur allemande, qui atteste de son adéquation à des fins empiriques. Remarques à l’intention des praticiens Les agences de réglementation sont souvent considérées comme indépendantes, tout en étant tenues de rendre des comptes. Dans le présent article, nous proposons un cadre réaliste pour l’étude des « régimes » d’imputabilité dans lesquels elles s’intègrent. Ce cadre souligne la nécessité d’identifier les différents acteurs (les « instances » d’imputabilité) devant lesquels les agences sont formellement responsables (commissions parlementaires, organes d’audit, tribunaux, etc.) et d’examiner les relations possibles entre eux. Nous soutenons que l’imputabilité formelle « sur papier », telle qu’elle est définie dans les documents officiels, ne représente pas pleinement l’imputabilité de facto , qui dépend des ressources dont disposent les « instances » (essentiellement, leurs capacités de traitement de l’information et décisionnelles) et de la crédibilité de leur capacité à imposer des sanctions. Dans cet article, nous appliquons ce cadre à la Bundesnetzagentur allemande.
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