| dc.description.abstract | Accountability is one of the cornerstones of good governance. Establishing accountable governments is a top priority on the international development agenda. Yet, scholars and democracy practitioners know little about how accountability mechanisms develop and thus can be supported by international and national actors. The present study tackles the questions of how, and in what sequence accountability sub-types develop. We consider not only vertical (elections and political parties) and horizontal accountability (legislature, judiciary and other oversight bodies), but also diagonal accountability (civil society and media) in both their de-jure and the de-facto dimensions. By utilizing novel sequencing methods, we study their sequential relationships in 173 countries from 1900 to the present with data from the new V-Dem dataset. Considering the long-term dimensions of institution building, this study indicates that most aspects of de-facto vertical accountability precede other forms of accountability. Effective institutions of horizontal accountability – such as vigorous parliaments and independent high courts – evolve rather late in the sequence and build on progress in many other areas. | sv |
| dc.description.sponsorship | For helpful comments, we thank Marco Larizza, David Janoff Bulman as well as participants in the 2016 V-Dem Research Conference, and 2017 Midwest Political Science Association, where an earlier version of this paper was presented. We received funding for this research project from the World Bank as part of the Background Paper Series for the World Development Report 2017 (WDR 2017) on Governance and the Law, where an earlier version of this paper was published. This research project, and in particular the data collection, was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Grant M13-0559:1, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to Wallenberg Academy Fellow Staffan I. Lindberg, Grant 2013.0166, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; by European Research Council, Grant 724191, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; as well as by internal grants from the Vice-Chancellor's office, the Dean of the College of Social Sciences, and the Department of Political Science at University of Gothenburg. We performed simulations and other computational tasks using resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at the National Supercomputer Center in Sweden, SNIC 2016/1-382 and 2017/1-68. We specifically acknowledge the assistance of In-Saeng Suh at CRC and Johan Raber at SNIC in facilitating our use of their respective systems. | sv |
