Jan Biela

The empirical assessment of agency accountability: a regime approach and an application to the German Bundesnetzagentur

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 Bundesnetzagenturs accountability regime, which shows its suitability for empirical purposes. Points for practitioners Regulatory agencies are often considered as independent, yet accountable. This article provides a realistic framework for the study of accountability ‘regimes’ in which they are embedded. It emphasizes the need to identify the various actors (accountability fora) to which agencies are formally accountable (parliamentary committees, auditing bodies, courts, and so on) and to consider possible relationships between them. It argues that formal accountability ‘on paper’, as defined in official documents, does not fully account for de facto accountability, which depends on the resources possessed by the fora (mainly information-processing and decision-making capacities) and the credibility of their sanctioning capacities. The article applies this framework to the German Bundesnetzagentur.

Combining Federalism and Decentralization Comparative Case Studies on Regional Development Policies in Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, and Ireland

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.

Between Deadlock and Decentralization: Bargaining Dynamics in Federal States

Abstract A classic way to meet regionally diverse interests is to grant partial autonomy to sub-national entities, either by assigning them the right to decide upon policies (federalism), to implement policies (decentralization), or both. This article argues and formally elaborates that central governments may intentionally choose to increase decentralization in an effort to facilitate agreements that otherwise would be deadlocked. In this regard, a central governments decision to promote decentralization depends on its own relative valuation of policy change and congruence. We illustrate the empirical validity of our argument with a case study pertaining to the Swiss New Regional Policy.