No support is found for the credible commitment hypotheses. First, a measure of the number of veto players in the system has been used to test the first part of Hypothesis 3, which stated that the degree of formal political accountability is higher when the number of veto players is higher. Yet whilst the hypothesis suggested a positive relation between the number of veto players and the number of provisions for accountability, the analysis points out that the relation is, in practice, negative. That is, when a larger number of veto players are involved in the development of the statutes of an independent agency, the accountability arrangements in the statutes tend to be less rather than more extensive. The second part of Hypothesis 3 referred to the ideological distance between the veto players in the system. This distance was hypothesized to be positively related to degrees of formal political accountability. No support for this hypothesis was found in the analysis: the ideological distance between veto players does not have an effect on the number of accountability provisions in legislation. Although this does not confirm the hypothesis, it is in line with the results in the study by Yesilkagit and Christensen (2010), who do not find an effect of ideological distance on agency independence in the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden.