10 Hence whilst issue salience as such is an important determinant of formal political accountability, there is no evidence that it is also the factor which determines whether the need for credible commitments matters in the delegation process. As the direction of the relation between government capacity and delegated discretion has not yet been settled in previous studies, two alternative hypotheses were formulated on the impact of government capacity on formal political accountability. No decisive support for one of the two hypotheses is found in the analysis. Nevertheless, the measure of government strength is positively and significantly related to accountability in Model 1, and the p-value in Model 3 is close to the critical value of 0.05 (p,0.1). Hence although the findings are not robust, there is some indication that the relationship is a positive one. This would support Hypothesis 6a, which states that independent agencies whose legislation is written under higher degrees of government capacity are subject to higher degrees of formal political accountability. It would also be in line with the study of Huber and Shipan (2002), who found a positive effect of legislative capacity on the detailedness of legislation.