Third, according to Hypothesis 4, independent agencies which deal with market regulation should be subject to less extensive accountability arrangements. No support for this hypothesis was found in the analysis. There is no significant difference between regulatory and executive agencies. Looking at the data, we indeed see that there are quite some regulatory agencies among the organizations with the highest scores on formal political accountability. For instance, the statutes of telecom regulator OPTA, financial market authority AFM, and competition authority NMa all include a high number of provisions for accountability. However, the finding is not in line with the previous study of Elgie and McMenamin (2005), who demonstrate that the degree of independence of French regulatory agencies is significantly higher than the degree of independence of executive agencies. No support was found either for Hypothesis 5, which gave expression to the suggestion of Elgie and McMenamin (2005) that credible commitments may only matter in issue areas which are politically salient. The hypothesis is tested in Model 2, using interaction terms which combine issue salience with the number of veto players, the ideological distance between them, and the regulatory nature of organizations. None of the interaction terms is significantly related to the degree of formal political accountability.