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.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.