Public policy documents │ Accountability expresses the concern for checks and oversight, for surveillance and institutional constraints on the exercise of power. In democracies, Congress (Latin America) or Parliament (Africa) is expected to exercise the role of monitoring and providing control on the Executive branch.
By taking into account the opacity of power, it seeks to reduce uncertainties that come from it, limit arbitrariness and prevent or even remedy abuses, maintaining power within certain predetermined rules. However, in both Latin America and Africa, there seems to be gaps in accountability mechanisms. Both the ill development of relevant norms regarding sanctions and the distance between formal institutions and actual practices of accountability are some of the main deficits of democracies in many developing countries.
This research project explores the conditions under which legislative bodies succeed or fail in holding accountable public agencies of the executive as well as the executive’s own capacity for being accountable. Case countries used to generate evidence for lessons are Argentina for Latin America and Kenya for Africa.
This design and methods paper sets out how the authors will explore the conditions under which legislative bodies succeed or fail in holding accountable public agencies of the executive as well as the executive’s own capacity for being accountable.
The paper is organised in seven sections. Section 1 is an introduction to the topic. Section 2 is a review of literature identifying what we know on horizontal accountability. Section 3 points out the value addition of the study by answering the ‘so what’ question. Section 4 defines the central question while section 5 states the hypotheses. Section 6 describes the research design and section 7 is on the methods
