Indexing watchdog accountability powers a framework for assessing the accountability capacity of independent oversight institutions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Independent oversight institutions are critical components of the accountability landscape in modern democracies. This paper presents a framework for assessing the accountability powers of these watchdogs. This watchdog accountability index is an empirical tool to assess the key accountability powers of accountability forums that operate in a democratic constitutional context. The aim is to provide a richer evidence base to assess evolving external accountability arrangements and their effectiveness. Our approach breaks down the concept of watchdog accountability power into three distinct, conceptually coherent dimensions. We apply the accountability index to assess the strength of one of the main watchdog institutions in the EU, the European Court of Auditors in 2017. Data were collected by means of a study of secondary sources and by an expert survey.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.103 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.022 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".