under most governance structures— are an important part of the explanation why sector performance outcomes are so seldom what they are expected to be in the long run.

Even if the nature of the accountability challenge has been identified, however, it is not straightforward how this understanding should help improving sector-governance. Policy strategies are complicated by the very nature of private agendas in politics, which also entails resistance against any measures that may reduce the opportunity to pursue those agendas. Even if accountability-increasing initiatives are promoted by civil society organizations, the development community, political groups, the press, and others, the process to improve political performance might be extremely slow in some countries with continued weak performance at the sector level as the result.

The crucial importance of macro-political factors could be seen as throwing into question the relevance of sector-level recommendations. If the bigger governance indicators are what matters, one may ask if we could just as well give up on sector-specific governance until the accountability issues have been “fixed.” This would be a misinterpretation, however, since the macro-political accountability indicators are no more than accumulated information about decision making—and the overall impression of how sector governance decisions are being solved. The political regime in a country is a framework condition—at least in a short- to medium-term perspective. Policy recommendations can be promoted most easily at the sector-level and this alone defends a sector-level approach for better policy-choices. The question is if also accountability can be better incentivized from this level and how to adjust recommendations to the given political environment framework conditions.

There are difficulties in promoting political accountability from the sector level, however. Some overall accountability issues are addressed in this section: the design of constitutional rules adopted to implement democracy in a given country; the reliance on political self-discipline to enforce rules; and lack of coherence between sector specific rules and global rules in countries.

# **4.1. The design and practical effect of constitutional rules**

The functioning of democracy and separation of powers in a country are essential to understand the relationship between accountability and sector performance. Horizontal checks and balances—how the parliament should control the executive, for example—are fundamental principles of constitutional design and to a large extent, underestimated drivers of sector performance. Vertically, the control is manifested in election rules, a free press, access to information laws, and access to education. Countries have budget procedures that involve several governance institutions to secure consistency between development plans and actual spending. When these mechanisms are interfered with—for example if access to information about political decisions is blocked—the incumbent politicians can bias their sector decisions in line with their private agendas more easily.

There is striking variation across countries when it comes to political control procedures, how powers are separated between institutions, the clarity of the rules, and the enforcement of them.<sup>50</sup> Constitutional protection of human rights and control on political powers are not more than a façade in some countries. Other countries focus on constitutional weaknesses just to highlight the fact that it is their own rules that make it difficult to enforce democratic principles. Constitutional weaknesses may themselves be the result of private agendas. Torvik and Robinson (2008) explain presidentialism as endogenous by pointing at the incentives of incumbents in a parliamentarian system to move toward a more presidential system. Over the last decades many countries have tended to concentrate political power in the executive. Constitutional reforms have removed constraints on reelection of individual politicians, while fiscal reforms have provided the national level with relatively more authority on spending decisions compared

> 50 See the Open Budget Index <u>(http://www.openbudgetindex.org) for variation in control and transparency of budget</u> procedures.

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