The use of amnesties in transitional justice remains a contentious issue. The fight against impunity at the international level has left little room for the application of amnesties for international crimes and human rights abuses. Nevertheless, amnesty measures continue to be applied in many jurisdictions and the permissibility of conditional amnesties enacted as part of wider processes of reconciliation remains under debate. This paper argues that the judicial discussion of amnesties under international law has followed dynamics of path dependence, where initial decisions adopted in very specific contexts have strongly determined the subsequent treatment of amnesties in completely different situations. The influence of early decisions rejecting blanket amnesties in the aftermath of autocratic regimes in Latin America pulled domestic and international courts towards a general rejection of amnesties. However, in more recent years, transitional justice ideas have influenced the trajectory of the discussion on amnesties, opening courts to the permissibility of conditional and negotiated amnesties accompanied by alternative mechanisms of accountability. Mapping the judicial dialogue on amnesties, this paper shows a cautious shift in the approach to conditional amnesties. This is significant because international courts have mostly engaged with the most problematic amnesties, leaving some uncertainty around the way conditional amnesties enacted as part of complex transitional frameworks will be evaluated. Reading a significant number of decisions from different jurisdictions, this essay aims to shed some light on the way domestic courts have addressed the discussion of amnesties when they are part of wider efforts to bring peace, reconciliation, and democracy.

Military decision-making institutions face new challenges and opportunities from increasing artificial intelligence (AI) integration. Military AI adoption is incentivized by competitive pressures and expanding national security needs; thus, we can expect increased complexity due to AI proliferation. Governing this complexity is urgent but lacks clear precedents. This discussion critically re-examines key concerns that AI integration into resort-to-force decision-making organizations introduces. Beside concerns, this article draws attention to new, positive affordances that AI proliferation may introduce. I then propose a minimal AI governance standard framework, adapting private sector insights to the defence context. I argue that adopting AI governance standards (e.g., based on this framework) can foster an organizational culture of accountability, combining technical know-how with the cultivated judgment needed to navigate contested governance concepts. Finally, I hypothesize some strategic implications of the adoption of AI governance programmes by military institutions.

This study examines if prime minister's parties are punished or rewarded by voters to a lesser extent in candidate‐centred electoral systems compared to party‐centred systems. Candidate‐centred systems allow the voters greater choice in determining the fate of individual candidates at the district level and create incentives for candidates to cultivate a personal vote rather than pursuing a party vote. Voters in these systems are more likely to focus on individual candidates than on parties, thus fostering individual accountability at the expense of collective (party) accountability. Cross‐sectional time‐series data for 23 OECD countries between 1961 and 2014 were analysed. Two indices of intraparty efficiency (the Farrell–McAllister Index and the Shugart Index) were used to capture the candidate‐centredness of electoral systems. The analysis of aggregate‐level data with almost 300 observations showed that incumbent parties tend to win or lose fewer votes in candidate‐centred electoral systems. This effect has become stronger over time. Candidate‐centredness has a weak moderating impact on the state of the economy on the degree of public sanctioning of government parties.

Despite some prominent critics, deliberative democrats tend to be optimistic about the potential of deliberative mini‐publics. However, the problem with current practices is that mini‐publics are typically used by officials on an ad hoc basis and that their policy impacts remain vague. Mini‐publics seem especially hard to integrate into representative decision making. There are a number of reasons for this, especially prevailing ideas of representation and accountability as well as the contestatory character of representative politics. This article argues that deliberative mini‐publics should be regarded as one possible way of improving the epistemic quality of representative decision making and explores different institutional designs through which deliberative mini‐publics could be better integrated into representative institutions. The article considers arrangements which institutionalise the use of mini‐publics; involve representatives in deliberations; motivate public interactions between mini‐publics and representatives; and provide opportunities to ex post scrutiny or suspensive veto powers for mini‐publics. The article analyses prospects and problems of these measures, and considers their applicability in different contexts of representative politics.

Although federal arrangements adopt a multiplicity of forms across and within federations, this article suggests that some models of power division are better than others at enhancing clarity of responsibility and electoral accountability. This conclusion is the result of exploring responsibility attribution and economic voting in a state where decentralisation arrangements vary across regions: the Spanish State of Autonomies. Using electoral surveys and aggregated economic data for the 1982–2012 period, the empirical analysis shows that regional economic voting is most pronounced in regions where decentralisation design concentrated authority and resources at one level of government, whereas it is inexistent in regions where devolution followed a more intertwined model of power distribution. The implication of the empirical findings is that the specific design of intergovernmental arrangements is crucial to make electoral accountability work in federations.

Voters in rural and peripheral areas have increasingly turned away from mainstream parties and towards right‐wing populist parties. This paper tests the extent to which political decisions with adverse local effects—such as school and hospital closures—can explain this electoral shift. I theorize that political decisions such as these substantiate a perception of a disconnect between “ordinary” people and the politicians in power in day‐to‐day experiences. Using data on 315 school closures and 30 hospital closures in Denmark from 2005 to 2019 in a generalized difference‐in‐differences design, I find that mayors lose about 1.6 percentage points of the valid votes in areas where they close a school. Furthermore, I find that right‐wing populist parties increase their support in both local and national elections when a local school or hospital is closed. These findings provide insight into the electoral consequences of political decisions with adverse local effects and thus contribute to our understanding of the rise of right‐wing populism.

The EU has become increasingly responsible for the state of national economies over the last decades. Meanwhile, many observers have claimed that this increased responsibility has not translated into more accountability. In this article, we revisit this literature and analyse vote‐popularity functions before and after accession because it provides a situation when the EU is an incumbent and when it is not. Using Eurobarometer surveys from 2001 to 2011, which were carried out in the countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007, we first show that individuals do not hold the EU accountable for macroeconomic performances before accession, but that they do after accession. Using European Election Studies surveys, we also indicate that the incumbent European Peoples’ Party is held accountable for the state of the economy in countries that are ruled by the EU, but not in countries that have just become EU members.

Citizens' ability to hold corrupt politicians accountable is a key feature of democratic political systems. Particularly in the European Union (EU), such accountability mechanisms are often argued to malfunction due to the EU's complicated and opaque institutional structure, which could compromise voters' basic abilities to detect political malpractice in Brussels. Putting EU voters' attentiveness to the test, we provide quasi‐experimental evidence of the causal effect of a recent corruption scandal in the European Parliament. Leveraging an ‘Unexpected Event during Survey Design’ identification strategy in France and Germany, we document a sizeable negative effect of the so‐called Qatargate scandal on public trust in the European Parliament. This provides causal evidence on the presence of attentiveness to EU politics within these electorates. Given the EU's complex institutional structure, we derive two alternative implications from this finding.

The delegation of governance tasks to third parties is generally assumed to help governments to avoid blame once policies become contested. International organizations, including the European Union (EU), are considered particularly opportune in this regard. The literature lacks assessments of the blame avoidance effects of delegation, let alone of the effects of different delegation designs. To address this gap in the literature, we study public blame attributions in the media coverage of two contested EU policies during the financial crisis and the migration crisis. We show that the blame avoidance effect of delegation depends on the delegation design: When agents are independent (dependent) of government control, we observe lower (higher) shares of public blame attributions targeting the government (blame shifting effect), and when agents are external (internal) to the government apparatus, overall public blame attributions for a contested policy will be less (more) frequent (blame obfuscation effect). Our findings yield important normative implications for how to maintain governments’ accountability once they have delegated governance tasks to third parties.

This article critically examines the concept of ‘accountability’ as it is understood in two‐party systems and majoritarian democracy – namely the ability of voters to remove governments that violate their mandates or otherwise perform poorly. Voters’ capacity to ‘throw the rascals out’ is one of the main normative appeals of two‐partism and the single‐member plurality (SMP) electoral system. However, this article uses a spatial model to show that in at least two types of situation voters are left in a bind when confronted with a mandate‐breaking governing party: (1) when both major parties undertake unexpected non‐centrist shifts in opposing directions after an election, leaving centrist voters with an unappealing choice; and (2) when a governing party that had won an election on a non‐centrist platform undertakes a post‐election shift to the centre, leaving its more radical supporters dissatisfied. In each case, voters have four imperfect options: punish the governing party by throwing the rascals out, but in doing so vote for a party that is ideologically more distant; abstain, and withdraw from the democratic process; vote for a minor party that has no hope of influencing government formation, but which might detach enough votes to allow the ideologically more distant major opposition party to win; and forgive the governing party its mandate‐breaking. All of these options represent accountability failures. The problems are illustrated with two case studies from two‐party systems: the United Kingdom in the mid‐1980s and New Zealand in the period 1984–1993. In both instances, many voters found it difficult to ‘throw the rascals out’ without harming their own interests in the process. The article concludes that accountability may sometimes be better achieved if voters can force a party to share power in coalition with another party in order to ‘keep it honest’ instead of removing it from government completely, as can happen in multi‐party systems based on proportional representation. Thus, although two‐partism based on plurality voting is normally regarded as superior to multi‐partism and proportional representation on the criterion of accountability, in some instances, the reverse can be true. The article therefore undermines a core normative argument advanced by supporters of majoritarian democracy and SMP.

Political accountability requires that voters understand the distribution of policy outcome responsibility among their vote choice options. Research on partisan‐motivated reasoning suggests that voters do not meet this requirement. The problem is that voters condition their attributions of responsibility to the government on their party identification. Government identifiers credit the government for desirable outcomes and blame external forces such as the global economy for undesirable outcomes. This paper draws a more optimistic conclusion. It argues that focusing on the perceived responsibility of the government and external forces is not sufficient for understanding whether voters meet the responsibility attribution requirement. It is also necessary to compare the perceived responsibility of government parties to the perceived responsibility of opposition parties because those are the options that voters get to choose from. This party distribution of perceived responsibility is analyzed with original survey data from Denmark and the United Kingdom. The results demonstrate that while party identification does indeed condition voters’ responsibility attributions, both government identifiers and independents attribute systematically more responsibility to the government than to the opposition regardless of the desirability of the outcome. This suggests that voters tend to meet the responsibility attribution requirement of accountability despite the presence of partisan‐motivated reasoning.

Electoral integrity is increasingly being recognised as an important component of democracy, yet scholars still have limited understanding of the circumstances under which elections are most likely to be free, fair and genuine. This article posits that effective oversight institutions play a key role in scrutinising the electoral process and holding those with an interest in the electoral outcome to account. The main insight is that deficiencies in formal electoral management can be effectively compensated for via one or more other institutional checks: an active and independent judiciary; an active and independent media; and/or an active and independent civil society. Flawed elections are most likely to take place when all four checks on electoral conduct fail in key ways. These hypotheses are tested and supported on a cross‐national time‐series dataset of 1,047 national‐level elections held in 156 electoral regimes between 1990 and 2012.

To hold their Members of Parliament individually accountable for their legislative behaviour, British voters would need to base their decision to vote for an MP at least partially on the extent to which the MP's legislative voting behaviour deviated from that of the MP's party leadership. Voters should evaluate this deviation contingent on their views of the party leadership. MP rebellion can signal that voter–MP congruence is greater than that of the voter and the MP's party leadership. In this article it is found that only constituents with negative attitudes toward the Labour government reward rebellious Labour MPs, albeit to a limited extent. A similar conditional association is not observed on a single issue: Iraq. The policy accountability of MPs is relatively weak and general rather than issue‐specific.

Accountability in grant-making requires a valid, fair and transparent selection process. This study proposes a four-step framework for validating such a process: determine standards for qualified applicants, assess inter-reviewer reliability, assess factorial validity, and assess reliability. This framework is applied to the Corporation for National and Community Service’s 2013 RSVP grant-making process. The standards were close to the highest points of reliability. Inter-reviewer reliability was above 0.90, a common threshold for high-stakes measurement. After conducting confirmatory factor analysis, the final model merged two of the original five domains of selection criteria, resulting in four domains. The final model was found to have strict measurement invariance, high convergent validity, and measurement reliability between 0.88 and 0.93 for all domains. The results validate the 2013 review process and indicated that the scores exhibited high degrees of reliability, giving public assurance that the process was sufficiently objective and accurately reflected program priorities.

This paper examines, from a management accounting perspective, the efficacy of the dominant ‘restricted’ funding structure in the international development NGO sector in terms of overall sector effectiveness, and whether it is the most appropriate means of funding NGOs. The objective is to encourage theoretical debate around the tensions highlighted between external accountability for funding and overall value-for-money delivered by individual development NGOs and the wider international development sector. From unique access to three internationally recognised major NGOs, our case studies reveal management accounting as broadly homogenous, with some nuanced distinctions both within and between the cases; but the scope of management accounting emerges as relatively limited. This is despite the NGOs utilising complex accounting software, employing qualified accounting staff, and having a large annual income. Using the broad principles of systems theory to frame our approach, this paper suggests that due to the ‘restricted’ nature of funding awarded to NGOs by institutional donors, accounting is dominated by external accountability reporting to the detriment of management accounting. These relatively novel data on management accounting practices at international development NGOs help illustrate how, potentially, NGOs are missing opportunities to utilise, or even improve, value-for-money in terms of how various program themes, geographic areas or time periods are delivering better or worse discernible impact for the money spent.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play a critical role in the response to human displacement yet face competing pressures. One ongoing site of displacement is among the 1.1 million Rohingya persons living in refugee camps in Bangladesh. NGOs are party to the ongoing humanitarian response yet operate under competing demands by multiple stakeholders. To what extent do NGOs meet the various expectations among different groups of Rohingya refugee beneficiary stakeholders? We used UNHCR survey data from 31 refugee sites in Cox’s Bazar to empirically examine the relationship between demographic and socioeconomic indicators with satisfaction levels of service provision. We find that female refugees and head of household disability (difficulty seeing, hearing, walking, remembering, or communicating) are indicators that present the most significant differences; NGO responses more often overlook the priority needs of females and persons with disabilities when compared to other refugees, a response gap that reduces their satisfaction and potentially heightens these groups’ vulnerabilities. Although UNHCR and NGOs face pressures from competing demands within beneficiary populations, they also have opportunities to develop refugee-centered policies and practices that are more responsive to vulnerable groups. Overall, this paper adds dimension to understanding of various refugee stakeholder perspectives within a camp setting.