Fourth Branch Agencies: A Silver Bullet for Making Government Accountable?

Jerg Gutmann and Stefan Voigt

No 88, ILE Working Paper Series from University of Hamburg, Institute of Law and Economics

Abstract: A new consensus appears to have emerged among academics and policy practitioners: Governments can be made to respect constitutional rules by establishing and constitutionally entrenching watchdogs, such as anti-corruption commissions, electoral commissions, or ombudspersons. In this article, we evaluate the consequences of what we propose to call the New York Consensus. We find that fourth branch agencies can increase constitutional compliance, but their effects are largely limited to higher income countries with a democratic political system.

Keywords: New York Consensus; fourth branch; integrity branch; guarantor branch; constitutional compliance; de jure-de facto gap; separation of powers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/330301/1/ile-wp-2025-88.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ilewps:88

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ILE Working Paper Series from University of Hamburg, Institute of Law and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().