Accountability in Global Governance (AGG) Database

The Accountability in Global Governance (AGG) dataset measures the strength of formal accountability mechanisms possessed by major international institutions. The dataset covers five types of mechanisms – transparency, evaluation, redress, investigation, and participation mechanisms – and covers 52 significant international institutions between 1960 and 2018. The dataset also includes a number of additional variables that may be of interest to scholars of accountability in global governance, such as institutions’ governance tasks, decision-making procedures, financial resources, and media coverage.

The dataset, which is available in CSV format, was introduced in my article "Making Global Governance Accountable" Please use the following citation:

Lall, Ranjit. 2023 (Online First). "Making Global Governance Accountable: Civil Society, States, and the Politics of Reform." American Journal of Political Science.

This repository also contains a codebook that provides a detailed description of all variables in the database, including their definition, scale, and sources.

Details on Accountability Mechanisms

The AGG database focuses on what I call multistakeholder accountability (MSA) mechanisms: formalized routines and procedures, based broadly on principles of democratic governance, that seek to enhance the capacity of diverse public and private stakeholders to monitor, assess, and shape institutional activities. The dataset measures the strength of five types of MSA mechanisms on a five-point index for every year between 1960 (or an institution’s founding date) to 2018:

1. Transparency is an additive index measuring whether institutions possess an access-to-information policy — a policy that enshrines the public’s right to request (non-sensitive) information from them — and whether this policy guarantees automatic and timely disclosure and includes an independently managed appeals process for rejected disclosure requests (i.e., a process not managed by the secretariat itself).
2. Evaluation is an additive index measuring whether institutions possess an internal unit (e.g., office, department, division) responsible for monitoring and assessing their activities, and whether this unit is organizationally independent, publicly discloses evaluation findings, and works with the secretariat to implement lessons for improving performance.
3. Redress is an additive index measuring whether institutions possess a mechanism for receiving, assessing, and addressing complaints from adversely affected external stakeholders, and whether this mechanism is independently managed, guarantees confidentiality and nonretaliation for complainants, and includes systems for monitoring the implementation of remedial measures.
4. Investigation is an additive index measuring whether institutions possess a mechanism for investigating and sanctioning professional, financial, or other misconduct by officials, and whether this mechanism has the same four additional characteristics as Redress (i.e., independence, confidentiality, nonretaliation, and follow-up).
5. Participation is a multiplicative index measuring (1) the depth of access to policy processes granted to external stakeholders (such as civil society actors and corporations) and (2) the range of such stakeholders permitted access. Scores are averaged across three types of policy organ: governing bodies, advisory councils, and consultation forums. MSA Composite is a summative combination of all five indices. It thus has a scale of 0-25 points.