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Disassembling accountability and democracy: varied effects of elements of accountability and democracy on public trust
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DOI：10.1080/13510347.2026.2666833.png)
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Abstract
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Previous literature on the impact of democracy on public trust is inconsistent. While some researchers find democracy associated with increased public trust, others find the opposite impact or no association between democracy and public trust. These inconsistent and contradictory findings may be due to the way democracy is measured and defined. There are many different facets of democracy, yet they are rarely delineated or decomposed to succinctly measure specific phenomena. To fill this gap in the previous literature, I conduct a two-way fixed effect regression with clustered robust standard errors for cross-national panel data of 161 countries on the relationship between public trust in governance and forms of accountability. I use Transparency International's corruption perception index as the outcome variable and forms of accountability, vertical, diagonal, horizontal, and comprehensive, as the main predictor variables and measure of democracy. I control for clean election, education equality, GDPPC, FDI, and total population. I find aggregated and diagonal accountability significantly associated with the trust measure, and vertical and horizontal accountability fail to reach a level of significance. Variations in the influence of comprehensive accountability and the types of accountability suggest the need to account for the individual components that make up accountability and democracy.
Keywords:
Democratic elements
electoral democracy
vertical accountability
diagonal accountability
horizontal accountability
public trust
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