The media accountability of independent regulatory agencies

Independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) are increasingly attracting academic and societal attention, as they represent the institutional cornerstone of the regulatory state and play a key role in policy-making. Besides the expected benefits in terms of credibility and efficiency, these regulators are said to bring about a 'democratic deficit', following their statutory separation from democratic institutions. Consequently, a 'multi-pronged system of control' is required. This article focuses on a specific component of this system, that is, the media. The goal is to determine whether media coverage of IRAs meets the necessary prerequisites to be considered a potential 'accountability forum' for regulators. The results of a comparison of two contrasted cases - the British and Swiss competition commissions - mostly support the expectations, because they show that media coverage of IRAs corresponds to that of the most relevant policy issues and follows the regulatory cycle. Furthermore, a systematic bias in media coverage can be excluded.

Navigation intérieure . Règlement général de police. Décret du 6 février 1932 modifié et complété [par les décrets des 31 mars 1934, 15 août 1936 et 2 mai 1956 du Ministère des travaux publics, des transports et du tourisme]

[Code]

Les aspects sanitaires du travail de la police auprès des consommateurs de drogues

Voir aussi version en allemand: Gesundheitliche Aspekte der Polizeiarbeit im Drogenbereich.

Political centralization and government accountability

This paper studies fiscal federalism when regions differ in voters' ability to monitor publicofficials. We develop a model of political agency in which rent-seeking politicians providepublic goods to win support from heterogeneously informed voters. In equilibrium, voterinformation increases government accountability but displays decreasing returns. Therefore,political centralization reduces aggregate rent extraction when voter information varies acrossregions. It increases welfare as long as the central government is required to provide publicgoods uniformly across regions. The need for uniformity implies an endogenous trade off between reducing rents through centralization and matching idiosyncratic preferences throughdecentralization. We find that a federal structure with overlapping levels of government canbe optimal only if regional differences in accountability are sufficiently large. The modelpredicts that less informed regions should reap greater benefits when the central governmentsets a uniform policy. Consistent with our theory, we present empirical evidence that lessinformed states enjoyed faster declines in pollution after the 1970 Clean Air Act centralizedenvironmental policy at the federal level.

Mémoires de Vidocq, chef de la police de Sûreté, jusqu'en 1827. 3

Collection : Archives de la linguistique française ; 397

Mémoires de Vidocq, chef de la police de Sûreté, jusqu'en 1827. 4

Collection : Archives de la linguistique française ; 397