Accountability in Liberal Democratic, Parliamentary Systems

This chapter looks at some of the factors that shape and inform accountability in European liberal democratic parliamentary systems. Specifically, we will identify the key institutional features that define parliamentary democracy, and seek to understand how they could mould national political cultures and processes, and in so doing, showing how the nature of their respective systems affect the form issues of accountability take. The chapter provides a snapshot of Europe’s parliamentary liberal democracies, capturing the range of this system type, showing how they function, and how differences in function have been manifest in practice. It assesses how and why different countries have different interpretations and approaches to accountability, and therefore how different agendas develop with respect to the issue.