[jackcosgrove]

I'm not sure if there is any literature to this effect, but an institutional arrangement that has known flaws is one in which peers nominate future peers for membership. Academia is an example of this arrangement.

When evaluating whether an institution is accountable, a good default question to ask is, "Is power plural?" In the terminology of the American political order, this is called checks and balances. It's not perfect, but a system of overlapping institutions, whose members are chosen by a plurality of methods and from a plurality of backgrounds, and which have oversight over each other in a loop, are more accountable than unitary institutions.

I'm sure some have attempted to answer this analytically, basically making a "directed power graph" to measure how plural power is, and then correlating that with measures of accountability such as corruption perceptions. This is a huge topic and the second paragraph is my opinion, but that's because I think that's what such an analysis would show.