Europe’s ‘Democratic Deficit’:
The Question of Standards
Giandomenico Majone*
Abstract: Arguments about Europe’s democratic deficit are really arguments about the
nature and ultimate goals of the integration process. Those who assume that economic
integration must lead to political integration tend to apply to European institutions
standards of legitimacy derived from the theory and practice of parliamentary
democracies. We argue that such standards are largely irrelevant at present. As long as
the majority of voters and their elected representatives oppose the idea of a European
federation, while supporting far-reaching economic integration, we cannot expect
parliamentary democracy to flourish in the Union. Economic integration without
political integration is possible only if politics and economics are kept as separate as
possible. The depoliticisation of European policy-making is the price we pay in order
to preserve national sovereignty largely intact. These being the preferences of the
voters, we conclude that Europe’s ‘democratic deficit’ is democratically justified.
The expression ‘democratic deficit,’ however, is also used to refer to the legitimacy
problems of non-majoritarian institutions, and this second meaning is much more
relevant to a system of limited competences such as the EC. Now the key issues for
democratic theory are about the tasks which may be legitimately delegated to
institutions insulated from the political process, and how to design such institutions so
as to make independence and accountability complementary and mutually supporting,
rather than antithetical. If one accepts the ‘regulatory model’ of the EC, then, as long
as the tasks delegated to the European level are precisely and narrowly defined, nonmajoritarian
standards of legitimacy should be sufficient to justify the delegation of
the necessary powers.
I Introduction: Standard-Setting and Standard-Using
When evaluating any product, process or institution, it is essential to distinguish
between standard-setting and standard-using: between defining the norms to be used,
and searching for solutions satisfying current norms. Standard-using is the technical
task of measuring various dimensions of performance against given benchmarks.
Standard-setting is a process of deliberation, and it is open to anyone to put forward a
proposal as to what the standards should be and to use persuasion to influence others
to accept the proposal.1
European Law Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1, March 1998, pp. 5–28
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
* European Institute of Public Administration, Maastricht (NL).
1 G. Majone, Evidence, Argument and Persuasion in the Policy Process, (Yale University Press 1989).
Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved.
This paper argues that there is an urgent need to re-set the standards by which we
assess the legitimacy of European integration and of the institutions which guide the
process. To speak of re-setting the standards is to suggest that the debate about
Europe’s democratic deficit is still in the standard-setting stage – we are still groping
for normative criteria appropriate to the sui generis character of the European
Community (EC). It should be obvious, but it is easily forgotten, that arguments about
the democratic deficit are really arguments about the nature, functions and goals of
the EC. The reference to the Community rather than to the European Union (EU) is
deliberate because I want to focus on the tasks assigned to the European institutions
by Article 2 of the Treaty of Rome, as amended.
Since the legitimacy debate is still in the standard-setting state, current evaluations
start from different normative premises to reach different, even contradictory,
conclusions. Regardless of their substantive merits, all proposed solutions are
methodologically flawed because they take for granted what is, in fact, contestable and
in need of justification. In order to make the underlying assumptions explicit, I shall
classify current arguments about the democratic deficit into four groups, according to
the standards being used:
· Standards based on the analogy with national institutions;
· Majoritarian standards;
· Standards derived from the democratic legitimacy of the Member States;
· Social standards.
This classification does not pretend to be exhaustive, and its categories are not,
strictly speaking, mutually exclusive; it is, however, analytically convenient as it helps
to structure the critical analysis presented in the first part of this paper.
Arguments in the first group tend to equate Community institutions with familiar
national institutions, or to assume that EC institutions will converge towards such
models. The analogy with national institutions leads, for example, to the claim that the
European Parliament (EP) should have an independent power of legislative initiative
because national parliaments are so empowered.
The second group of arguments do not rely on the analogy with actual democratic
institutions in the Member States, but on an abstract model of democracy, the pure
majoritarian or ‘Westminster’ model. According to this model, parliament is the
ultimate source of legitimacy in a representative democracy. The European Parliament
is the only (or at least the principal) repository of democratic legitimacy in the
Community. Hence increased powers to the EP, directly elected by universal suffrage,
would substantially reduce the democratic deficit and restore legitimacy to the EC
policy-making process.
According to the more traditional arguments in the third group, the legitimacy of
European integration and of Community institutions proceeds from the democratic
legitimacy of the Member States. The veto power of each Member State is, in Joseph
Weiler’s words, ‘the single most legitimating element’ of the integration process. Hence
the shift to majority voting since the Single European Act is an important cause of the
legitimacy problem: it weakens national parliamentary control of the Council without
increasing the powers of the EP.2
Finally, arguments relying on social standards have become increasingly frequent in
recent years. While such arguments are ostensibly about the democratic deficit, they
European Law Journal Volume 4
6 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998
2 Weiler, ‘The Transformation of Europe,’ (1991) 100 Yale Law Journal, 2403–2473.
Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved.
are in fact driven by a different agenda: dissatisfaction with the slow pace of political
integration, or concerns about the future of the national welfare state in an
increasingly integrated European market. According to these critics, the Community
lacks legitimacy not only because it lacks a true legislative body, popularly elected
executives and a truly pluralistic system of interest representation, but primarily
because of its failure to provide sufficient equality and social justice. By the social
standards prevailing in the Member States, the EC is a ‘welfare laggard’ and thus
cannot count on the social acceptance enjoyed by the national welfare states.
All these arguments will be evaluated in the first part of the paper. In the second
part, I shall advance the thesis that the process of European integration is inherently
non-majoritarian, and that relevant standards of legitimacy and accountability should
reflect this basic fact. The process is non-majoritarian not because the founding
fathers distrusted democracy. Rather, they understood more clearly than today’s
leaders that economic integration without political integration is feasible only if
politics and economics are kept as separate as possible. Depoliticisation of European
policy-making is the price we have to pay in order to preserve national sovereignty
largely intact. As long as the majority of the citizens of the Member States oppose the
idea of a European super-state, while supporting far-reaching economic integration,
we cannot expect democratic politics to flourish at the European level. These being the
preferences of the national electorates, we are forced to conclude that, paradoxically,
Europe’s ‘democratic deficit,’ as the expression is usually understood, is democratically
justified.
II The Inadequacy of Current Standards
A The Argument by Analogy
A recurrent theme in the debate about democracy in the EC is that the powers of the
European Parliament, even after the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties, fall far
short of the powers of an ordinary parliament, while the Commission still holds the
monopoly of legislative initiative. In fact, a consistent application of legitimacy
standards derived from the democratic practices of familiar national institutions – a
parliament with an independent power of legislative initiative, an executive responsible
to parliament, popular elections to decide who shall govern – leads to the conclusion
that the democratic deficit in the EC is actually twofold.
First, the executive (the Council of Ministers and the Commission) rather than
parliament, is responsible for legislation; and, second, within the executive, the
bureaucratic branch (the Commission) is unusually strong with respect to the political
branch (the Council) whose members are subject, at least in principle, to the control of
national parliaments. Furthermore, because of the supremacy of European law over
national law, the governments of the Member States, meeting in the Council, can
control their own parliaments rather than being controlled by them. To reduce the
mismatch between European and national institutions it is proposed to deny the
Commission any role in the legislative process, and to assign the right of legislative
initiative to the EP or, at least, to the EP and the Council.3
March 1998 Europe’s Democracy Deficit
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998 7
3 R. Vaubel, The Centralization of Western Europe, IEA Hobart Paper 127, (Institute of Economic Affairs
1995).
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Arguments by analogy are popular both with scholars who oppose centralisation
(like professor Vaubel) and with those who do not object to an expansion of European
competences. Also Juliet Lodge, for example, views critically the vast difference
between Community and domestic policy making: ‘EC policy-making processes are
largely dominated by bureaucracies and governments that provide little scope for
parliamentary institutions (whether national parliaments or the EP) to intervene and
to exercise roles traditionally believed to be the hallmarks of legislatures in liberal
democratic politics.’4
The most obvious objection to the analogy with national institutions is that the sui
generis institutional architecture of the Community has been designed by Treaties duly
ratified by all national parliaments. One of the characteristic features of the EC is the
impossibility of mapping functions onto specific institutions. Thus the EC has no
legislature but a legislative process in which different political institutions have
different parts to play. Similarly, there is no identifiable executive, since executive
powers are exercised for some purposes by the Council acting on a Commission
proposal; for other purposes (e.g., competition matters) by the Commission; and
overwhelmingly by the Member States in implementing European policies on the
ground.5
The institutional arrangements designed by the Treaties are certainly unusual by the
standards of the classical separation-of-powers doctrine, but they do serve important
functions. Thus, if the Treaties make the decision-making powers of the Council and
of the EP dependent on the proposals of the Commission, this is not to give a
privileged position to a supranational bureaucracy against the democratically
legitimated representatives of the Member States or the popularly elected members of
the European Parliament. Rather, the Commission’s monopoly of legislative proposals
is a mechanism for linking more closely the Council and the EP to European law. The
powers of oversight of the Member States given to the Commission by Article 169 of
the Treaty of Rome supports this interpretation.6
Another striking difference between the national and the European levels is the fact
that the Community is a system of limited competences. This is another reason for
being sceptical of legitimacy arguments based on analogy. However, this feature of the
EC has more general relevance, as will be seen in the second part of this article. For
this reason it is treated in a separate section.
B A System of Limited Competences
In the euphoria created by the Single European Act and the highly successful
marketing of the ‘Europe ‘92’ programme, it became tempting to imagine that there
was no effective barrier to the continuous, if incremental, expansion of Community
competences. In those days, a distinguished jurist could write that ‘there is no nucleus
of sovereignty that the Member States can invoke, as such, against the Community,’7
and few people seemed to object.
European Law Journal Volume 4
8 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998
4 J. Lodge (ed.), The European Community and the Challenge of the Future, (Frances Pinter 1989).
5 Dashwood, ‘The Limits of European Community Powers,’ (1996) 21 European Law Review, 113–128, at
127.
6 Mestmäcker, ‘Über das Verhältnis der europäischen Wirtschaftsordnung zu den Mitgliedstaaten,’ in
Veröff. Joachim Jungius-Ges. Wiss., (Hamburg 1994), 149–169.
7 Lenaerts, ‘Constitutionalism and the Many Faces of Federalism,’ (1990) 38 American Journal of
Comparative Law, 205–263, at 220.
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Since Maastricht, however, the continuous accretion of powers to the Community is
no longer on the political agenda. The new precise delimitation of Community powers
was a major result of the Treaty of European Union (TEU). Article 3b of the Treaty,
which enacts the principles of attribution of powers, of subsidiarity, and of
proportionality as organising principles of the constitutional order of the Community,
marks a shift in the Community’s deep structure. In the words of professor Dashwood,
the Article effectively rules out of court the notion of a Community continuously
moving the boundary posts of its own competence.8
Moreover, the TEU defines new competences in a way that limits the exercise of
Community powers. For example, Article 126 adds a new legal basis for action in the
field of education, but the measures the EC can take in this field are limited to
‘incentive measures’ (e.g., programmes such as ERASMUS) and to recommendations.
Any harmonisation of the laws and regulations of the Member States is explicitly
excluded.
Similarly, Article 129 creates specific powers for the Community in the field of
public health, but the competence is highly circumscribed as subsidiary to that of the
Member States. Harmonisation of national laws and regulations is again ruled out,
even though the Article states that health protection requirements shall form a
constituent part of the Community’s other policies. The other provisions of the Treaty,
defining new competences in such areas as culture, consumer protection, and
industrial policy, are similarly drafted. In sum, rather than rely on implicit
competences, whose limits seemed out of control, the TEU opted for an explicit grant
that delimits the modes of action and the reach of such policies.9 With one significant
exception (public health), the same approach has been followed, by and large, by the
drafters of the Amsterdam Treaty.
These Treaties also throw new light on the limits of previous grants of power,
especially the creation of subsidiary powers by means of Article 235 of the Rome
Treaty. This Article enables the Council to take appropriate measures – acting
unanimously on a proposal by the Commission and after consulting the EP – in cases
where action by the Community is found to be necessary to attain, in the course of the
operation of the common market, one of the objectives of the Community and there is
no specific power under the Treaty available for that purpose. The question as to
whether Community action was necessary was considered by the political institutions
as a matter within their complete discretion.
Since 1973, the Council has made liberal use of Article 235 to expand Community
competences or to broaden the reach of Community legislation in such areas as
economic and monetary union, social and regional policy, the free movement of
workers and professionals, energy and environment, scientific and technological
research and development, and co-operation agreements with third countries. In the
light of such developments, it is not surprising that this Article has been considered
the Community’s equivalent of the ‘necessary and proper,’ or residual powers, clause
of the US Constitution, which in fact covers much else besides the power to regulate
interstate and foreign commerce. Such liberal interpretations are no longer tenable in
view of the first paragraph of Article 3b of the Maastricht Treaty, (now Article 5 of the
Amsterdam Treaty), which states the principle of attribution in terms of strictly
limited competences.
March 1998 Europe’s Democracy Deficit
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998 9
8 Dashwood, loc cit, n 5, at 113.
9 Weiler, loc cit, n 2.
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As Dashwood points out, Article 235 only makes sense post-Maastricht if the
reference to the attainment of a Community objective ‘in the course of the operation
of the common market’ begins to be taken seriously. This means that subsidiary
powers would be created under this Article only for matters directly connected with
the policies that lie at the very core of the EC, but not, for example, for programmes
of technical assistance such as PHARE and TACIS, however worthy their
objectives.10
In addition to the legal limitations one must also consider the material limitations.
The Community has no general taxing and spending powers similar to those held by
national governments; and with a budget of less than 1.3 per cent of Union GDP
which, moreover, must always be balanced, it can only undertake a limited range of
policies.11 These limitations on the powers of the EC are important from the
perspective of the present paper because questions of legitimacy are basically
questions about the use of power. Hence, standards of accountability historically
developed to control an omnicompetent state with virtually unlimited powers to tax
and spend, cannot be applied without substantial modifications to a system of limited
competences and resources such as the EC.
C Majoritarian Standards and Non-Majoritarian Practices
Let us return to the criticism that parliamentary institutions – national parliaments or
the EP – have too little scope in the EC policy-making processes. As we saw above
(IIB), this criticism may be inspired by a misplaced analogy with national institutions;
but it can also follow from a radical view of parliament as the only democratic
representative institution. Such a view is the key assumption of the pure majoritarian,
or ‘Westminster,’ model of democracy. In its most extreme version, the model asserts
that majorities should be able ‘to control all of government – legislative, executive and,
if they have a mind to, judicial – and thus to control everything politics can touch.
Nothing clarifies the total sway of majorities more than their ability to alter and adjust
the standards of legitimacy.’12
In practice, most majoritarians admit that the will of the majority may have to be
restrained by minority rights. However, these restraints should be informal – a matter
of historical tradition and political culture, rather than of a formal-constitutional
nature which cannot be changed by bare majorities. By majoritarian standards, all
institutions that are not directly accountable to the voters or to their elected
representatives – not only independent central banks or regulatory agencies but, as
Spitz makes clear, also courts – are democratically suspect. For example, a serious
legitimacy problem arises whenever a court strikes down a policy choice made by an
electorally accountable branch of government and supplants it with a policy choice of
its own, as the US Supreme Court has done on several occasions.13
It is of course true that the strict majoritarian model has never been seriously
considered for the European Community. Yet many reform measures or proposals for
remedying Europe’s democratic deficit are inspired by some version of this model.
European Law Journal Volume 4
10 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998
10 Dashwood, loc cit, n 5.
11 G. Majone, Regulating Europe, (Routledge 1996).
12 Spitz 1984, quoted in Lijphart ‘Majority rule in theory and practice: the tenacity of a flawed paradigm,’
(1991) 129 International Social Science Journal, 483–493, at 485.
13 M.J. Perry, The Constitution, the Courts and Human Rights, (Yale University Press 1982).
Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved.
Thus, Article 158 of the Maastricht Treaty – according to which the Commission, as a
body, must have the confidence of a majority of the European Parliament as in
classical parliamentary systems, and a number of proposals currently debated in
European circles: a downsizing of the Commission which would no longer include
representatives of all the Member States, the generalisation of majority voting, a
reform of the Presidency which would de facto limit the role of small countries – all
point in the direction of strengthening the majoritarian features of the European
political system.14
The tendency to equate democracy with majority rule is quite common but it is
nevertheless puzzling, since the pure majoritarian model of democracy is the exception
rather than the rule: most democratic polities, with the exception of Britain and of
countries strongly influenced by the British traditions, rely extensively on nonmajoritarian
principles and institutions.15 This is especially true of federal and quasifederal
systems. True federalism is fundamentally a non-majoritarian, or even antimajoritarian,
form of government since the component units often owe their
autonomous existence to institutional arrangements that prevent the domination of
minorities by majorities. As a great liberal historian put it, ‘[t]he true natural check on
absolute democracy is the federal system, which limits the central government by the
powers reserved, and the state governments by the powers they have ceded.’16
Among the most important and best-known non-majoritarian features of
federalism are: a written constitution, which cannot be amended by simple majority
vote; vertical and horizontal separation of powers; checks and balances; overrepresentation
of small jurisdictions, as in the US Senate or the EU Council of
Ministers; judicial review; and delegation of policy-making powers to officials who
have limited or no direct accountability to either political majorities or minorities.
Non-majoritarian principles are important not only in federal or quasi-federal
systems, but in all ‘plural’ societies, i.e., societies that are ‘sharply divided along
religious, ideological, linguistic, cultural, ethnic or racial lines into virtually separate
sub-societies with their own political parties, interest groups, and media of
communication.’17 Detailed empirical studies have shown that there is a strong
correlation between the needs of cleavage management in plural societies and the
number and importance of non-majoritarian features in their political systems.18
These findings are clearly relevant to the issue of Europe’s democratic deficit. The
EC is divided by a number of deep cleavages: linguistic, geographical, economic,
ideological and, especially, the division between large and small Member States. Many
non-majoritarian features of the Community system are best explained as strategies of
cleavage management. However imperfect, such strategies have been essential to the
progress of European integration, while a strict application of majoritarian standards
would only produce deadlock and possibly even disintegration.
March 1998 Europe’s Democracy Deficit
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998 11
14 Dehousse, ‘Institutional Reform in the European Community: Are there Alternatives to the Majoritarian
Avenue?,’ Florence: European University Institute 1995, EUI Working Paper RSC 95/4.
15 A. Lijphart, Democracies, (Yale University Press 1984) also, loc cit, n 12.
16 Lord Acton, in, William H. McNeill (ed), Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History, (University of
Chicago Press 1967), 393.
17 A. Lijphart, op cit, n 15, at 22.
18 A. Lijphart/R. Rogowski/R.K. Weaver ‘Separation of powers and cleavage management,’ in
Weaver/Rockman (eds) Do Institutions Matter? (The Brookings Institution 1993).
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D Derived Standards of Legitimacy
Widespread concern about the democratic deficit of European integration is a fairly
recent phenomenon. According to the view prevailing before the Single European Act
(SEA) and the Maastricht Treaty, the integration process derives its legitimation from
the democratic character of the Member States. National parliaments ratify the
Treaties; democratically accountable heads of state or government, meeting in the
European Council, set strategic priorities; the Council of Ministers, composed of
people who are normally elected members of the national executives, must approve
Commission’s proposals before they become European law. Thus the entire process is
guided and controlled by sovereign democratic states.
This scheme of indirect legitimation, even if it was never free from ambiguities and
doubtful assumptions,19 was considered to be sufficient as long as the Community
dealt mainly with such matters as tariff reductions and agricultural quotas. In fact, the
scheme makes perfect sense in an intergovernmentalist perspective. For example, as
recently as 1993, the German Constitutional Court, in the Brunner case, based the
constitutionality and legitimacy of the Maastricht Treaty on the democratic legitimacy
of the Member States which signed it. The Court argued that the TEU, like the
previous European Treaties, is nothing more than an international agreement among
sovereign states. The members of the Union, the Court said, remain the ‘lords of the
Treaties’ (Herren der Verträge) and never surrendered their power to secede.
Roland Dumas, a former French foreign minister, carried the intergovernmentalist
argument to its logical conclusion by suggesting that the best way to enhance the
legitimacy of the Community would be to strengthen the European Council, which is
the expression of the democratic legitimacy of the Member States.20 Whether or not
this proposal was seriously meant, it is clear that state-based standards of legitimacy
imply that the veto power of the Member States is the most legitimating element of the
integration process, so that the shift to majority voting can only aggravate the
democratic deficit.
To evaluate the validity of such arguments it is necessary to recall that the
institutional architecture of the European Union includes two distinct elements: an
intergovernmental component, where international features dominate (European
Council, Council of Ministers, and the second and third ‘pillars’ of the TEU), and a
communitarian component where supranational features are most evident (European
Parliament and Courts, Commission, and the policies and activities included in the
first ‘pillar’ of the TEU).
Now, even if it is true that the democratic character of the Member States is
sufficient to legitimate the intergovernmental component of the Union, such indirect
legitimation cannot provide an adequate normative foundation for its supranational
component. This is because one of the important tasks of the supranational
institutions has always been to protect the rights and interests (as defined by the
Treaties) of the citizens of the EC/EU, even against the majoritarian decisions of a
Member State, or the unanimous position of all the Member States.
Indeed, Community law has developed as an autonomous legal system precisely on
the basis of the economic and social rights – the four freedoms, a system of
undistorted competition, prohibitions of discrimination for reasons of nationality or
gender, and now also a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the
European Law Journal Volume 4
12 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998
19 Dehousse, loc cit, n 14.
20 Ibid.
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environment – created by the Treaties. The Court of Justice has played a key role in
this development by consistently assigning to EC law the role of protecting private
individuals against Member State laws often conceived in a spirit of nationalism.
Thus, one of the unanticipated consequences of economic integration has been the
growth of an impressive body of rules and decisions protecting diffuse interests that
often lacked effective representation or protection at national level. Since all the
supranational institutions of the EC contribute to the protection of the economic and
other rights created by the Treaties, if necessary against the short-term political
interests of the Member States, they all derive at least part of their autonomous
legitimacy from such protection.21 I shall come back to this point in the second part of
the paper (III).
E Legitimation through Social Policy?
Autonomous standards of legitimacy for EC policies and institutions are also
proposed by the fourth group of arguments. Here, however, legitimacy is derived, not
from the protection of individual rights created by the Treaties, but from the creation
of new social rights at European level. According to these critics, the democratic
deficit of the EC is due to the failure to develop a European welfare state, or at least to
give the Community a bigger role in trans-national redistribution of income. The
concerns expressed here are not, primarily, about the weak position of the European
or national parliaments in the integration process, nor about the loss of control of the
process by the Member States, but about the future of social entitlements in the
integrated European market. It is feared that competition between different national
welfare regimes could lead to regime shopping, social dumping and far-reaching
deregulation of labour markets.
A fully-fledged social policy at European level would not only prevent such negative
developments; it would also increase the legitimacy of the EC just as, in the past, social
policies proved to be an essential source of democratic legitimation for the nation state.
Historically, social security, health and welfare services, education, housing policy,
represented powerful symbols of national solidarity, providing needed legitimation to
the process of integration of the national market. A comprehensive European social
policy, it is argued, could do the same for European economic integration.
Actually, it is more likely that the result would be exactly the opposite. To begin
with, it should be noted that the very modest role of traditional social policy in the
process of European integration is largely due to the reluctance of the Member States,
including the national parliaments, to surrender control of such a politically sensitive
area of public policy, and to transfer the necessary competences and resources to the
Community. This reluctance is clearly expressed in the Treaty of Rome. The
enumeration of matters relating to the social field in Article 118, and the limited role
given to the Commission in Title III, Part Three of the Treaty, indicate that the social
policy domain, with a few exceptions such as the social security regime for migrant
workers, was originally considered to be beyond the competence of Community
institutions. Neither the Single Act nor the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties have
provided true legislative competences in the social field. On the contrary, harmonisation
of national laws and regulations in areas such as health care and social security
is explicitly excluded.
March 1998 Europe’s Democracy Deficit
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998 13
21 Mestmäcker, op cit, n 6.
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Integration of health and social security is opposed not only by national
governments, but also by a majority of citizens in the Member States. According to
Eurobarometer data for the period 1992–1995, only Greece and Portugal favour such
integration with majorities of 52 and 51 per cent of respondents, respectively. If we
exclude such potential net receivers of EC transfers, average support for social policy
integration drops from almost 44 per cent to less than 34 per cent of respondents.
Since 1989, support has actually declined among the wealthier Member States. The
data also show that opposition to involving the Community in policies dealing with
personal distribution of income is, in fact, long-standing.
Popular opposition to a supranational policy regime in the social field is
understandable. On the one hand, the welfare state represents the unique combination
of national traditions and political compromises that formed the basis of the social
democratic consensus in many West European countries after the war. On the other
hand, the delicate value judgements about the appropriate balance of efficiency and
equity which social policy expresses, can be made legitimately only within fairly
homogeneous polities. Advocates of a European welfare state must face the fact that in
several countries even national redistribution in favour of poorer communities is
increasingly challenged in the name of fiscal federalism and regional autonomy. It is
difficult to see how politically acceptable levels of income distribution could be
determined centrally in a system like the EC, where economic, social, political and
legal conditions are still so different.
For all these reasons, the development of welfare policies at European level would
actually aggravate the legitimacy problem, reinforcing the popular image of a highly
centralised and bureaucratised Community. In fact, the historical experience of both
the American New Deal and the European welfare states shows that the expansion of
redistributive social policies has been one of the main causes of political and
administrative centralisation in this century. We may conclude that the attempt to
legitimate the Community by developing European standards of social justice is
bound to fail, under present circumstances, because it goes against the clearly
expressed preferences of the governments and the citizens of the Member States.
III Re-setting the Standards
A The Democratic Deficit: One Problem or Two?
The legitimacy arguments reviewed in the preceding pages, although different in their
assumptions and conclusions, share a common perception of the democratic deficit as
a problem peculiar to the EC. In a sense this is true. If the expression is taken literally
– an absence or incomplete development of institutions which we take for granted in a
parliamentary democracy – then a deficit of democracy is indeed a distinctive feature
of a process within which economic and political integration not only move at
different speeds but also follow different principles – supranationalism in one case,
inter-governmentalism in the other. As I have already pointed out, such a historically
unique approach to integration can succeed only if the economic and the political
tracks are carefully kept separate. Hence a deficit of democracy will remain endemic to
the EC as long as the Member States remain, for their people, the principal focus of
collective loyalty and the real arena for democratic politics.
However, the expression ‘democratic deficit’ can also denote a set of problems –
technocratic decision-making, lack of transparency, insufficient public participation,
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14 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998
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excessive use of administrative discretion, inadequate mechanisms of control and
accountability – that arise whenever important policy-making powers are delegated to
bodies operating at arm’s length from government, such as independent central banks
and regulatory authorities. Such problems, far from being unique to the EC, are
increasingly important at all levels of government as the shift from the positive to the
regulatory state gains momentum throughout Europe.22 Democratic deficit, in this
second sense, refers to the legitimacy problems of non-majoritarian institutions, i.e.,
institutions which by design are not directly accountable to the voters or to their
elected representatives.
For example, when public utilities are privatised, they are subject to rules developed
and enforced by specialised agencies such as the Regulatory Offices in the United
Kingdom and similar institutions in other European countries. Such bodies are
normally established by statute as independent administrative authorities combining
expertise with a rule-making and adjudicative function. They are independent in the
sense that they are allowed to operate outside the line of hierarchical control by the
departments of central government, and that they are granted considerable discretion
in the use of the powers delegated to them. While the usefulness of independent
regulatory agencies is widely recognised, it is also felt that the agencies are constitutional
anomalies that do not fit well into the traditional framework of controls,
checks and balances. For these critics, the new mode of policy-making is too
discretionary and suffers from weak accountability to Parliament, weak judicial
review, an absence of procedural safeguards, and insufficient public participation.23
The extent of delegation to politically independent institutions is even more striking
in the case of central banks. Thus, the Maastricht Treaty gives the European Central
Bank (ECB), which is not a Community institution within the meaning of Article 4 of
the Treaty of Rome, the power to make regulations that become European and
Member States’ law without the involvement of national parliaments, the European
Parliament, or other Community institutions. Moreover, since the governors of the
national banks – which together with the ECB form the European System of Central
Banks (ESCB) – are members of the ECB Council, the national banks must also be
independent as a condition for membership in the ESCB.
Notice that since the independence of the ECB is guaranteed by the Treaty, it has an
even stronger legal basis than the Bundesbank’s independence. However, Article 88 of
the German Constitution (Basic Law) has been amended expressly to provide for the
transfer of the powers of the Bundesbank to the independent ECB. In this sense, the
independence of the ECB forms part of German constitutional law and any attempt to
change the ECB’s status at European level would, in addition to having to be ratified
by all the Member States, require an amendment of the German Constitution. Not
surprisingly, the democratic deficit of the ECB is becoming a topic of intense
discussion.24
March 1998 Europe’s Democracy Deficit
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998 15
22 Majone, ‘From the Positive to the Regulatory State: Causes and Consequences of Changes in the Mode
of Governance,’ (1997) 17:2 Journal of Public Policy, 139–167.
23 R. Baldwin/C. McCrudden, Regulation and Public Law, (Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1987); Prosser,
‘Regulation of privatized enterprises: institutions and procedures,’ in L. Hancher/J. Moran (eds)
Capitalism, Culture and Economic Regulation, (Clarendon Press 1989); Veljanovski, ‘The Regulation
Game’ in C. Veljanovski (ed), Regulators and the Market, (Institute of Economic Affairs 1991).
24 Gormley/de Haan, ‘The democratic deficit of the European Central Bank,’ (1996) 21 European Law
Review, 95–112.
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But why are political leaders willing to transfer such far-reaching powers to nonmajoritarian
institutions? Why, for example, do the same politicians who always
preferred to have a hand on the monetary levels suddenly opt to transfer control of
monetary policy to a system of independent central banks? Before discussing ways of
reducing the democratic deficit of such institutions, we have to understand the logic of
delegation.
B Delegation as a Solution to the Commitment Problem
The willingness of legislators and political executives to delegate policy-making
powers to independent institutions has been explained in various ways. Older theories
emphasised cognitive factors: politicians have neither the expertise to design policies in
detail nor the capacity to adapt them to changing conditions or particular circumstances.
Specialised agencies, staffed by neutral experts, can carry out policies with a
level of efficiency and effectiveness that politicians cannot. This argument is not
wholly convincing, however. There are areas, such as taxation, where elected
politicians show themselves to be quite capable of designing very detailed policies.
Today, parliamentary committees and technical departments of government routinely
hire high-level consultants or rely on in-house expertise to conduct extensive policy
analyses.
A more sophisticated explanation is that delegation to specialised agencies reduces
legislative decision-making costs by allowing legislators to economise on the time and
effort required to identify desirable refinements to legislation and to reach agreement
on these refinements. Thus, McCubbins and Page suggest that decision-making costs
increase as legislation becomes more specific because of the greater difficulty of
reaching agreement as possible outcomes are excluded.25 Legislators’ resources are
limited; hence, spending time and effort refining legislation reduces their ability to
advance other legislation or to take other actions.
Delegation has also been explained by the wish to avoid blame by shifting
responsibility for policy failures to other decision makers. Fiorina, the main
proponent of the blame-avoidance thesis, has argued that broad delegation allows
legislators to reduce the political costs of making more specific decisions: ‘legislators
not only avoid the time and trouble of making specific decisions, they avoid or at best
disguise their responsibility for the consequences of the decisions ultimately made.’26
He also points out that the choice between narrow and broad delegation is a choice
between more and less certainty of regulation or regulatory standards. Everything else
being equal, risk-averse legislators should prefer a narrow delegation.
Both the transaction-costs approach of McCubbins and Page and of other
authors,27 and Fiorina’s blame-avoidance hypothesis have merit, but they fail to
explain why, at least in Europe, delegation to non-majoritarian institutions was rather
infrequent in the past and is so popular now. The reason for this failure is that both
approaches miss what is probably the main reason, today, for delegating policymaking
powers to such institutions: the commitment problem and its implications for
policy credibility.
European Law Journal Volume 4
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25 McCubbins/Page, ‘A theory of Congressional Delegation,’ in M.D. McCubbins/T. Sullivan (eds),
Congress: Structure and Policy, (Cambridge University Press 1987), 409–425.
26 Fiorina, ‘Legislative Choice of Regulatory Forms: Legal Process or Administrative Process?,’ (1982) 39
Public Choice, 33–66, at 47.
27 M Horn, The Political Economy of Public Administration, (Cambridge University Press 1995).
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As Juan Linz reminds us, government pro tempore is an essential and defining
characteristic of democratic governance.28 The time limit inherent in the requirement
of elections at regular intervals is a powerful constraint on the arbitrary use by the
winners of the electoral contest of the powers granted to them by the voters. At the
same time, the fact that those defeated in the elections can look forward to victory at
the next elections, a few years hence, is an important incentive to stay in the democratic
game.29
However, the requirement of elections at regular intervals and the consequent
segmentation of ‘democratic time’ into relatively short intervals produce negative
effects when the problems faced by society require long-term solutions. Under the
expectation of alternation, politicians have few incentives to develop policies whose
success, if at all, will come after the next elections. At best, they will heavily discount
the present value of such policies to themselves.
Government pro tempore has other significant implications. The new institutional
economics rightly emphasises the importance of well-defined property rights for the
efficient allocation of resources through markets. Now, the right to exercise public
authority may be thought of as a sort of property rights – political property rights.30
In fact, the distinction between economic and political property rights tended to be
fuzzy in pre-democratic times; under the 17th-century system of sale of public offices,
one type of property rights could easily be converted into the other.
Political property rights are used by politicians to make choices about policy and
the structure of government. However, such property rights are ill-defined since
‘[w]hatever today’s authorities create . . . stands to be subverted or perhaps completely
destroyed – quite legally and without any compensation whatever – by tomorrow’s
authorities.’31 The difficulty of democratic politicians to achieve policy credibility is a
consequence of ill-defined political property rights. Because a legislature or a majority
coalition cannot bind a subsequent legislature or another coalition, public policies are
always vulnerable to reneging and hence lack credibility.32
Delegation to politically independent institutions is one method of achieving
credible policy commitments. In this perspective, delegation amounts to a transfer of
political property rights in a given policy area to decision-makers who are one step
removed from election returns. The stronger the legal basis of independence, the better
defined are the rights of the new ‘owners.’ The strongest basis of secure political
property rights is a constitutional guarantee of independence, as in the case of the
European Central Bank; but statutory independence may be sufficient when the policy
objective enjoys widespread popular support, as is the case of price stability in postwar
Germany.
Let us now briefly consider the logic of delegation at the EC level. Here, the
commitment problem is compounded since national policy-makers may lack
credibility not only domestically, but also in the eyes of policy-makers from other
Member States. The difficulty of achieving credible commitments without the help of
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© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998 17
28 Linz, Juan, ‘Democracy’s Time Constraints,’ paper presented at the Second Vienna Dialogue on
Democracy, Democracy and Time, Vienna: Institute for Advanced Studies.
29 A. Przeworski, Democracy and the Market, (Cambridge University Press 1991).
30 Moe, ‘Political Institutions: The Neglected Side of the Story,’ (1990) 6 Journal of Law, Economics and
Organization, 213–253.
31 Ibid, 227.
32 Shepsle, ‘Discretion, Institutions, and the Problem of Government Commitment,’ in P. Bourdieu/J.S.
Coleman (eds), Social Theory for a Changing Society, (Westview Press 1991).
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institutions explains why delegation to EC institutions in areas such as environmental
regulation has gone well beyond the functional needs of the Single European
Market.33 The existence of transboundary pollution problems, for example, does not
in itself require the delegation of responsibility for problem-solving to the supranational
level. Member States could search for common solutions through intergovernmental
agreements, as they do in many important areas such as justice and
home affairs.
The problem with intergovernmental agreements in areas where a good deal of
regulatory discretion is unavoidable is that it may be difficult for the parties concerned
to know whether the discretion is used properly. For example, if the agreement imposes
heavy fines on industrial polluters, national regulators will be tempted not to prosecute
domestic firms as rigorously if they determine the level of enforcement unilaterally
rather than under supranational supervision. Although the monitoring capacities of
EC institutions are limited, they are still superior to those provided by intergovernmental
agreements. Hence, the delegation of regulatory powers to the European
Commission will increase the credibility of stringent regulations.
In sum, delegation is an important strategy for achieving credible policy
commitments at both national and supranational level. As Gatsios and Seabright
write: ‘The delegation of regulatory powers to some agency distinct from the
government itself is . . . best understood as a means whereby governments can commit
themselves to regulatory strategies that would not be credible in the absence of such
delegation. And it is an open question in any particular case whether the commitment
is most effectively achieved by delegation to national rather than supra-national
agencies.’34
If we accept that for some purposes reliance upon qualities like independence and
credibility has more importance than reliance upon majority rule, then we must look
for new standards of legitimacy and accountability. The American debate about the
‘fourth branch of government’ provides useful suggestions on how independence and
accountability may be reconciled.
C Independence and Accountability in the Regulatory State
While the pure majoritarian model of democracy is opposed to any delegation of
powers to non-majoritarian institutions, the pluralist or Madisonian model35 – which
aims to share, disperse, limit and delegate power – provides a much more favourable
constitutional environment for the development of such institutions. This may explain
why the United States was the first country to establish a tradition of judicial review
and judge-made law, and also to delegate policy-making powers to independent
regulatory commissions (IRCs) and other agencies on such a scale that American
scholars have coined the expressions ‘regulatory state’ and ‘fourth branch of
government.’ The latter denotes the regulatory branch, whose significance next to the
legislative, executive and judicial branches, is thus explicitly acknowledged.
Such is the tenacity of the paradigm that equates democracy with majority vote,
however, that even in the country of James Madison doubts about the democratic
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18 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998
33 Majone, op cit, n 11.
34 Gatsios/Seabright, ‘Regulation in the European Community,’ (1989) 5:2 Oxford Review of Economic
Policy, 37–60, at 46.
35 R. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory, (University of Chicago Press 1956).
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legitimacy of the ‘fourth branch’ have never completely disappeared. Thus, a political
scientist writing in the 1950s, but expressing views held by a number of scholars and
politicians before and after him, argued that the independence of the IRCs ‘represents
a serious danger to the growth of political democracy in the United States. The dogma
of independence encourages support of the naive notion of escape from politics and
the substitution of the voice of the expert for the voice of the people.’36
In reality, the independence of American regulators, far from being a dogma, has
always been constrained and controlled in various ways. Even the IRCs are
independent in the sense that they operate outside the presidential hierarchy and that –
as asserted by the US Supreme Court in Humphrey’s Executor vs United States (1935)
– commissioners cannot be removed from office for disagreement with presidential
policy. All regulatory agencies and commissions are created by congressionally
enacted statutes and regulators are appointed by elected officials. The programmes
they operate are defined and limited by such statutes; their limited authority, their
objectives and sometimes even the means to achieve those objectives can be found in
the enabling laws.
Furthermore, regulatory discretion is constrained by procedural requirements that
have become increasingly stringent over time. Since passage of the Federal Administrative
Procedure Act (APA) in 1946, regulatory decision-making has undergone a farreaching
process of judicialisation. Under APA, agency adjudication was made to look
like court adjudication, including the adversarial process for obtaining evidence
through presentations of the contending parties, and the requirement of a written
record as the basis of agency decision.
APA requirements for rule-making, as distinct from adjudication, are considerably
less demanding: before promulgating a rule, the agency must provide notice and
opportunity for comments; when it promulgates the rule, it must produce a concise
statement of the rule’s ‘basis and purpose,’ and the rule can be set aside by a court only
if it is ‘arbitrary, capricious, or abuse of discretion.’ As Martin Shapiro has observed,
such differences in procedural requirements for adjudication and rule-making did not
matter much as long as most regulation was of the rate-setting and permit-allocation
types and hence relied largely on adjudication.37
However, with the growth of environmental and risk regulation in the 1960s and
1970s, rule-making (e.g., standard-setting) became much more important. Hence,
federal judges began to develop stricter standards of judicial review for rule-making
proceedings. Starting from the general and apparently innocuous requirements
contained in the APA, they succeeded in formulating new principles to improve the
transparency and substantive rationality of rule-making. For example, the courts have
demanded that both the essential factual data on which a rule is based and the
methodology used in reasoning from the data to the proposed standards, be disclosed
for comment at the time the rule is proposed. The agency’s discussion of the basis and
purpose of its rule must detail the steps of the agency’s reasoning, and significant
comments received during the public comment period must be answered at the time of
final promulgation.38
As a consequence of these judge-made procedural requirements, today rule-making
has to be accompanied by records and findings even more detailed and elaborate than
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36 M. Bernstein, Regulating Business by Independent Commissions, (Princeton University Press 1955).
37 M. Shapiro, Who Guards the Guardians?, (University of Georgia Press 1988).
38 Pedersen, ‘Formal records and informal rule-making,’ (1975) 85 Yale Law Journal, 38–88.
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had been originally envisaged for formal adjudication. The progressive judicialisation
of regulatory proceedings makes the arguments in favour of an independent regulatory
branch more plausible by making the agencies more and more court-like. After all,
one of the most important characteristics of courts is their independence; if it is
improper for a president or member of Congress to interfere with a judicial decision,
the same ought to be true with respect to the decisions of a court-like agency.39
This does not mean that regulatory decisions should be taken in a political vacuum.
The authority of Congress to define broad policy objectives and the responsibility of
the president to co-ordinate the entire regulatory process, are not questioned.
However, the experience of the 1980s has shown that a president, for ideological
reasons, can try to impede an effective implementation of statutory objectives, for
example, in the area of environmental protection, while members of Congress are
often too concerned with their own re-election to worry about the coherence of
regulatory programmes.
In such a situation, only the courts seem to be able to provide the necessary
continuity of regulatory programmes since they, more than any other branch of
government, are committed to preserving continuity of meaning in statutory law.
What is needed, therefore, is a partnership between courts and regulatory agencies.
The courts should insist that regulators continue to pursue with vigour the
environmental and other regulatory objectives set by Congress in the 1960s and 1970s,
even when Congress and the president are tempted to cut back on regulation in the
name of economic growth or political ideology. In return, judges should protect the
independence of regulators.40
But is government by judges and technocratic experts compatible with democratic
accountability? The supporters of agency independence answer that if courts require
the regulatory process to be open to public input and scrutiny, and to act on the basis
of competent analyses, the regulators are not necessarily less accountable than elected
politicians, who often design laws with numerous opportunities to help particular
constituencies.41
D Procedural Legitimacy
The American debate on the legitimacy and accountability of the regulatory branch of
government reveals two distinct dimensions of the issue: a procedural dimension and a
substantive one.42 Procedural legitimacy implies that the agencies are created by
democratically enacted statutes which define the agencies’ legal authority and
objectives; that the regulators are appointed by elected officials; that agency decisionmaking
follows well-defined procedures, which typically define the rights that various
interests have to participate directly in the decision-making process; that agency
decisions must be justified, and especially that they are open to judicial review, and are
adequately monitored by the political principals.
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20 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998
39 Shapiro, op cit, n 37.
40 Ibid, at 127.
41 S. Rose-Ackerman, Rethinking the Progressive Agenda: the Reform of the American Regulatory State,
(The Free Press 1992) at 34.
42 For a similar distinction in the context of EC institutions, see Weiler ‘After Maastricht: Community
Legitimacy in Post-1992 Europe, ’ in W.J. Adams (ed), Singular Europe, (University of Michigan Press
1992).
Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved.
Substantive legitimacy depends on such features as the expertise and problemsolving
capacity of the regulators, their ability to protect diffuse interests, a rational
selection of regulatory priorities, the congruence of agency actions with statutory
objectives and, most important, the precision of the limits within which regulators are
expected to operate. The substantive dimension of regulatory legitimacy will be
discussed in the next section. Here, I examine the procedural dimension, focusing on
the requirements of transparency and public accountability since this is the area where
the democratic deficit of European regulators, both at the national and EC level, is
most obvious.
The simplest and most effective way of improving transparency and accountability
is to require that regulators give reasons for their decisions. This requirement activates
a number of other mechanisms for controlling regulatory discretion such as public
participation and debate, peer review, complaint procedures, and judicial review. In the
words of Martin Shapiro, ‘giving reasons is a device for enhancing democratic
influences on administration by making government more transparent. The reasonsgiving
administrator is likely to make more reasonable decisions than he or she
otherwise might and is more subject to general public surveillance.’43 For example, the
procedural requirements introduced by American courts to improve the transparency
and substantive rationality of rule-making, have been achieved by elaborating the
giving-reasons requirement of the APA (supra).
The framers of the Treaties establishing the European Communities were well aware
of the special importance of giving reasons for institutions not directly accountable to
the voters or to their elected representatives. Article 5 of the Paris Treaty establishing
the European Coal and Steel Community states that ‘the Community shall . . . publish
the reasons for its actions,’ while Article 15 of the same Treaty provides that
‘[d]ecisions, recommendations and opinions of the High Authority shall state the
reasons on which they are based.’ Similarly, Article 190 of the Treaty of Rome requires
that ‘[r]egulations, directives and decisions of the Council and of the Commission shall
state the reasons on which they are based.’
It is important to note that there is no general requirement to give reasons in the law
of most Member States, so that these Community provisions were not only different
from, but in advance of, national laws.44 For example, English public law still lacks a
general obligation on public administrators to give reasons for their decision. Only
recently have English courts begun to develop specific obligations to give reasons in
the absence of a general duty by determining whether the refusal to give reasons was
fair.45
The jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice shows that the Court is quite
prepared to impose the obligation of giving reasons upon the national authorities
in order that individuals be able to protect their rights in so far as they arise
under Community law. In the Heylens case (Case 222/86[1987]ECR4097), the Court
reasoned that effective protection requires that the individual be able to defend his or
her right under the best possible conditions. This would involve judicial review of the
national authority’s decision restricting that right (in the Heylens case, the right of free
movement of workers). For judicial review to be effective, however, the national court
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43 Shapiro ‘The giving-reasons requirement,’ (1992) The University of Chicago Legal Forum, 180–220, at 183.
44 T. C. Hartley, The Foundations of European Community Law (Clarendon Press, 2nd Edition, 1988).
45 Thomas, ‘Reason-giving in English and European Community Administrative Law,’ (1997) 3:2 European
Public Law, 213–222.
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must be able to call upon the authority to provide its reasons.46 A question still
debated by legal scholars is whether Article 190 of the Rome Treaty – according to
Shapiro ‘one of the world’s central devices for judicial enforcement of bureaucratic
transparency’47 – will be used by the ECJ to move beyond formal requirements
towards substantive judicial review of regulatory decision-making in the EC.
Needless to say, much remains to be done to improve procedural legitimacy. The
enactment of an Administrative Procedure Act for the EC would provide the
Community with a unique opportunity to decide what kind of rules are more likely to
rationalise decision-making, to what extent and in which form interest groups should
be given access to the regulatory process and the possibility of dialogue with the
Commission, or how judicial review, especially substantive review, could be facilitated.
The proliferation of committees, working groups, and agencies, shows how urgent is
the need for a single set of rules explaining the procedures to be followed in regulatory
decision-making. The growth in the number of such bodies, the overlap of their
activities, and the divergence’s between the rules governing their functioning create a
real lack of transparency.48 In such a situation, where it is difficult for the citizens of
the European Union to identify the body which is responsible for decisions which
apply to them, procedural legitimacy is reduced to a vanishing point.
The need for greater transparency and accountability in regulatory decision-making
exists also, indeed is even more urgent in some respects, in the Member States. If the
problem of regulatory legitimacy seems to be more acute at the European level, this is
because, relative to other functions of government, the regulatory function is much
more important here than at national level. Thus, a European APA would not only
contribute to the legitimacy of the Community policy-making system, but also serve
as a useful model for the Member States.
E Substantive Standards of Legitimacy
The legitimacy of non-majoritarian institutions depends also on their capacity to
engender and maintain the belief that they are the most appropriate ones for the
functions entrusted to them. Thus, constitutional lawyers use functional standards to
justify the exercise of judicial review, despite its anti-majoritarian character, in order to
protect individual rights that are not adequately represented in the political process.
The argument is that the judiciary has the prime responsibility in the protection of
human rights because it has the essential ingredient for this task, which is lacking in
the political branches: it is ‘insulated from political responsibility and unbeholden to
self-absorbed and excited majoritarianism.’49 As another scholar puts it, if judicial
review serves a crucial governmental function that no other practice realistically can
be expected to serve and if it serves that function in a manner that somehow
accommodates the principle of electorally accountable policy-making, then that
function constitutes the justification for striking down a policy choice made by an
electorally accountable branch of government.50
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22 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998
46 Ibid, 218.
47 Shapiro, loc cit, n 43, at 220.
48 Dehousse/Joerges/Majone/Snyder ‘Europe After 1992: New Regulatory Strategies,’ 1992 Florence, EUI
Working Paper, Law 92/31, at 30.
49 J. Choper, Judicial Review in the National Political Process: A Functional Reconsideration of the Role of
the Supreme Court, (University of Chicago Press 1980), at 68.
50 Perry, op cit, n 13, at 24.
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The grant of autonomous powers to the European institutions, too, is best
understood in functional terms. As mentioned in section II D, one of the important
tasks of EC institutions has always been to protect the individual rights created by the
Treaties, even against the majoritarian decisions of a Member State or the unanimous
preference of all the Member States. EC competences that serve to protect such rights
are legitimated, and limited, by this function.51 In particular, the important powers
given to the Commission are justified by the functions attributed to that body by
Article 155 (‘. . . the Commission shall ensure that the provisions of this Treaty and the
measures taken by the institutions pursuant thereto are applied . . .’) and by Article
169 (monitoring the Member States with respect to the fulfilment of their obligations
under the Treaty) of the Rome Treaty.
Also, the Commission’s right of legislative initiative – which, as we saw in the first
part of the paper, is regarded by many as the root cause of the democratic deficit – is
best understood as a way of ensuring that EC policies are directed towards the
advancement of the general interests of the Community (as defined by the Treaties) as
opposed to national or sectoral self-interests. Like any bureaucracy, the Commission
has interests of its own, and is not free from pressures from special interests when
making decisions. It is, however, better placed than the other political institutions to
take into account the general interests of the Community in its legislative proposals.
The members of the Council are often swayed by short-term considerations relating to
the needs of their own constituencies, while the European Parliament is not yet
institutionally suited to develop a coherent legislative strategy to achieve the objectives
laid down in the Treaties.52 On the other hand, the fundamental interests of the
Commission are aligned with those of the Community as a whole. Indeed, the
Commission has never subscribed to the view that there is no conception of the
Community public interest which is independent of the competition between
individual state preferences.53 On the contrary, it has always seen itself as the guardian
of that interest. This commitment is credible not only because it is sustained by
institutional self-interest, but also because the Treaties are considerably more explicit
than national constitutional documents in identifying the public good: the four
economic freedoms, a system of undistorted competition, prohibition of discrimination
on the basis of nationality or gender and, since the Single European Act, the
protection of non-commodity values like environmental quality. By the same token, an
unlimited expansion of Community competences is the most serious threat to the
legitimacy of EC institutions since it undermines the credibility of such functional
justifications. This is why the more precise delimitation of Community powers
achieved by the Maastricht Treaty is so important from a normative point of view. As
we saw in section II B, Article 3b of the Treaty, which enacts the principles of attribution
of powers, subsidiarity, and proportionality as organising principles of the EC’s
constitutional order, dispels the notion of a Community whose potential regulatory
reach into the domain of the Member States is virtually limitless. It also throws new
light on the limits to the possibility of creating subsidiary powers by means of Article
235. After Maastricht, subsidiary powers can be created under this Article only for
matters directly connected with the core business of the EC, the establishment and
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51 Mestmäcker, loc cit, n 6.
52 Craig, ‘Democracy and Rule-making Within the EC: An Empirical and Normative Assessment,’ (1997)
3:2 European Law Journal, 105–130, at 118.
53 Ibid, at 127.
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regulation of the internal market. Thus, paradoxically, the same Treaty that stimulated
the current debate on the democratic deficit also laid the foundation on which the
autonomous legitimacy of EC institutions could be firmly re-established.
Accountability by results is another important standard of substantive legitimacy.
The standard is particularly relevant when two conditions are satisfied. First,
objectives must be clearly specified: ambiguous or multiple objectives make it difficult
to assign precise responsibilities. Second, the outcomes of the agent’s decisions must
be objectively measurable to avoid that the evaluation itself be too discretionary and
possibly unfair. When these two conditions are met, accountability by results is a
powerful tool in the hands of political principals to control the discretion of their
administrative agents.
Because inflation can be measured with a high degree of accuracy, this mode of
accountability has received a good deal of attention in the area of monetary policy.
Laws establishing the independence of central banks normally define the banks’
objective(s), a structure of accountability and, in some cases, also specific policy
targets. Price stability may be the sole objective of the central bank, as in the case of
the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, or the primary objective, with support of the
government’s economic policy as a secondary objective. For both the Bundesbank and
the European Central Bank, price stability is the primary, not the sole, policy
objective, although the secondary objective has hardly played a role in the
Bundesbank’s decisions, and the same will be probably true of the ECB.
Now, a key measure of the degree of a central bank’s independence is the question
when the bank’s views can be overridden.54 As already mentioned, the status of the
ECB, with minor exceptions, can be modified only through Treaty amendment, which
requires the unanimous consent of the Member States. Thus, electorally accountable
politicians can override ECB’s policies only through an extremely demanding
procedure. The only accountability requirement for the ECB is to present an annual
report on the activities of the ESCB and on the monetary policy of the previous and
the current year to the European Council, the European Parliament, the Council and
the Commission. As an extra guarantee of independence, the ECB has financial
autonomy in that its income and expenditures do not fall under the Community
budget. Although such a high degree of independence raises serious problems of
legitimacy, it was probably necessary under present circumstances. On the one hand,
the ECB will have to establish its reputation as an inflation fighter within a short time
period; on the other hand, preferences about desirable levels of inflation differ widely
among the Member States, so that it is difficult to imagine the Council defining precise
policy targets for the Bank to achieve.
The arrangements designed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act 1989
follow a somewhat different model. Because price stability is the sole objective of the
Bank, the law introduces very strict mechanisms of accountability. Responsibility lies
with the Governor, not with a Board, as in the case of both the Bundesbank and the
ECB. The Governor must agree a target range for inflation with the government, over
a period of three years, and can be dismissed if he fails to deliver the inflation target,
although his contract contains some clearly defined escape clauses.
Thus, the independence of the Bank of New Zealand has a contractual rather than
a statutory or constitutional basis. The underlying theory is that of the principal-agent
model, while the institutional design of the ECB (as of the Bundesbank) is inspired by
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24 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998
54 Gormley and de Haan, op cit, n 24.
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the idea of a fiduciary relationship between the Bank and its political sovereigns.
Several economists have argued that a contractual arrangement between the central
bank (the agent) and the government (the principal) is superior in terms of efficiency
as well as accountability. I have already suggested some reasons why a contractual
arrangement would probably be less than optimal for the ECB, at least in its initial
stages. A detailed discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of the present paper, but
this brief comparison of alternative institutional arrangements for central bank
independence suggests some lessons of general relevance for the design of other nonmajoritarian
institutions.
F Accountability as a Design Problem
Whether political independence and democratic accountability may in fact be
reconciled depends crucially on the way in which the relationships between electorally
accountable politicians, non-majoritarian institutions, and the general public are
structured. As was mentioned, political principals create independent agencies, define
their legal authority, objectives and decision-making procedures, and appoint key
personnel. Such powers can and should be used not only to provide ex ante legitimacy,
but also to design institutional arrangements capable of ensuring democratic
accountability over time.
In this connection, it is interesting to note that before the 1980s most research on
political-bureaucratic relations tended to cast doubt on the possibility of effectively
monitoring and controlling the bureaucracy. However, more recent studies, inspired by
advances in agency theory and supported by sophisticated statistical analyses, show
that effective oversight is possible – provided democratic leaders take design problems
seriously. This new research on political control makes two key assumptions.55 First,
bureaucratic agents are bound by contract to serve electorally accountable principals;
their primary duty is faithful implementation of the law. But, second, through time the
interests of politicians and bureaucratic experts tend to diverge. This is because
political coalitions change from those existing when the principals adopted a certain
policy, and also because bureaucracies develop separate interests through institutionalisation
and external pressures. The important point is that sophisticated
politicians recognise these dangers and can take countermeasures.
Thus, political oversight is possible if elected politicians design agencies with
suitable incentive structures. It is up to the principals to structure relationships with
their agents so that the outcomes produced through the agents’ efforts are the best the
principals can achieve, given the choice to delegate in the first place. Agency theory, as
applied to problems of political control,56 suggests that the following institutional
choices are crucial for the design of an effective accountability structure:
• the extent to which decisions are delegated to an independent body rather than taken by the
principals themselves, with the choice ranging from ‘no delegation’ to ‘full delegation.’
• The governance structure of the agent: ministerial department, single-headed agency,
commission, self-regulatory organisation, private organisation, and so on. The single most
important dimension along which these institutions vary is their degree of independence
from the political process.
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© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998 25
55 Wood/Waterman: ‘The Dynamics of Political Control of the Bureaucracy,’ (1991) 85 American Political
Science Review, 801–828.
56 Horn, loc cit, n 27, 47–55.
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• The rules that specify the procedures to be followed in administrative decision-making.
Examples are the already mentioned reason-giving requirements, and rules defining the
rights of various groups to participate directly in the decision-making process.
• The allocation of resources, in particular, the agents’ employment conditions, and the extent
to which the agency is to be financed by taxes or by the sale of its services.
• The extent of ex post monitoring through ongoing legislative and executive oversight, the
budgetary process, judicial review, reorganisations, citizens’ complaints or professional
sanctions.
A judicious selection of the values to be assigned to these variables, in the light of
the nature of the delegated tasks and of the relevant political and institutional setting,
will go a long way towards ensuring that independence and accountability are indeed
complementary and mutually supporting, rather than antithetical, values.
Our present understanding of the logic of delegation casts doubt on the validity of
the received view concerning the delegation of powers by Community institutions to
ad hoc bodies not envisaged by the founding Treaties. That view, expressed by the socalled
Meroni doctrine, holds that delegation is only possible under conditions that
effectively negate the autonomy of such bodies. This is one reason why the European
agencies created in the early 1990s were denied the power of rule-making, enforcement
and adjudication normally granted to American regulators, and even lack the more
limited powers enjoyed by, for instance, the Regulatory Offices in Britain and the
Autorités Administratives Indépendantes in France. Even the European Agency for the
Evaluation of Medicinal Products, which comes closest to being a fully fledged
regulatory body, cannot take decisions concerning the safety and efficacy of new
medical drugs, but must submit opinions concerning the approval of such products to
the European Commission.
Now, it is a moot point whether the Meroni precedent (Case 9/56, [1958]ECR 133),
which deals with delegation to outside bodies, is relevant for the new agencies. After
all, on several occasions the Court has ruled that extensive discretionary powers may
be delegated to the Commission – provided, the delegation specifies the basic
principles governing the matter in question – and the same principle is thought to
apply where a Community institution delegates power to itself.57
Be that as it may, one can only agree with Michelle Everson that the case of Meroni
vs High Authority, which dates from the 1950s, should be seen as a creature of its time:
the judgement of the Court reveals a heavy reliance on outdated economic and
political theories. Thus, the Court assumed that control, to be effective, must be
exercised directly and in great detail by the delegating authority. By this criterion,
European agencies could never be truly independent, but should remain within the
administrative domain of organs such as the Commission.58 By contrast,
contemporary theories of administrative control emphasise the need to identify selfpolicing
mechanisms which are already present in the system; and instead of assuming
that control is necessarily to be exercised from any fixed place in the system, these
theories contemplate a network of complementary and overlapping checking
mechanisms.59 More generally, the Meroni doctrine, like older theories of politicalEuropean
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26 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998
57 Hartley, op cit, n 44, 110–115.
58 Everson, ‘Independent Agencies,’ in G. Winter (ed), Sources and Categories of European Union Law,
(Nomos 1996), 601–627, at 620.
59 Hood, ‘Concepts of Control over Public Bureaucracies: ‘Comptrol’ and ‘Interpolable Balance’’, in FranzXavier
Kaufmann (ed), The Public Sector, (de Gruyter 1991) 347–366.
Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved.
bureaucratic relations, takes a pessimistic view of the possibility of controlling
administrative discretion, apparently unaware of the potentials of institutional design.
In fact, as we saw above, careful institutional design can provide a number of
instruments which political principals may use to minimise the danger of bureaucratic
drift and reconcile independence with accountability.
The experience of countries with a long tradition of independent regulatory bodies,
such as the United States, leads to similar conclusions. Independent agencies can
indeed be kept politically accountable, but only by a combination of control
instruments: clear statutory objectives, oversight by specialised legislative committees,
strict procedural requirements, judicial review, appointments of key personnel,
budgetary controls, reorganisations, professionalism, public participation, monitoring
by interest groups, even inter-agency rivalry. When such a multi-pronged approach is
used carefully and fully, no one controls an independent agency, yet the agency is
‘under control.’60
IV Conclusion
At the beginning of this paper it was suggested that arguments about Europe’s
democratic deficit are really arguments about the nature, functions and goals of the
EC/EU. Those who assume that economic integration must necessarily lead to
political integration tend to apply to the European institutions, seen as the kernel of a
future European federation, the same standards of legitimacy which prevail at the
national level.
Fully fledged federalism, however, is only one possible trajectory of the process of
European integration, and one that does not enjoy widespread political support at
present. In fact, after the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties, and the decision to
proceed with the enlargement of the Union, the federalist goal seems to recede into an
ever more distant and indistinct future. But even assuming a growing demand for
greater political union as a result of deepening economic and monetary integration or
of external threats, there is no reason at all to think that the political and constitutional
arrangements of the future will mirror the institutional architecture of the nation-state.
Overlapping jurisdictions, legal pluralism, extensive delegation of powers to
transnational organisation – in short, a new ‘medievalism’ – is a more likely scenario.
The key question which has been raised in this paper, therefore, is whether it is
realistic and methodologically correct to assess the legitimacy of present institutions
and policy-making processes with reference to norms that are largely irrelevant today
and may not become relevant in the future.
Our normative conclusions are grounded in a positive model of EC institutions
which deliberately eschews loaded terms like federalism, inter-governmentalism, and
even neofunctionalism – if the latter label is interpreted to mean an allegedly
irresistible expansion of Community competences. This ‘regulatory model’ of the EC61
March 1998 Europe’s Democracy Deficit
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998 27
60 Moe, ‘Interests, Institutions and Positive Theory: The Politics of the NLRB,’ (1987) 2 Studies in American
Political Development, 236–299.
61 Caporaso, ‘The European Union and Forms of State: Westphalian, Regulatory, and Post-Modern,’ (1996)
34 JCMS, 29–52; Dehousse, ‘European Institutional Architecture after the Amsterdam Treaty:
Parliamentary System or Regulatory Structure?,’ (1998 forthcoming ) CMLR; Mc Gowan/Wallace,
‘Towards a European regulatory state,’ (1996) 3:4 JEPP, 560–576; Majone, ‘Market Integration and
Regulation: Europe after 1992’ (1992) 43:1–2 Metroeconomica, 131–156; Majone, op cit, n 11.
Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved.
shifts the focus of attention from state building or intergovernmental bargaining to the
delegation to European institutions of specific functional tasks that can be tackled
more efficiently and/or credibly at the supranational level.
Among the delegated tasks rule-making is by far the most important one, since the
internal market would not even exist without an intricate system of regulations
supplementing the prohibitions of quantitative and other restrictions to trade between
Member States. Hence, the willingness of national governments to accept far-reaching
limitations of their sovereignty in regulatory matters. Such is the extent of delegation
in this area that it is heuristically useful to think of the EC institutions as the
regulatory branch – the ‘fourth branch of government’ to use the America phrase – of
the Member States.
All democratic political systems solve collective-action problems by delegating
authority to take actions in particular areas from individuals or institutions to whom
it was originally granted – the political principals – to agents or trustees. The
important issue for democratic theory is to specify which tasks may be legitimately
delegated to institutions insulated from the political process, and which areas should
remain under the direct control of the political principals. It has already been
suggested (see section II E) that the distinction between efficiency and redistribution is
highly relevant to this issue. Efficiency-oriented policies attempt to increase the
aggregate welfare of society, while redistributive policies are designed to improve the
welfare of one particular group in society at the expense of other groups.
In a nutshell: redistributive policies can be legitimated only by majoritarian means
and thus cannot be delegated to institutions independent of the political process;
efficiency-oriented policies, on the other hand, are basically legitimated by results, and
hence may be delegated to such institutions, provided an adequate system of
accountability is in place. It is of course true that efficiency-enhancing policies, like all
public policies, will normally have redistributive impacts. This is not a serious problem
if the efficiency gains are large enough to compensate the losers, and if it is politically
feasible to do so. However, it is well known that compensation is often difficult at
national level because of the veto power of special interests.
At European level, by contrast, Member States that are negatively affected by a
collective decision, at least in the short run, are generally compensated in some way.
This possibility of separating the two stages of decision-making – problem-solving,
and bargaining over the distribution of the gains – is not the least advantage of having
a supranational level of governance. As long as the tasks assigned to this level are
precisely and narrowly defined, non-majoritarian sources of legitimacy – expertise,
procedural rationality, transparency, accountability by results – should be sufficient to
justify the delegation of the necessary powers.
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