Accountability and European Governance

Deirdre Curtin, Peter Mair, Yannis Papadopoulos

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415845816
• eBook ISBN: 9781317999560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In recent years there has been a considerable effort in some transnational organizations and institutions to confront a crisis of legitimacy by promising more accountability and openness. This volume takes as its central focus the role of accountability in democratic governance, and attempts to position a broad understanding of the notion of accountability within the overall context of the evolving political system of governance in Europe and in particular of the European Union. Bringing together new work by some of the leading scholars in the field, this volume considers the relationship between accountability and a wide range of other themes in European governance such as problems of representation, transparency, bureaucracy, and transnational relations. The volume also deals with the role of accountability in multi-level governance, and its relationship to both direct democracy and civil society.

This book was published as a special issue of West European Politics.

Introduction

DEIRDRE CURTIN, PETER MAIR and YANNIS PAPADOPOULOS

The special issue of which this paper forms the introduction takes as its central focus one particular aspect of democratic governance: accountability. It attempts to position a broad understanding of the notion of accountability within the overall context of the evolving political system of governance in Europe and in particular of the European Union. With accountability at the centre, we consider its relationship to a fairly wide range of other themes in any given political system. This introduction first looks to the concept of accountability as it stands alongside and within other major themes of contemporary political systems. The issue of accountability beyond the national democratic state is then considered, and in particular within what Sbragia has termed the ‘ecology’ of governance. The introduction concludes with summaries of the papers included in the special issue.

This special issue takes as its central focus one particular aspect of democratic governance: accountability. It attempts to position a broad understanding of the notion of accountability within the overall context of the evolving political system of governance in Europe and in particular of the European Union. With accountability at the centre, we consider its relationship to a fairly wide range of other themes in any given political system.

In this brief introductory essay, we first look to the concept of accountability as it stands alongside and within other major themes of contemporary political systems. We then consider the issue of accountability beyond the national democratic state, and in particular within what Sbragia (2008) has aptly termed the ‘ecology’ of governance, that is, the context in which the various meta-norms and organising principles come to be applied. We conclude this introductory essay with summaries of the papers included in the special issue.

Accountability: From ‘Buzzword’ to Operating Principle

Accountability is one of those golden concepts that are relatively uncontested in the sense that there is intuitive agreement that public institutions or authorities should render public account for the use of their mandates and for the manner in which they use public resources. Moreover, the term ‘accountable’ is increasingly used in political discourse and policy documents as a means of underlining an image of transparency and trustworthiness. In good governance terms, it is regarded as an undisputed virtue (Bovens 2010), and in the last two decades, as Onora O’Neill (2002) put it, the quest for greater accountability ‘has penetrated all our lives, like great draughts of Heineken, reaching parts that supposedly less developed forms of accountability did not reach’. However, it is also a very elusive concept, meaning very different things to different people and to different audiences. In this sense, as Bovens (2005: 184) has suggested elsewhere, it is a vague concept, ‘a garbage can filled with good intentions, loosely defined concepts and vague images of good governance’, the very elasticity of which constitutes both a challenge and a pitfall (see also Lindberg 2009).

Accountability is a broad and rather stretched concept that reflects a range of understandings rather than a single core paradigm. In democratic polities, it also appears intimately related to electoral representation, reflecting a looped relationship between authorisation of parties and their governments through ex-ante mandates, on the one hand, and, on the other, the evaluation of their performance in office through ex-post controls (Andeweg 2003), with the ultimate sanction being the capacity to ‘throw the rascals out’. In reality these links have become more complex. In the first place, it is now increasingly difficult for voters to authorise parties, or for parties to act as authorised agents. This is partly to do with the general problems of representation in the modern polity, about which Manin (1997) and Andeweg (2003), among others, have written insightfully. As societies and hence electorates fragment, and as their major components lose ideological cohesion and coherence, the issues on which parties might mobilise support become narrower and less capable of being aggregated. The result is the promotion of a party policy in election programmes that is often less a mandate for action and more a symbolic signalling of priorities and core concerns. In this context the party assumes the role of ‘trustee’ rather than ‘delegate’, and is voted on more in hope than expectation. In addition, the complexity of modern governance systems often makes the accountability of elected officials fictitious: they are considered responsible for events beyond their control and they can evade accountability for some of their undertakings (Papadopoulos 2003).

The problem is also to do with the parties themselves, which have become so embedded within the institutions of the democratic polity, and which have become so caught up with their role as administrators or governors, that they are no longer so capable of listening to voters and acting on their behalf. In other words, parties find themselves with much less room and capacity to acts as representatives, and representation – and hence also authorisation – tends thereby to migrate away from the electoral channel, and to find expression through the agency of interest groups, advocacy coalitions, lobbyists, and the media. In this sense, and to adopt Ulrich Beck’s (1992) familiar expression, representation moves from being part of politics with a big ‘P’ to being part of politics with a small ‘p’ (for a more extensive discussion of these issues, see Mair 2008, 2009).

All of this involves a re-equilibration of voter–party links, with a steady downplaying of pre-electoral mandates and a growing emphasis on post-electoral controls. This is also why the notion of accountability now begins to figure so strongly in discussions of electoral politics and representative government. If voters can no longer authorise parties in advance in terms of their programmatic preferences and commitments, and if the parties themselves are no longer susceptible to this type of authorisation, then retrospective accountability becomes the most important linkage mechanism. Parties, and their governments, are elected with the promise of serving as good governors rather than as partisans, and hence are judged on how well they have performed when their term of office concludes. This is precisely the form of relationship which is invoked by the notion of accountability, with the government seeking to explain or justify its actions, in retrospect, to the citizens, and doing so in the hope of gaining the reward of re-election and avoiding the sanction of dismissal. In sum, accountability in electoral politics looms much larger in situations in which citizens find it difficult to authorise parties beforehand, and in which parties find it difficult to be so authorised (see also Müller and Mayer 2010).

One consequence of this re-equilibration is the growing trend towards bipolarism in modern European party systems. Bipolarism refers here to the tendency for parties in multiparty systems to group together to offer alternative governments and pre-electoral coalitions, thus offering voters the opportunity to choose between alternative teams of leaders even within the context of fragmented multiparty politics. Italy is the most obvious example of such a transformation, but a tendency towards bipolarism has also been evident in Germany, as well as in Austria and France. Moreover, many of the new third- and fourth-wave democracies in Europe, including Greece, Portugal and Spain, and more recently Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, are also often bipolar in character, whether through two-partism or through bipolar multipartism. Thirty years ago, bipolar systems were relatively rare; today, they are emerging as one of Europe’s dominant forms of party system. But it is also important to underline that in many cases these bipolar systems are not simply two-party systems. Rather, competition ensues between two alternating and sometimes shifting coalitions, through which elections become decisive even within the context of increasingly fragmented multiparty politics, and through which a relationship of electoral accountability can be established. When parties become less oriented towards delegated representation, they become more inclined to present themselves to voters as governors, and to ask to be evaluated, in retrospect, as governors. This clearly involves a more instrumental and accountability-oriented approach to voting – judging the incumbents on how well they have performed, and on how well they have managed the polity, and judging the opposition in terms of how much better or worse they might have done had they been in office (Andeweg 2003).

In a context of widespread distrust and negative attitudes about politicians, there are also more demands for an efficient monitoring of their behaviour to ensure that they do not primarily care about their own interest. Politicians’ conduct, including in their private sphere, is subject to increased scrutiny. This is partly what Manin (1997) speaks about when he discusses the advent of an ‘audience’ democracy. The scrutiny of politicians’ conduct is facilitated by the role of the media that are increasingly independent of parties and subject to a commercial logic that makes them privilege failures of politicians (Stoker 2006: 127–31). This probably further reinforces cynical views and the quest for accountability. Holding governments to account has also involved in recent years the copious use of the rhetoric of transparency and participation by civil society groups and individual citizens. We are here in a context of a ‘monitory’ democracy (Keane 2009) – which is not unrelated to ‘audience’ democracy – where NGOs act as watchdogs and often go public to name and shame the rulers about their conduct (see also Kohler-Koch 2010).

Governance in Europe and Beyond

The description thus far of the different facets and understandings of accountability relates above all to the context of the political systems of nation states. But what of systems of governance beyond the nation state: at the transnational, supranational, international or global levels of governance? The fact is that a new political order has arisen beyond the nation state. It is transforming the previously existing Westphalian order on an ongoing basis, albeit often invisibly. It is most developed in Europe, in particular in the context of ongoing processes of European integration. But we find essentially the same phenomenon at transnational, international and even global levels of governance (see also Koenig-Archibugi 2010 and references cited).

The new political order is dominated by executive powers who jump the fence of their national constitutional and democratic systems and who exercise public power over an increasing range of politically and socially salient issues. Issues such as the influenza pandemic, climate change and bonuses in the banking system are now largely addressed and regulated by public power in the post-national order, exercised by governments, (prime) ministers, civil servants as well as other national actors and policy/scientific experts who are part of the so-called ‘disaggregated state’ (Slaughter 2004) and who perform essentially executive and regulatory functions in and around the European Union, and at the transnational, international and global level (for example, the G20 and the United Nations). Alongside national actors, their supranational and international counterparts (Eurocrats and international civil servants) further accumulate public power (Barnett and Finnemore 2006). The accountability chain in the IMF, for example, is seen as very ‘tortuous’ (Sperling 2009: 42), running from administrative staff to the executive board, then to the Board of Governors, to the government of member states that appointed its governor, and finally to national voters.

This development presents an important puzzle: can the ongoing and incremental accumulation of these various ‘executive orders’ (Curtin and Egeberg 2008) take place without being matched by accountability mechanisms similar to those that exist at the level of national political and constitutional systems? The European Union presents in this context a salient example of the exercise of public power by both political and administrative executives that works to a large extent beyond the reach of national accountability mechanisms. At the same time the institutional specificity and sophistication of the EU means that it is at the cutting edge in terms of developing accountability mechanisms of various kinds at the supranational level of governance.

The Ecology of EU Governance

The EU as we know it is not an ‘ordinary’ international organisation. Yet it operates on the international plane and conducts its own external relations with both third states and other international organisations and actors. At the same time, the EU has its own internal and autonomous – and well developed – legal system, as well as its own evolving political system, both of which interact in an intricate, complex and often opaque manner with the legal and political systems of the individual member states. Nor is the EU a conventional state, but it obviously has state-like features and functions, as well as a mode of governance that, like those of the member states themselves, is increasingly multi-actor, multi-functional and multi-level (Bovens et al. 2010).

The Treaty of Lisbon, like the Constitutional Treaty before it, can be said to make more visible than hitherto the fact that the European Union is evolving as a matter of legal and institutional practices into a political system in its own right. This is not the same as saying that it is evolving into a super-state, federal or otherwise; rather, the manner in which power is being organised and exercised is ever closer to a practice that is better understood in terms of comparative politics than international relations. Although this evolution has obviously being going on for quite some time now (Hix 2005), it is important to underline that several already existing trends have now been consolidated in the Treaty of Lisbon, including the main legislative procedure now leading to the adoption of what are de facto ‘laws’. Moreover, while the mainstreaming of the European Parliament at the heart of the adoption of EU legislation has been evolving for some time, it has now reached fairly advanced proportions, even allowing for the variety of exceptions and ‘specific’ legislative procedures that allow the Council of Ministers to retain the primordial role as legislator in specific policy fields and areas (mainly defence and security policy).

Second, the Lisbon Treaty has consolidated and accentuated the fact that at the level of the EU political system itself there is now a plural executive power. This is composed of the Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Council, with the position of the latter being not only institutionalised and linked closely to the Council of Ministers, but also being reinforced considerably by the provision for a semi-permanent President. In fact all three core institutions can be analysed increasingly in terms of the dichotomy that defines the two aspects of executive power – the political and the administrative (Curtin 2009).

This brings us to the third aspect of the EU political system, which is the role played at the EU level by national ministers and national civil servants (see Geuijen et al. 2008). This also contributes to the distinctive nature of the EU political system. Some of its key players are agents of democratic principals (ultimately the citizens) in the national political processes but lack a ‘European’ mandate as such. Contrary to the belief that these actors play a democratically legitimate role in the EU political system having been elected and mandated in national elections, the reality is closer to the notion that these components of national executive power have become effectively ‘depoliticised’ in their operations in the European context (see also Abromeit 2009). This is so because democratic governments are indeed accountable to national electorates, but usually their positions on European integration do not form a core part of the public debate in the framework of national electoral competition: typically a case of fictitious accountability. Another problem with respect to accountability is that decision-making at EU level is propitious to credit-claiming and blame-avoidance strategies on behalf of national governments (Smith 1997).

The paradox is that at the same time as national actors became increasingly depoliticised, the Commission, which was originally conceived as a technocratic expert-based body, has become increasingly politicised at the EU level (Wille 2009). This has partially to do with the manner in which the Commission has interpreted its own role and tasks in the EU context by delegating to others its non-political and more administrative and managerial tasks. But it is also a reflection of the manner in which the European Parliament has consolidated its power and willingness to hold the Commission to account for its actions and failings.

The Democratic Accountability Deficit

The oft-cited statement by Jacques Delors that the EU has an influence over 80 per cent of the legislation of its member states is usually qualified as a myth. However, the EU indisputably governs, and its governance indisputably matters. We need only note, for example, the power of the European Commission to instruct the Dutch ING Bank to repay a very substantial part of the loan it received as a prohibited ‘state aid’, and to significantly restructure and slim its businesses. We might also note its power to order Microsoft to pay almost €900 million for abusing its dominant position in the market, a decision which is also likely to open up otherwise restrictive practices on the part of Microsoft, and hence to have an impact on computer users everywhere. Hence EU governance is also felt in areas such as the environment, foo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Two Concepts of Accountability: Accountability as a Virtue and as a Mechanism
• 3. Representation and Accountability: Communicating Tubes?
• 4. Accountability and Transparency: Siamese Twins, Matching Parts, Awkward Couple?
• 5. Accountability as a Bureaucratic Minefield: Lessons from a Comparative Study
• 6. Accountability and Multi-level Governance: More Accountability, Less Democracy?
• 7. Reflexive Accountability and Direct Democracy
• 8. Meeting the Challenges of Representation and Accountability in Multi-party Governments
• 9. Political–Bureaucratic Accountability in the EU Commission: Modernising the Executive
• 10. How to Put Matters Right? Assessing the Role of Civil Society in EU Accountability
• 11. Accountability in Transnational Relations: How Distinctive Is It?
• Index