Experimentalist governance in the European Union: A commentary

Sabel and Zeitlin's Experimentalist Governance offers an insight into European governance in those cases where the EU institutions do not have clear competence and where member states are not prepared to accept a unified policy on a problem at hand. Experimentalist Governance identifies four steps of action: agree on common goals, have lower levels propose ways to meet goals, then report on their meeting of goals, and, finally, periodically reevaluate the review procedures. By looking at the developments in EU policymaking through the lens of experimentalist governance (EG), one obtains an appreciation of how goals might be achieved that would otherwise not likely have been achieved through the community method. Sabel and Zeitlin highlight how EG can be effective in obtaining results, integrating peers, and incorporating deliberation, and offer a different way to deal with accountability and legitimacy. This article closes by taking the next step, namely, asking what challenges EG poses to democratic processes.     

Experimentalist governance in the EU: The emperor's new clothes?

Most students of the EU agree by now that it is best described as a governance system. There is far less consensus on what kind of governance the EU actually features: modern, postmodern, network, cooperative, innovative or simply new? Sabel and Zeitlin have advanced yet another concept. This paper discusses the added value of their “experimentalist governance” (EG), as presented in an edited volume published in 2010, for understanding and explaining the nature of EU policymaking, addressing four questions: First, to what extent is EG distinct from existing concepts of governance? Second, how pervasive is EG in the EU when compared to alternative forms of governance? Third, what is the effect of EG on EU policy outcomes, on the one hand, and the overall architecture of the EU, on the other? Finally, does EG solve or exacerbate the EU's democratic deficit?     

EU public affairs and the White Paper on Governance

The White Paper on Governance process[This analysis covers the period up to and including the publication of COM (2001) 428 of 25.7.2001, ‘European Governance: A White Paper’.] began life as a search for an issue by a new Commission President. The issue is packaged as enhancing/modernising democracy in the EU and legitimising EU institutions, and searches for further avenues of civil participation. The process ‘sells’ the concept of ‘democratic deficit’, though reveals a highly open and accessible system which is already severely overloaded by interest representation. Rather than escalating a ‘lobby free for all’, the opportunity could be taken to strengthen governance by organising EU interest representation. This could be done by accrediting associations that are able to meet strict criteria of representativity as ‘governance partners’, making them sufficiently attractive to their members to work through them rather than bypassing them, and which would strengthen their ability to contribute to EU governance as policy capable organisations. These associations could find a place in a revamped and reorganised Economic and Social Committee, which would be engaged at a much earlier stage in the EU policy process. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Reconceptualizing European Union regulatory networks: A response to Blauberger and Rittberger

This article responds to Michael Blauberger and Berthold Rittberger's article “Conceptualizing and theorizing EU regulatory networks,” published in Regulation & Governance in 2015. Blauberger and Rittberger challenged our previous work on the politics of Eurocracy, disputing our argument that political considerations, not functional ones, explain the choice of bureaucratic structure in the European Union (EU). Blauberger and Rittberger suggest that functional considerations do indeed explain why policymakers sometimes prefer governance through European Regulatory Networks rather than through more centralized EU agencies, and argue that we have misunderstood the preferences of EU legislative principals. In this article, we argue that there are significant flaws in Blauberger and Rittberger's analysis on both theoretical and empirical grounds. We show that a proper interpretation of developments in both telecoms and competition lends support to our theoretical claims and not those offered by Blauberger and Rittberger.     

The welfare state,migration, and voting rights

This paper proposes a political economic analysis of public opinion in European Union countries toward migrants from poor countries. By focusing on redistributive policy, the analysis sheds light on specific determinants of public opinion. The theoretical analysis, based on the median voter framework, shows that one of the key variables affecting public opinion is the voting rights of migrants. Where migrants do not have the right to vote, their presence negatively impacts the poorest natives. In countries where migrants enjoy voting rights, they are able to vote on redistributive policy; therefore, the impact of migration on natives’ welfare is fundamentally different. After the theoretical analysis, the paper proposes an empirical analysis of Europeans’ attitudes toward non-Western migrants in European Union countries. This empirical analysis confirms the decisive impact of migrants’ voting rights. It shows that, in EU countries, the more educated natives are significantly less favorable to migrants from poor countries when the latter have the right to vote.     

Steuerung jenseits von Hierarchie

The paper sheds new light on recent debates about governance and approaches contemporary problems of governing from the perspective of contemporary theories of power. The concept of “soft governing” is developed in order to capture horizontal mechanisms of power intentionally used to govern beyond formalised hierarchies characteristic of processes of governance. The paper describes in particular the horizontal forms of governing through discursive practices, argumentation and symbols and the ways in which they interact. The example of campaigns against female genital mutilation is introduced in order to illustrate possible forms of governing beyond hierarchy.     

Do all bridges collapse? Possibilities for democracy in the European Union

It is tempting, but wrong, to infer from the failures of the EU draft constitution that all reforms based on increasing citizen participation in the European Union are doomed to fail. Andrew Moravcsik’s trenchant dismissal of the constitutional project commits this error. Moravcsik’s sweeping claims, based on what he calls empirical social science, speak well beyond the evidence on democratic institutional innovations. Participatory measures such as consultative Citizens’ Assemblies may articulate a citizens’ perspective that can help to anchor the democratic legitimacy of the EU. We do not know if such innovations can resolve the problems of the democratic deficit, but we do know that empirical social science has not spoken decisively on the issue. It is worth examining their democratic potential rather than dismissing them outright. This article develops and draws on ideas we first expressed in an online symposium with Andrew Moravcsik and others, hosted by Notre Europe (Culpepper/Fung 2006b).     

Reflections on experimentalist governance

This article critically engages with Sabel and Zeitlin's important notion of experimentalist governance (EG). It is cast as a “recursive process of provisional goal‐setting and revision based on learning from the comparison of alternative approaches to advancing them in different contexts.” This is a useful heuristic device to capture policymaking and implementation in complex, dynamic, and highly diverse political entities. This article discusses the micro‐foundations underpinning EG, how it relates to hierarchical modes of governing, and how well it captures the distinctive traits of the EU. It also discusses EG from a democratic perspective. In democratic terms EG is understood as a form of direct deliberative polyarchy. This article notes that the question of EG's contribution to democratization cannot, however, be adequately addressed unless we pay more systematic attention to representation and representative democracy.     

Exploring Transnational Civil Society: A Comparative Study of Colombian,Dominican and Mexican Immigrant Organizations in the USA

ABSTRACT

European integration has added an extra dimension to the perceived crisis of contemporary democracy. Many observers argue that the allocation of decision-making powers beyond the nation state bears the risk of hollowing out the institutional mechanisms of democratic accountability. In EU governance, the Commission has emerged as a particularly active and imaginative actor promoting EU–society relations, and it has done so with the explicit desire to improve the democratic legitimacy of the EU. However, assumptions concerning the societal prerequisites of a working democracy differ with the normative theory of democracy employed. Therefore, expectations concerning the beneficial effect of institutional reforms such as the European Commission's new governance strategy, which was launched at the beginning of the century, vary according to normative standards set by different theories of democracy on the one hand and to the confidence in the malleability of society on the other. Our contribution seeks to pave a way for the systematic assessment of the democratic potential of the European Commission's consultation regime. To this purpose, two alternative theoretical conceptions that link participation to democracy will be presented. A list of criteria for both conceptions that enable us to empirically assess the democratic potential of the EU Commission's participatory strategy will then be presented.     

Constitutionalism and experimentalist governance

This comment explores how experimentalist governance is connected to wider constitutional questions and makes two claims. First, there are good reasons to believe that experimentalist governance can only flourish in a world where the precepts of liberal democratic constitutionalism have been widely accepted and institutionalized. Experimentalist governance is part and parcel of the world of liberal democratic constitutionalism. Second, it is not only governance in Europe that can be described in experimentalist terms. The concept is also useful to describe the dynamics of European constitutionalism.     

Macro-regional strategies of the European Union (EU) and experimentalist design of multi-level governance: the case of the EU strategy for the Danube region

Placed within EU Cohesion policy and its objective of European territorial cooperation, macro-regional strategies of the European Union (EU) aim to improve functional cooperation and coherence across policy sectors at different levels of governance, involving both member and partner states, as well as public and private actors from the subnational level and civil society in a given ‘macro-region’. In forging a ‘macro-regional’ approach, the EU commits to only using existing legislative frameworks, financial programmes and institutions. By applying the analytical lens of multi-level and experimentalist governance (EG), and using the EU Strategy for the Danube Region as a case, this article shows that ‘macro-regional’ actors have been activated at various scales and locked in a recursive process of EG. In order to make the macro-regional experiment sustainable, it will be important to ensure that monitoring and comparative review of implementation experience functions effectively and that partner countries, subnational authorities and civil societies have a voice in what is, by and large, an intergovernmental strategy.     

Credibility,Complexity and Uncertainty: Explaining the Institutional Independence of 29 EU Agencies

The delegation of policy-making tasks to EU agencies and their remarkable growth in number over the past two decades mark a striking new development in the EU's institutional make-up. While most of the nascent literature on the EU's ‘agencification’ addresses the conditions for agency creation and the implications of agency governance from the perspective of democratic accountability, there is a lack of empirical research systematically scrutinising the institutional structure and degree of formal-institutional independence of these agencies. This article offers a comprehensive empirical assessment and measure of the variation in institutional independence displayed by the entire set of 29 EU agencies operating under the EU's three pillars and tests hypotheses explaining variation in formal independence among agencies.     

From the rule of law to the rule of rules: technocracy and the crisis of EU governance

This article focuses on two trends emerging through the eurozone crisis, both of which diminish the quality of democracy in the EU and its member states. Firstly, the crisis has led to an increased reliance on non-majoritarian institutions, such as the ECB, at the expense of democratic accountability. Secondly, the crisis has led to a new emphasis on coercive enforcement at the expense of the voluntary cooperation that previously characterised (and sustained) the EU as a community of law. Thus, the ECB’s (over-)empowerment is a synecdoche of a wider problem: The EU’s tendency to resort to technocratic governance in the face of challenges that require political contestation. In the absence of opportunities for democratic contestation, EU emergency governance – Integration through Crisis – oscillates between moments of heightened politicisation, in which ad hoc decisions are justified as necessary, and the (sometimes coercive) appeal to the depoliticised rule of rules.     

Experimentalism in transnational forest governance: Implementing European Union Forest Law Enforcement,Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Voluntary Partnership Agreements in Indonesia and Ghana

Over the past decade, the European Union (EU) has created a novel experimentalist architecture for transnational forest governance: the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative. This innovative architecture comprises extensive participation by civil society stakeholders in establishing and revising open‐ended framework goals (Voluntary Partnership Agreements [VPAs] with developing countries aimed at promoting sustainable forest governance and preventing illegal logging) and metrics for assessing progress toward them (legality standards and indicators) through monitoring and review of local implementation, underpinned by a penalty default mechanism to sanction non‐cooperation (the EU Timber Regulation that prohibits operators from placing illegally harvested wood on the European market). This paper analyzes the implementation of VPAs in Indonesia and Ghana, the two countries furthest advanced toward issuing FLEGT export licences. A central finding is the reciprocal relationship between the experimentalist architecture of the FLEGT initiative and transnational civil society activism, whereby the VPAs’ insistence on stakeholder participation, independent monitoring, and joint implementation review, underwritten by the EU, empowers domestic non‐governmental organizations with local knowledge to expose problems on the ground, hold public authorities accountable for addressing them, and contribute to developing provisional solutions.     

The Rise of 'New' Policy Instruments in Comparative Perspective: Has Governance Eclipsed Government?

Governance is a term in good currency, but there are still too few detailed empirical analyses of the precise extent to which it has or has not eclipsed government. This article explores the temporal and spatial characteristics of the governance transition by charting the deployment of new policy instruments in eight industrialised states and the European Union. The adoption and implementation of ('old' and 'new') policy instruments offer a useful analytical touchstone because governance theory argues that regulation is the quintessence of government. Although there are many 'new' environmental policy instruments in these nine jurisdictions, this article finds that the change from government to governance is highly differentiated across political jurisdictions, policy sectors and even the main instrument types. Crucially, many of the new policy instruments used require some state involvement (that is, 'government'), and very few are entirely devoid of state involvement (that is, pure 'governance'). Far from eclipsing government, governance therefore often complements and, on some occasions, even competes with it, although there are some cases of fusion. Future research should thus explore the many complex and varied ways in which government and governance interact in public policy-making.     

Enforcing and disrupting circular movement in an EU Borderscape: housingscaping in Serbia

ABSTRACT

This article examines Western Balkans/EU bordering and debordering practices through a borderscape method in the context of the geopolitical positionality and (de)institutionalization of migrant housing in Serbia. From this perspective, a new ‘border variation’ can be seen emerging after the securitarian turn, transforming the external borderscape of the EU into a space of circular movement. The article sheds light on discourses, practices and places that constitute these spaces of circular movement within the EU external borderscape. In particular, the Western Balkans borderscape is investigated with reference to Serbian migrant housingscapes emerging at the intersection of state-run camps and migrant collective self-organized squatted housing. The focus on migrant housingscapes points to the interconnectedness of camps and squats in the process of facilitating circular movement by the state, the production of mobile commons as a debordering practice, and the production of visual representations of the external border as stabilized ‘scape’ for the EU.     

Functional stakes and EU regulatory governance: temporal patterns of regulatory integration in energy and telecommunications

Abstract

One of the most fiercely debated questions about EU regulatory governance is the respective role played by functional and political factors in regulatory integration. This article contributes to this debate by focussing on the functional factor. Based on a refined conceptualisation of functional stakes, it finds that they vary across sectors, evolve over time, and that these variations are reflected in the degree of regulatory integration observed. When member states perceive regulatory integration as a solution to one of their most pressing problems of the moment, they value – and sometimes even actively push for – the delegation of regulatory powers to the EU. This argument is subject to a credibility probe based on two within-sector analyses of temporal patterns of regulatory integration in energy and telecommunications. The empirical analysis lends support to the conditioning role of the functional factor in the design of EU regulatory governance.     

Legitimacy through targeted transparency? Regulatory effectiveness and sustainability of lobbying regulation in the European Union

Regulating interest groups’ access to decision makers constitutes a key dimension of legitimate and accountable systems of government. The European Union explicitly links lobbying regulation with the democratic credentials of its supranational system of governance and proposes transparency as a solution to increase legitimacy and regulate private actors’ participation in policy making. This lobbying regulation regime consists of a Transparency Register that conditions access to decision makers upon joining it and complying with its information disclosure requirements. The extent to which transparency‐based regulatory regimes are successful in ensuring effective regulation of targeted actors and in being recognised as a legitimate instrument of governance constitutes a key empirical question. Therefore, the study asks: Do stakeholders perceive the transparency‐based EU lobbying regulation regime to be a legitimate form of regulatory governance? The study answers by building on a classic model of targeted transparency and proposes perceived regulatory effectiveness and sustainability as two key dimensions on which to evaluate the legitimacy of the Register. The arguments are tested on a new dataset reporting the evaluations of 1,374 stakeholders on the design and performance of the EU lobbying regulation regime. The findings describe a transparency regime that scores low in perceived effectiveness and moderate to low in sustainability. Citizens criticise the quality of information disclosed and the Register's performance as a transparency instrument. The Register did not effectively bridge the information gap between the public and interest groups about supranational lobbying. In terms of sustainability, interest organisations appreciate the systemic benefits of transparency, but identify few organisation‐level benefits. Organisations that are policy insiders incur more transparency costs so they instrumentally support transparency only insofar it suits their lobbying strategies and does not threaten their position. Insiders support including additional categories of organisations in the Register's regulatory remit but not more types of interactions with policy makers. They support an imperfect regulatory status quo to which they have adapted but lack incentives to support increased transparency and information disclosure. Targeted transparency proves an ineffective approach to regulating interest groups’ participation in EU policy making, constituting a suboptimal choice for ensuring transparent, accountable and legitimate supranational lobbying.     

Homeowners Associations as Private Governments: What We Know,What We Don’t Know,and Why It Matters

Homeowners associations (HOAs) are private governments that are reshaping urban governance and service delivery in large parts of the United States. Despite the fact that millions of Americans are HOA members, the field of public affairs has paid scant attention to these new governance entities. The essays in this symposium call attention to HOAs’ potential effects on urban services and civic life in the hope of sparking interest among scholars and public managers to include HOAs in our understanding, research, and teaching of contemporary urban governance.     

Regional inequality and institutional trust in Europe

Inequality is a central explanation of political distrust in democracies, but has so far rarely been considered a cause of (dis-)trust towards supranational governance. Moreover, while political scientists have extensively engaged with income inequality, other salient forms of inequality, such as the regional wealth distribution, have been sidelined. These issues point to a more general shortcoming in the literature. Determinants of trust in national and European institutions are often theorized independently, even though empirical studies have demonstrated large interdependence in citizens’ evaluations of national and supranational governance levels. In this paper, we argue that inequality has two salient dimensions: (1) income inequality and (2) regional inequality. Both dimensions are important antecedent causes of European Union (EU) trust, the effects of which are mediated by evaluations of national institutions. On the micro-level, we suggest that inequality decreases a person's trust in national institutions and thereby diminishes the positive effect of national trust on EU trust. On the macro-level, inequality decreases country averages of trust in national institutions. This, however, informs an individual's trust in the EU positively, compensating for the seemingly untrustworthiness of national institutions. Finally, we propose that residing in an economically declining region can depress institutional trust. We find empirical support for our arguments by analysing regional temporal change over four waves of the European Social Survey 2010–2016 with a sample of 209 regions nested in 24 EU member states. We show that changes in a member state's regional inequality have similarly strong effects on trust as changes in the Gini coefficient of income inequality. Applying causal mediation techniques, we can show that the effects of inequality on EU trust are largely mediated through citizens’ evaluations of national institutions. In contrast, residing in an economically declining region directly depresses EU trust, with economically lagging areas turning their back on European governance and resorting to the national level instead. Our findings highlight the relevance of regional inequality for refining our understanding of citizens’ support for Europe's multi-level governance system and the advantages of causal modelling for the analysis of political preferences in a multi-level governance system.