Experimentalist governance: An introduction

This symposium critically engages with the volume Experimentalist Governance in the European Union: Towards a New Architecture (2010), edited by Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin. “Experimentalist Governance” (EG) opens up an original theoretical perspective on the emergent governance architecture of the EU and sheds new light on developments in key policy sectors. This symposium brings together a transatlantic group of distinguished political scientists and legal scholars to discuss the added value of EG as a concept for analysis, its theoretical underpinnings, empirical relevance, and normative implications, in terms of legitimacy. Contributors discuss EG from different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, referring to a variety of empirical examples in the EU context and beyond. The symposium closes with a response from the authors to their critics. This collection of essays sheds new light on debates around the nature of the EU and democratic governance beyond the nation state.     

Governance in the European Union: A Policy Analysis of the Attempts to Raise Legitimacy through Civil Society Participation

Abstract

The article focuses on two flagship initiatives – the open method of co-ordination and online consultations – in which the European Union aimed to improve democratic legitimacy through collaborative governance. Offering an analytical framework to scrutinize the large body of existing theoretical and empirical research, the article concludes that not only were the high expectations on the effects of applied governance disappointed, the results also hint at larger, more general implications for the governance concept that, in contrast to the high expectations, appears to be indeed strongly dependent on government-like conditions to operate successfully.     

Good governance and differentiated integration: Graded membership in the European Union

The study of European integration has traditionally focused on organisational growth: the deepening and widening of the European Union (EU). By contrast, this article analyses organisational differentiation, a process in which states refuse, or are being refused, full integration but find value in establishing in‐between grades of membership. It describes how the EU's system of graded membership has developed, and it explains the positioning of states in this system. The core countries of the EU set a standard of ‘good governance’. The closer European countries are to this standard, the closer their membership grade is to the core. Some countries fall short of this standard and are refused further integration by the core: their membership grade increases with better governance. Other countries refuse further integration because they outperform the standards of the core countries: their membership grade decreases as governance improves. These conjectures are corroborated in a panel analysis of European countries.     

Disaggregating public-private governance interactions: European Union interventions in transnational private sustainability governance

Transnational private sustainability governance, such as eco-certification, does not operate in a regulatory or jurisdictional vacuum. A public authority may intervene in private governance for various reasons, including to improve private governance's efficient functioning or to assert public regulatory primacy. This article argues that to properly understand the nature of public-private governance interactions—whether more competitive or complementary—we need to disaggregate a public authority's intervention. The article distinguishes between four features of private governance in which a public authority can intervene: standard setting, procedural aspects, supply chain signaling, and compliance incentives. Using the cases of the European Union's policies on organic agriculture and biofuels production, the article shows that public-private governance interaction dynamics vary across these private governance features as well as over time. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the importance of active lobbying by private governance actors in influencing these dynamics and the resulting policy outputs.     

Orchestrating sustainability: The case of European Union biofuel governance

This article provides an empirical analysis of orchestration – that is, the initiation, support, and embracement of private governance arrangements through public regulators – in the field of European Union biofuel governance. It examines the emerging sustainability regime and shows that orchestration has been extensively practiced. Regulators in the European Union have used a range of directive and facilitative measures to initiate and support private biofuel certification schemes and to incorporate them in their regulatory frameworks. This has given rise to a hybrid regime in which public and private approaches are closely intertwined. Discussing the benefits and complications of engaging with private biofuel sustainability governance, the article's findings point to a partial failure of orchestration in this policy area.     

Balancing experimentalist and hierarchical governance in European Union electricity and telecommunications regulation: A matter of degrees

While the widespread diffusion of experimentalism across sectors and polities is well documented, less is known about the extent of the shift to this non‐hierarchical form of governance, which continues to coexist with traditional hierarchical governance and involves more inclusive rulemaking and revision based on review of alternative implementation experiences. By comparing and process‐tracing electricity and telecommunications regulation in the European Union, we find diversity in experimentalism over time and across two sectors often considered similar. We explain varying degrees of experimentalism with strategic uncertainty and the constellation of preferences, which we label “de facto polyarchy.” Thus, we confirm the emphasis on uncertainty documented in the experimentalist literature, while addressing a conventional critique by also highlighting the relevance of “politics.” Moreover, while corroborating the common spread of experimentalism, we suggest that an analytical framework based on ideal types offers the best route forward to develop comparative analysis of experimentalism and non‐hierarchical forms of governance more broadly.     

Majority representation and legitimacy: Survey-experimental evidence from the European Union

What can policy makers do in day-to-day decision making to strengthen citizens' belief that the political system is legitimate? Much literature has highlighted that the realization of citizens' personal preferences in policy making is an important driver of legitimacy beliefs. We argue that citizens, in addition, also care about whether a policy represents the preferences of the majority of citizens, even if their personal preference diverges from the majority's. Using the case of the European Union (EU) as a system that has recurringly experienced crises of public legitimacy, we conduct a vignette survey experiment in which respondents assess the legitimacy of fictitious EU decisions that vary in how they were taken and whose preferences they represent. Results from original surveys conducted in the five largest EU countries show that the congruence of EU decisions not only with personal opinion but also with different forms of majority opinion significantly strengthens legitimacy beliefs. We also show that the most likely mechanism behind this finding is the application of a ‘consensus heuristic’, by which respondents use majority opinion as a cue to identify legitimate decisions. In contrast, procedural features such as the consultation of interest groups or the inclusiveness of decision making in the institutions have little effect on legitimacy beliefs. These findings suggest that policy makers can address legitimacy deficits by strengthening majority representation, which will have both egotropic and sociotropic effects.     

Quality of government and regional competition: A spatial analysis of subnational regions in the European Union

Building on previous work on competition networks and governmental performance among British local governments, this article investigates the diffusion of government quality across subnational regions of Europe through strategic interaction with neighbouring regions or competitor regions more generally. The article demonstrates the presence of spatial interdependence using standard spatial regression models and controlling for common explanations of quality of government. In particular for regions with high levels of autonomy from the national government, there is clear adjustment in government quality to be seen in response to disparities with competitor regions. The article further investigates the intensity of this geographical effect separately in the north and south of Europe in order to estimate the potential for virtuous or vicious cycles of good governance in the two regions, respectively. It is found that while regions in the north develop relatively independently of each other but respond to competitive pressure across Europe, in the south regions demonstrate a higher level of local interdependence, increasing the possibility of virtuous cycles – but also of vicious ones.     

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.     

Democratic legitimacy in regional economic organizations: the European Union in comparative perspective

Regional organizations have been widely criticized for lacking democratic legitimacy, but these criticisms have been rather ad hoc, concerned with single case studies and reliant on unclear standards or metrics. Are all organizations similarly deficient? And how does the European Union (EU), the target par excellence of the criticisms, fare in comparative perspective? In this paper, we take a first step towards answering these questions by leveraging the rich debate on the EU to identify several institutional dimensions of democratic legitimacy and operationalizing them for comparative analysis. We then investigate the most important regional economic organizations (REOs) in the world. Our findings are three-fold: (i) there is systematic variation across REOs, with a group doing rather well, one mixed, and one poorly; (ii) procedural dimensions fare better than those related to representation or local self-determination; (iii) no organization exhibits or lacks legitimacy in all dimensions. These results qualify the perception that democratic legitimacy deficits are indiscriminately pervasive and indicate that the EU belongs to the most democratically legitimate group.     

Domestic European Union Coordination and Interest Group Mobilization in Three Member States: Looking Beyond the Formal Mechanisms

One conclusion in the literature on domestic European Union (EU) coordination is that the formal institutional properties of countries—devolved versus centralized or unitary—affect the nature of coordination practices. Basically, the view has emerged that domestic coordination is a largely bureaucratic process in which political control mechanisms remain relatively weak. Instead of only looking at public authorities and their formal networks, this article relies on a data set that allows us to analyse informal political-administrative networks and look at how societal interests mobilize and target policymakers in order to shape the position governments defend at the EU level. One of our conclusions is that despite devolution in Belgium, its intergovernmental coordination shows a considerable level of network centralization, even when compared to unitary countries such as France and the Netherlands, meaning that there are large differences between the three states with respect to the connectedness of the actors involved.     

The weakness of strong policies and the strength of weak policies: Law,experimentalist governance,and supporting coalitions in European Union health care policy

The experience of European Union (EU) health care services policy shows the importance of supporting coalitions in any effort to effect policy change and the extent to which the presence or absence of such coalitions can qualify generalizations about policymaking. EU health care services law is substantively liberalizing and procedurally driven by the courts, with little legislative input. But the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has been much better at establishing an EU competency in law than in causing policy development in the EU or member states. Literature on courts helps to explain why: courts are most effective when they enjoy supporting coalitions and the ECJ does not have a significant supporting coalition for its liberalizing health care services policy. Based on interview data, this article argues that the hard law of health care services deregulation and the newer forms of health care governance, such as the Open Method of Coordination and the networks on rare diseases, depend on supporting coalitions in member states that are willing to litigate, lobby, budget, decide cases, and otherwise implement EU law and policy. Given the resistance that the Court has met in health care sectors, its overarching deregulatory approach might produce smaller effects than expected, and forms of experimentalist governance that are easy to deride might turn out to have supporting coalitions that make them unexpectedly effective.     

The contested nature of political leadership in the European Union: conceptual and methodological cross-fertilisation

Abstract

European leaders have struggled to find common responses to the polycrisis the EU is facing. This crisis of leadership makes it urgent that scholars provide a better understanding of the role and impact of leadership in EU politics and policy making. This article prepares the ground for a collection of contributions that addresses this need by strengthening old and building new bridges between the academic domains of European studies and leadership studies. It opens with a discussion of the contested concept of leadership in the context of the European polity and politics, challenging the conventional view that leadership is necessarily a matter of hierarchy. Moreover, it argues that rather than leaderless, the EU is an intensely ‘leaderful’ polity. Subsequently, this introduction identifies four key debates in contemporary EU leadership research and discusses the value and insights the contributions in this special issue bring to these debates.     

Regulating lobbying activities in the European Union: A voluntary club perspective

This article offers a systematic exploration of why interest groups sign up to the European Union Transparency Register, a non‐binding lobby regulation system. We distinguish between instrumental and normative perspectives to explain voluntary compliance, and find that concern for one's reputation represents the most important motivational driver. Based on this, we suggest that the Transparency Register can be understood as a “voluntary club” sponsored by European institutions. This theoretical perspective captures the appeal of the instrument among lobbyists, but also a number of inconsistencies in its current design, which make it unviable in the long term. We outline implications for the ongoing reform of the Transparency Register, and more generally for the regulation of lobbying activities. The analysis draws on semi‐structured interviews with various types of lobbyists active in Brussels, and on data from public consultations organized by the European Commission.     

Domestic scrutiny of European Union politics: Between whistle blowing and opposition control

Some European law proposals are subject to scrutiny by national parliaments while others go unchecked. The analysis in this article indicates that the opposition scrutinises European Union law to gather information on the proceedings inside the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. Yet whereas strong opposition parties scrutinise highly politicised law proposals, weak opposition parties tend to scrutinise those proposals that are negotiated under the non‐transparent fast‐track procedure. In addition, there is ample evidence that the leading minister initiates scrutiny in order to strengthen his or her intergovernmental bargaining leverage. Yet, this Schelling Conjecture presumes that the party of the minister is located between the expected bargaining position in the Council and the coalition partner. Any other domestic interest constellation could lead to scrutiny motivated by whistle blowing. However, an issue's salience helps us to separate the whistle blowing from the Schelling Conjecture.     

The Contingent Diffusion of Parliamentary Oversight Institutions in the European Union

What explains the variation in institutional adaptation of national parliaments to European integration? Whereas the existing literature has mainly focused on domestic conditions, this article explains institutional adaptation to integration by focusing on inter‐parliamentary diffusion. The argument draws on ‘learning’ mechanisms of diffusion on the demand side and on ‘emulation’ mechanisms on the supply side. Parliamentary demand for external inspiration is related to uncertainty about functional oversight institutions, and the selection of sources to perceptions of similarity and success. Demand arises in new European Union member parliaments and young democracies that then turn towards culturally alike countries and old democracies. Using spatial econometrics, support is demonstrated for the argument in the article while ruling out alternative diffusion mechanisms such as spatial proximity and learning from Scandinavian frontrunners once links along cultural similarity and democratic experience are controlled for. The results underline the limits of the ‘isolated polity’ approach in the comparative study of institutions in Europe's closely integrated political system, while also showing that, even in this favourable environment, diffusion pathways are contingent on the mechanisms generating demand among policy makers and shaping their selection of sources for external information.     

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.