Delegation of Regulatory Powers in a Mixed Polity

It is a common place of academic and political discourse that the EC/EU, being neither a parliamentary democracy nor a separation‐of‐powers system, must be a sui generis polity. Tocqueville reminds us that the pool of original and historically tested constitutional models is fairly limited. But however limited, it contains more than the two systems of rule found among today's democratic nation states. During the three centuries preceding the rise of monarchical absolutism in Europe, the prevalent constitutional arrangement was ‘mixed government’—a system characterised by the presence in the legislature of the territorial rulers and of the ‘estates’ representing the main social and political interests in the polity. This paper argues that this model is applicable to the EC, as shown by the isomorphism of the central tenets of the mixed polity and the three basic Community principles: institutional balance, institutional autonomy and loyal cooperation among European institutions and Member States. The model is then applied to gain a better understanding of the delegation problem. As is well known, a crucial normative obstacle to the delegation of regulatory powers to independent European agencies is the principle of institutional balance. By way of contrast, separation‐of‐powers has not prevented the US Congress from delegating extensive rule‐making powers to independent commissions and agencies. Comparison with the philosophy of mixed government explains this difference. The same philosophy suggests the direction of regulatory reform. The growing complexity of EC policy making should be matched by greater functional differentiation, and in particular by the explicit acknowledgement of an autonomous ‘regulatory estate’. At a time when the Commission aspires to become the sole European executive, as in a parliamentary system, it is particularly important to stress the importance of separating the regulatory function from general executive power. The notion of a regulatory estate is meant to emphasise this need.     

Suicide with a butcher's bolt

The captive bolt pistol is an atypical firearm exclusively produced and used for butchery of breeding animals, but in some rare cases, it has been used as a lethal weapon for committing suicide by butchers, breeders and other people who have access to such weapons during their professional activities. This study describes the suicide committed by a butcher in the province of Udine (N. Italy) in 2001 who shot himself with his own captive bolt pistol that produced in the right temporal region a circular wound and a bone lesion of the temporal squama with a groove involving the frontal lobe; he died five days later of the fatal consequences of the meningo-encephalic lesions. The medico-legal issues implicated in this case, seen in the light of the data reported in the international literature, illustrate the difficulties faced when diagnosing these types of lesions, bearing in mind their rarity and peculiar nature, and introduce elements of differential diagnosis regarding lesions produced by similar weapons that lead to ascertainment of the event as accidental, suicidal, or homicidal.     

Regulation in Comparative Perspective

Structural changes in the world economy pose challenging new problems for comparative policy analysis. One such problem is the harmonization of domestic policies and institutions, which the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations has identified as a key principle of international economic relations. Harmonization may mean the creation of a single policy space out of a number of distinct jurisdictions. It can also mean the adoption of common policy goals or general principles that national governments can pursue by different strategies. Comparative analysis can help in choosing the type of harmonization most appropriate in a given context. This article analyzes the development of harmonization strategies in the European Community/European Union. The European experience shows that far-reaching economic integration can be achieved without suppressing cultural diversity and legitimate differences in national preferences.     

Europe's 'Democratic Deficit': The Question of Standards

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, non-majoritarian standards of legitimacy should be sufficient to justify the delegation of the necessary powers.     

The European Union Post‐Brexit: Static or Dynamic Adaptation?

The choice facing the leaders of the European Union, after Brexit, is between a static adaptation, leaving the current approach to integration essentially unchanged, and a dynamic adaptation, which recognises the need for radical changes. Dynamic adaptation requires institutional leadership—something apparently incompatible with the basic principle of the equality of all the Member States. The clearest indication of a deficit of leadership is the failure to define the real purpose of the collective activity. This failure is at the root of Brexit, as may be seen from the explicit rejection of the indefinite goal of ‘ever closer union’ by the British prime minister in November 2015. An alternative approach to European integration finds a good theoretical foundation in Buchanan's theory of clubs. The essential principle of a functional organisation at supranational level is that activities would be selected specifically and organised separately. A strictly functional approach to integration could revive an interest in political union in the form of a confederation. As Tocqueville had clearly understood long ago, the weakness of confederations increases in direct proportion to the extent of their nominal power. What is most important today is to distinguish between the general idea of European integration and one particular implementation of that idea, such as the European Union.     

Juvenile Delinquency in Six New EU Member States

This article presents the results of the study conducted in six new member states that joined the European Union in 2004 (This article is based on the report “Juvenile delinquency in six new EU member states’, 2008. Participant and co-authors where Jiri Burianek from the Charles University in Prague, Bojan Dekleva from the University of Ljubljana, Andreas Karpadis from the University of Cyprus, Beata Gruszczyńska from the Warsaw University & Institute of Justice of Poland, Vidas Kalpokas from the Law Institute of Lithuania, Anna Markina from the Uni-versity of Tartu and Majone Steketee and Marit Moll from the Verwey-Jonker Institute) (The study has been financially supported by the European Coomunity-Daphne-2 Programme to Combat Violence against Children, Young People and Women.). Five former eastern European countries; the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia and Cyprus, a southern European country and former British colony in the eastern Mediterranean. Often little is known about the prevalence of youth delinquency in these countries, let alone in a trans-national comparison. In this study we examined the variability in patterns of self-reported youth delinquency behaviour and the relative ranking of the prevalence of different types of juvenile delinquency. We also tested whether a number of sociological and criminological theories on prevalence and occurrence of youth delinquency are valid in these six countries.     

Transforming Prevention Systems in the United States and The Netherlands Using Communities That Care

Josine Junger-Tas introduced the Communities That Care (CTC) prevention system to the Netherlands as a promising approach to address the growing youth violence and delinquency. Using data from a randomized trial of CTC in the United States and a quasi-experimental study of CTC in the Netherlands, this article describes the results of a comparison of the implementation of CTC in 12 U.S. communities and five Dutch neighborhoods. CTC communities in both countries achieved higher stages of a science-based approach to prevention than control communities, but full implementation of CTC in the Netherlands was hampered by the very small list of prevention programs tested and found effective in the Dutch context.     

Prevention and health standards: American, Soviet, and European models

This paper explores some significant sources of variation in the way health standards are derived and used in various countries: differences in biological and regulatory philosophies, in enforcement strategies, and in institutional arrangements. Such cross-national variations raise a number of questions about the process of standard-setting. Among the issues discussed here are the nature of the trade-off between long-run goals and feasibility criteria that merely codify current technical and economic practice, and the possibility of replacing statutory regulation by self-regulation and non-statutory codes and standards.