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New Modes of Governance and Democratic Accountability1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

Adrienne Héritier  and
Dirk Lehmkuhl
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Abstract

This article raises the question of the link between new modes of governance and democratic accountability. Our definition of new modes of governance as modes refers to public policy-making that includes private actors and/or public policy-making by public actors that takes place outside legislative arenas, and which focuses on delimited sectoral or functional areas. We identify three different ways in which new modes of governance can be subjected to democratic control: parliamentary control, multi-stakeholder involvement and control through the public sphere and civil society at large. Building on a number of the illustrative insights from various empirical projects, we find that, in our cases at least, new modes of governance did not have a negative effect on existing patterns of democratic accountability. At the same time, neither multi-stakeholder policies nor the participation of civil society guarantee democratic accountability in the strict sense. We provide some evidence to the effect that, if institutionally linked to democratically elected governmental bodies – meaning, in this context, the European Parliament – it is more likely that negative externalities deriving from public policy-making in functionally segmented arenas of the European Union's multilevel polity will be dealt with in a more systematic way.

Type
Symposium on Democracy and New Modes of Governance
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , 2011 , pp. 126 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011.

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Footnotes

1

We thank Mel Marquis for his critical reading of the manuscript.

References

2 The empirical evidence on which this chapter builds was collected in the different projects of Cluster 2 directed by Adrienne Héritier and Dirk Lehmkuhl of the Integrated Project NEWGOV funded by the European Union's 6th Framework Programme (contract no. CIT1-CT-2004-506392). Partners involved in the activities of NEWGOV's Cluster 2 were J. Almer (Swedish Institute of European Policy Research), D. Coen (University College London), S. Eckert (EUI), C. Halpern (Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques), A. Héritier (EUI), P. Le Galès (Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques), D. Lehmkuhl (St Gallen University), O. de Maiscocq (Université Catholique de Louvain), L. Moral Soriano (Granada University), S. Smismans (Trento University/Cardiff University), J. Steffek (Bremen University), M. Thatcher (LSE), F. Varone (Université de Genève), C. de Visscher (Université Catholique de Louvain). For an overview and a list of individual publications, see http://www.eu-newgov.org/datalists/cluster_detail.asp?Cluster_ID=2.

3 Comitology is an institutional procedure by which member states cooperate with and control the Commission when it exercises its implementation powers under secondary legislation.

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7 C. de Visscher and F. Varone, ‘Governance of the EU Securities Sector: Impacts of the Lamfalussy Reform.’NEWGOV Policy Brief 1, Florence, 2006.

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17 De Visscher and Varone, ‘Governance of the EU Securities Sector’. De Visscher, Maiscocq and Varone, ‘The Lamfalussy Reform in the EU Securities Markets’.

18 Héritier and Eckert, ‘New Modes of Governance in the Shadow of Hierarchy’; Héritier and Eckert, ‘Self-Regulation by Associations’.

19 Lehmkuhl, ‘On Government, Governance and Judicial Review’.

20 Héritier and Eckert, ‘New Modes of Governance in the Shadow of Hierarchy’; Héritier and Eckert, ‘Self-Regulation by Associations’.

21 Coen and Thatcher, ‘Network Governance and Delegation’.

22 There may, however, be instances in which the Commission strategically prefers soft modes rather than pushing for an increased communitarization. A good case in point is the Commission's reference to legally non-binding instruments in competition policy. The strategic choice to keep its regulatory activities below the threshold of formal legislation increases the Commission's autonomous governance capacity ( Cini, M., ‘The Soft Law Approach: Commission Rule-Making in the EU's State Aid Regime’, Journal of European Public Policy, 8: 2 (2009), pp. 192–207 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lehmkuhl, ‘Cooperation and Hierarchy in the Governance of European Competition Policy’.

23 Smismans, S., ‘The European Social Dialogue in the Shadow of Hierarchy’, Journal of Public Policy, 28: 1 (2008), pp. 161–80Google Scholar.

24 Eberlein, ‘Regulation by Cooperation’.

25 Coen and Thatcher, ‘Network Governance and Delegation’.

26 Moral Soriano, ‘New Modes of Governance in the Spanish Electricity and Gas Sectors’.

27 A number of compliance studies investigate the degree of satisfactory transposition of European law. See e.g. G. Falkner, O. Treib, M. Hartlapp and S. Leib, Complying with Europe: EU Minimum Harmonisation and Soft Law in the Member States, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

28 Smismans, ‘The European Social Dialogue in the Shadow of Hierarchy’; T. A. Börzel, ‘Guarding the Treaty: The Compliance Strategies of the European Commission’, in T. A. Börzel and R. Cischowski (eds), The State of the European Union VI: Law, Politics, and Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 197–220.

29 Coen and Thatcher, ‘Reshaping European Regulatory Space’.

30 Lehmkuhl, ‘Cooperation and Hierarchy in the Governance of European Competition Policy’.

31 Héritier and Eckert, ‘Self-Regulation by Associations’; Smismans, ‘The European Social Dialogue in the Shadow of Hierarchy’.

32 C. de la Porte and P. Pochet (eds), Building Social Europe through the Open Method of Coordination, Brussels, Peter Lang, 2002. European Commission, ‘EU Governance by Self Co-Ordination? Towards a Collective “Gouvernement Economique” ’, GOVECOR EU Research on Social Sciences and Humanities, Final Report, Brussels, 2004, http://cordis.europa.eu/documents/documentlibrary/100124131EN6.pdf; Radaelli, C. M. and Kraemer, U. S., ‘Governance Arenas in EU Direct Taxation’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 46 (2008), pp. 315–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A. Héritier, ‘New Modes of Governance in Europe: Policy-Making Without Legislating?’, in A. Héritier (ed.), Common Goods: Reinventing European and International Governance, Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, pp. 185–206.

33 Lavenex, S., Lehmkuhl, D. and Wichmann, N., ‘Die Externe Governance der Europäischen Union: neue Steuerungsmodi und differenzierte Integration mit assoziierten Nachbarstaaten’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, Special Issue ‘Die Europäische Union. Governance und Policy-Making’, 40 (2007), pp. 367–88Google Scholar; T. G. Grosse and L. Kolarska-Bobinska, ‘New Modes of Governance in the New Member States’, NEWGOV Policy Brief 25, Florence, 2008.

34 Urbinati, N. and Warren, M. E., ‘The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory’, Annual Review of Political Science, 11 (2008), pp. 387–412 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Schmidt, V., ‘Procedural Democracy in the EU: The Europeanization of National and Sectoral Policy-Making Processes’, Journal of European Public Policy, 13: 5 (2006), pp. 670–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 This statement holds with a view on decision-makers at the European level such as the European Parliament.

37 De Visscher, Maiscocq and Varone, ‘The Lamfalussy Reform in the EU Securities Markets’.

38 This is not limited to securities regulation but may also be applied to the regulation of health and the environment.

39 De Visscher, Maiscocq and Varone, ‘The Lamfalussy Reform in the EU Securities Markets’.

40 Héritier and Eckert, ‘New Modes of Governance in the Shadow of Hierarchy’.

41 J. Steffek, ‘Report Comparing Participation in EU and WTO from a Normative Perspective’, 2007 NEWGOV Report, Florence, 2007. J. Steffek, C. Kissling and P. Nanz, Civil Society Participation in European and Global Governance: A Cure for the Democratic Deficit? Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.