Informal governance and legitimacy in EU politics

ABSTRACT

Informal governance often holds an aura of the covert and exclusive – aspects that are difficult to square with the ideal of a democratic process. Unfortunately, existing analyses mostly focus on the effect of informal governance on transparency, ignoring other channels through which a political order may generate legitimacy. However, existing analyses quite often conflate different types of informal governance or consider predominantly its effect on transparency and accountability. This article argued that the relationship between informal governance and legitimacy is much more complex and to some extent even counter-intuitive. To see this, I distinguish three channels of legitimation – input, throughput, and output – and discuss how various forms of informal governance affect it. The article has implications for scholarly debates on the legitimacy of global governance, studies of informal governance, and practical implications for the reform of international organizations.

KEYWORDS:

• Informal governance
• legitimacy
• EU politics
• transparency

Acknowledgments

I thank Doreen Allerkamp and Nikoleta Yordanova for their comments on a first rough draft of this article, and Fergal Treanor for invaluable substantive and editorial suggestions. The article was completed at the European University Institute during my time as a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Institute for Advanced Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For an evaluation of these different explanations, see, e.g. (Kleine 2013a), chapter 3.

2. It should be noted that this causal link between participation and legitimacy is stipulated, but rarely tested. Skeptics argue that the policies international organizations deal with do not lend themselves to political debate (Moravcsik 2008, 338–339).

3. Of course, small states could try to cooperate and jointly threaten to leave the organization. However, an alliance like this is difficult to form and sustain, which renders the outside options of the large state more credible.

4. Both types of power are not conceptually different. Power is much more dictated by preference asymmetries than sheer size when it exercised in a context of complex interdependence.

5. Note that an information-rich environment is not the same as transparency, which refers to the availability of information to the public.

6. It should be noted that the causal link between transparency and legitimacy is an empirical question. Citizens do not always follow political processes even if information about it is readily available. See, e.g., De Fine Licht, Naurin, Esaiasson and Gilljam 2014, .