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ABSTRACT
This article contends that the same set of decision-making procedures can be used more or less experimentally or hierarchically, depending on strategic uncertainty and de facto polyarchy. It distinguishes architectures from policy-making, and offers widely applicable indicators to better distinguish more experimentalist or hierarchical institutional designs from how decision-making actually occurs. It argues that polyarchy can be understood in both de jure and de facto terms, and shows that neither is fixed; equally, it proposes an alternative operationalization and shows that strategic uncertainty neither consistently rises nor gradually declines, but varies cyclically. It suggests that strategic uncertainty and de facto polyarchy might be jointly sufficient for experimentalist policy-making. Rather than a linear trend in which hierarchical governance re-emerges and experimentalist governance declines, it finds cyclical variation. More broadly, it extends claims that functional and political accounts are not mutually exclusive from questions of bureaucratic structures to their actual operation.
Acknowledgements
For extraordinarily helpful discussions and constructive criticisms, the author is indebted to Christel Koop, Martin Lodge, Mark Thatcher, Charles Sabel, Jonathan Zeitlin, three anonymous reviewers and the editors. He also wishes to thank the interviewees who generously offered their precious time and knowledge. He is also grateful to participants of a conference organized in 2016 in Florence by the Academic Research Network on Agencification of EU Executive Governance (TARN), in which an earlier draft of this essay was presented and then published as a working paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Bernardo Rangoni is Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence, Italy.
Notes
1 While there has been significant debate about whether experimentalist governance requires a shadow of hierarchy or penalty defaults, both accounts concern the ‘effectiveness’ of experimentalist governance owing to greater or lesser willingness of non-state actors to co-operate. Since neither of these accounts makes any prediction about the article’s question, which instead concerns the likeliness of public actors to more or less adopt experimentalist methods, these factors were not considered.
2 For reasons of tractability, this article focuses on the energy markets’ timeframe commonly considered most important, namely, ‘day-ahead’.
3 Certainly, no assumption is made about how comitology operates in practice. The point here is merely that comitology, in its design, does not greatly reflect key elements of experimentalist architecture.
4 https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/events/meeting-european-electricity-regulatory-forum-florence; https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/events/madrid-forum (accessed March 2016).
5 http://www.acer.europa.eu/en/Electricity/FG_and_network_codes/Pages/European-Stakeholder-Committees.aspx; http://www.entsog.eu/publications/joint-functionality-process#1-FIRST-FUNCTIONALITY-CYCLE-FROM-2014 (accessed September 2016).
6 Interviews with Dr Matti Supponen, policy co-ordinator at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy. Brussels, 19 May 2016; Edith Hofer, assistant to the director general for energy at the European Commission. Brussels, 19 May 2016; Marco Foresti, advisor at ENTSO-E. Brussels, 18 May 2016.
7 Interview with Dr Juan Jose Alba Rios, chairman of Eurelectric and vice-president of Endesa. Brussels, 17 May 2016.
8 Interview with Peter Styles, chairman of EFET. London, 28 July 2016.
9 Interview with Alberto Pototschnig, director of ACER. Ljubljana, 9 June 2016.
10 Interview with Dr Matti Supponen.
11 Interview with Stephen Rose, chairman at and head at RWE. London, 25 May 2016.
12 Interview with Dr Margot Loudon, deputy secretary general of Eurogas. Brussels, 18 May 2016.
13 Interview with Stephen Rose.
14 Interviews with Dr Juan Jose Alba Rios; Alberto Pototschnig; Edith Hofer.
15 Interviews with Dr Guido Cervigni, head of the Italian power exchange. Email, 7 April 2015; Dr Juan Jose Alba Rios.
16 Interviews with Alberto Pototschnig; Dr Martin Povh, officer at ACER. Ljubljana, 9 June 2016.
17 Interviews with Dr Annegret Groebel, vice-president of CEER and head at German regulatory authority. Telephone, 10 June 2016; Csilla Bartok, team leader at ACER. Ljubljana, 9 June 2016; Thomas Hoelzer, officer at ACER. Ljubljana, 9 June 2016.