The power of expertise: gauging technocracy in EMU reform negotiations

ABSTRACT

Is the European Union a technocracy? Observers and practitioners of EU politics have debated this deceptively simple question for decades, without arriving at a clear answer. To a large extent, this is due to the elusive nature of technocracy itself, a phenomenon that is hard to define with precision, and even harder to measure empirically. To tackle this problem, the article presents a novel approach to technocracy in the EU based on the study of bargaining settings, in which political and technical actors interact horizontally and simultaneously—as opposed to sequentially—thus allowing for a better appraisal of the power of experts. Using data gathered by the ‘EMU Choices’ project, we apply this alternative framework to the analysis of negotiations on the reform of the Economic and Monetary Union over the period 2010–15, focusing on the role of two institutional actors: the European Central Bank and the European Commission. While we find some evidence for technocracy in EMU negotiations, this has been mostly at the hands of the hybrid Commission rather than the quintessentially technical ECB. This suggests both caution in dismissing the EU as hopelessly technocratic, and the need for further research on the nature of the Commission.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic and Monetary Union
• euro crisis
• European Central Bank
• European Commission
• technocracy

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Gabriel Farkas for excellent research assistance, and the members of the ‘EMU choices’ project for access to data (www.emuchoices.eu). For helpful comments to previous versions of this article, we also thank Pamela Pansardi, Piero Salvagni, two anonymous reviewers, and participants in the 2019 conference of the European Communities Studies Association-Switzerland, the 2019 conference of the University Association for Contemporary European Studies, the 2020 conference of the Swiss Political Science Association, the colloquium of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Cultures and Politics at the University of Groningen, and the working lunch of the Institute of European Global Studies at the University of Basel.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For the sake of clarity, and coherence with the definition of technocracy adopted here, hereafter the term ‘technician’ will be used to indicate any expert who participates in policy-making within the formal and expected boundaries of his/her role (that is, without having undergone the above-mentioned distortion in his/her relationship with representative politicians, which would turn him/her into a ‘technocrat’).

2 To mention a well-known recent example, consider the recent political and legal disputes over some of the non-standard monetary policy measures introduced by the European Central Bank (ECB) to tackle the euro crisis and its consequences, above all the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) and quantitative easing (QE). Are these measures to be considered fully within the mandate and rights of the ECB, or should they be seen, conversely, as an unwarranted intrusion on the part of the Bank into the Eurozone’s economic policy-making—thus constituting a case of technocracy?

3 For comprehensive accounts of the unfolding of the euro crisis, and the political and institutional reactions to it, see Bastasin (2015) and Tooze (2018).

4 The mean distance between the Commission’s position and the three averages is 39.7, 36.5, and 35.5 points respectively. Pearson coefficients between the EC positions and those of the EU28, EZ and EZ3 member states are 0.14, 0.21, and 0.3 respectively. See online appendix F for further details.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Horizon 2020 Framework Programme: [Grant Number 649532].

Notes on contributors

Pier Domenico Tortola

Pier Domenico Tortola is assistant professor of European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Silvana Tarlea

Silvana Tarlea is senior researcher in the Social Sciences Department and the Institute for European Global Studies of the University of Basel, Switzerland.