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ABSTRACT
Inspired by the notion of demoi-cracy, this contribution analyses the legitimacy of European Union agencies (EUAs). It asks how far member states' representation on the management boards (MBs) of EUAs constitutes an instance of vertical accountability and a possible source of demoi-cratic legitimacy. In accordance with the horizontal dimension of demoi-cracy, the contribution additionally investigates the transnational links between MB representatives and their peers from other member states as possible instances of peer accountability. Drawing on document analysis and an original survey with MB representatives from six EUAs, the empirical results reveal a rather ambivalent picture of MBs' political accountability. Only the MB of the European Railway Agency (ERA) meets the established demoi-cratic criteria in the sense of vertical accountability. All other EUA MBs investigated possess either weak de jure or de facto political accountability (or both). Peer accountability, in contrast, is more pronounced for most EUAs, but is still predominantly nationally rather than transnationally oriented. This implies that, from a demoi-cratic perspective, there is considerable potential to improve MBs' de jure and de facto political and peer accountability.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank everyone who participated in the two demoi-cracy workshops in Zurich in 2012, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their very constructive comments. Special thanks to Sandra Lavenex for her suggestions to improve the contribution. I am grateful to the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Democracy for providing financial support for this research project.
Notes
2 This also tells us who national governments select to represent them on EUA MBs and how important they consider the strength of these representatives' de jure accountability to be.
3 According to Thatcher and Stone Sweet (Citation2002: 2), non-majoritarian institutions can be defined ‘as those governmental entities that (a) possess and exercise some grant of specialized public authority, separate from that of other institutions, but (b) are neither directly elected by the people, nor directly managed by elected officials’.
4 The European Commission recently issued a road map showing how existing and future EUAs could be adjusted to enhance their efficiency and accountability (see http://europa.eu/agencies/documents/2012-12-18_roadmap_on_the_follow_up_to_the_common_approach_on_eu_decentralised_agencies_en.pdf).
5 For more details about the concept of demoi-cracy, see the introduction to this collection and Besson (Citation2006), Cheneval (Citation2008, Citation2011), Cheneval and Schimmelfennig (Citation2012), and Nicolaidis (Citation2004, Citation2013).
6 Political accountability is exercised along the chain of a principal–agent relationship. ‘Voters delegate their sovereignty to popular representatives, who in turn, at least in parliamentary democracies, delegate the majority of their authorities to a cabinet of ministers. The ministers subsequently delegate many of their authorities to their civil servants or to various, more or less independent, administrative bodies. The mechanism of political accountability operates precisely in the opposite direction to that delegation’ (Bovens et al. Citation2010: 42).
7 As the principal–agent approach tells us, such accountability mechanisms are especially important to safeguard the delegation of powers. They are introduced to ensure agents' compliance and to avoid shrinking or agency loss (see Kassim and Menon Citation2003: 123ff; Pollack Citation1997).
8 For more information about the informal vertical relationships, see Buess (Citation2011). These informal relationships seem important, mainly, in providing the EUAs with the required knowledge and expertise present in their national counterparts.
9 One remarkable exception is the recent article by Busuioc (Citation2012). However, she focuses primarily on the internal relationship between EUAs and their MBs.
10 This by-design direct control by the member states is sometimes also criticized because a possible politicization of EUAs decisions is feared (see, for example, Majone [Citation2002a]).
11 This also tells us whom national governments select to represent them on EUA MBs and how important they consider the strength of de jure accountability of these representatives to be.
12 Sometimes, these MBs are also labeled as administrative boards, as is the case for the OHIM (see http://oami.europa.eu/ows/rw/pages/OHIM/institutional/ABBC/ABBC.en.do).
13 An exception is the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), for which the MB is composed of one representative from the European Commission and 14 independent experts appointed by the Council of Ministers (Groenleer Citation2009; Krapohl Citation2004).
14 Some of these lists also include alternates for the representatives. However, data on these alternates are not included in the dataset used for this contribution.
15 These three indicators were selected because it would not be very convincing for the sending institutions to only be differentiated between being a ministry or an agency – especially because differing national administrative traditions and often opaque labels for such institutions could produce invalid results (see James and van Thiel Citation2011: 216).
16 The more detailed data presented in this contribution will be made available on the author's website in a virtual appendix: http://www.unilu.ch/deu/doktorierende-1_825824.html.
17 The higher the average score, the lower the domestic political accountability (and the higher the independence) of MS representatives.
18 The others achieve the following response rates: EEA: 24 per cent; EMA: 30.2 per cent; ERA: 30.2 per cent; and OHIM: 35 per cent. The overall response rate is slightly higher than the response rate in a similar study of agency professionals by Wonka and Rittberger (Citation2011), who achieved a rate of about 25 per cent.
19 Question: ‘I have clear instructions about the “position” I should take.’
20 Question: ‘With whom do you coordinate your position before participating in EUA Management Boards’ meetings?’
Additional information
Michael Buess is a Ph.D. student and Research Assistant at the Department of Political Science, University of Lucerne, Switzerland.