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Text 11 Democratie
Text 11 Democratie
Power in the EU
There are, inevitably, numerous ways in which to think
about power in the EU. Two closely interrelated characteristics of the European Union direct us along one
particular line of inquiry. The first follows from a fairly
innocuous observation about the EUs complexity, that
is, that the EU is polycentric. In other words, there
exist many potential centres of power in the Union.
We know this because we know that the EU comprises
27 member states, with 27 national governments, and
hundreds of regional and local authorities. It also comprises institutions and agencies, and involves myriad
political, economic and societal actors, all of whom
have some stake in or who seek to influence European
politics. Thus, we might expect, at the outset, power to
be distributed, albeit unequally, across a range of those
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Political Insight
been many new initiatives to bring Europe closer to the people, encouraging
citizen participation through the use of referendums, NGO activism, external expert
involvement in policy-making and even
direct access to EU elites via the internet.
It would be rather lame to say, after almost
20 years, that the jury was still out on these
initiatives; and it would be more honest to
report that while the experiments have
been interesting and have changed the way
that the EU does business in certain areas,
the results, in terms of public perception,
have been disappointing.
Institutional Solutions
The alternative to the participatory path
to EU democracy has led to more obvious
institutional solutions to the democratic
deficit. This has meant enhancing the
power of the European Parliament (and
to a lesser degree improving the input of
national parliaments) in EU policy-making.
But even though Parliaments co-legislative
role (working together with the EU Council) has increased substantially so much
so that some academics now claim that the
EU is no less democratic than any other socalled democratic polity the perception
that the EUs democratic deficit persists has
proved remarkably resilient and therefore
difficult to change.
Participation aside, the increased powers
of the European Parliament, along with its
willingness to stick its neck out in battles
with other EU institutions, certainly provides an institutional channel that allows
EU actors and institutions to be held to
account for the decisions they take. Yet,
the European Parliaments scrutiny role
European Commission chief Jos Manuel Barroso is one of the EUs most powerful political actors
References
Bovens, M. (2007) New Forms of Accountability
and EU-Governance, Comparative European
Politics, 5 (1), 10420.
Moravcsik, A. (2002) In Defence of the
Democratic Deficit: Reassessing Legitimacy
in the European Union, Journal of Common
Market Studies, 40 (4), 60324.
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