Charalampos Koutalakis

European Agencies and Input Legitimacy: EFSA, EMEA and EPO in the Post-Delegation Phase

Abstract Most studies about the role of independent agencies in the European context focus on the driving forces that condition the incentives of political actors to delegate policy‐making competencies, and that influence the agency design and the consequences of delegation for democratic control. However interesting, these studies often disregard the question of the legitimacy of the agencies in the post‐delegation phase. This article aims at redressing this important blind spot in the current literature by highlighting the need for procedural input‐legitimacy at the stage of agency operation. It argues that procedural credibility is a fundamental property that explains the need for an increased interaction between agencies and stakeholders at the post‐delegation stage. The article examines three prominent cases of agencies in Europe — the European Food Safety Authority, the European Medicines Agency and the European Patent Office — in order to assess the extent to which the institutionalization of stakeholder networks facilitate credible knowledge that enhances their input and output legitimacy. The concluding remarks bring these results under the general perspective of democracy and new modes of governance in the EU.

Environmental Compliance in Italy and Greece: The Role of Non-state Actors

Both Italy and Greece experience considerable problems in adjusting to the underlining logic and the precise requirements of EU environmental policies. Their poor record of compliance with EU environmental legislation is often attributed to an alleged weakness of civil societal activism in environmental matters. Recent literature challenges these conventional assumptions by offering evidence of high levels of grassroots environmental mobilisations. This article seeks to add a new dimension to the study of societal impact on policy outcomes in terms of domestic compliance performance with EU environmental legislation. It suggests a number of empirical indicators related to the use of opportunities offered by EU institutions, such as the complaints procedure, that allow such an assessment in comparative perspective.

Environmental governance in Southern Europe: the domestic filters of Europeanisation

Over the last two decades, the EU has shown a preference for the replacement of traditional command-and-control patterns of environmental regulation with more cooperative policy schemes in the expectation of improving compliance in member states. But has the EU performed as a ‘governance-shaper’ in member states, such as Spain, Portugal and Greece that have little tradition of non-hierarchical styles of environmental policy-making? To what extent has the domestic institutional context modulated the Europeanisation of environmental governance in these three Southern countries? The EU influence on the emergence of new schemes of governance in these Southern member states has been modelled by domestic institutional pathways encompassing territorial structure, policy saliency and trust between state and non-state actors.

Pressing the button for European elections: verifiable e-voting and public attitudes toward internet voting in Greece

We present the initial set of findings from a pilot experiment that used an Internet-based end-to-end verifiable e-voting system and was held during the European Elections 2014 in Athens, Greece. During the experiment, which took place on May 25th 2014, 747 people voted with our system in special voting stations that were placed outside two main polling places in Athens, Greece. The election mimicked the actual election that was taking place which included a great number of parties. After casting their ballot, voters were invited to complete online a post-election questionnaire that probed their attitudes towards e-voting. In total, 648 questionnaires were collected. We present a description of the experiment and a regression analysis of our results. Our results suggest that acceptance of the e-voting system was particularly high especially among the most educated, the technologically adept but also -somewhat surprisingly- older generations.

Greece: Overcoming Statism in Environmental Governance?

Environmental policy in Greece was not a top priority area of public intervention when Greece joined the EC in 1981. Environmental regulation has been largely of a symbolic character and has suffered from a legacy of implementation gaps. Environmental protection has ranged low on the political agenda not least because it has been regarded as incompatible with economic development (Spanou, 1998). Like the other two Southern European member states, Greece faced a set of policy principles that hardly reflected its distinctive environmental concerns during its accession period (Kerameus and Kremlis, 1988; Kazakos, 1999). The mismatch between EU policies and domestic regulatory regimes widened when the adoption of the Single Market Programme fundamentally altered the scope and pace of European integration, posing unprecedented obligations to member states. The EU placed emphasis not only on expanding environmental policy to new areas but also on sustainability and the need to strengthen effective implementation through shared responsibility and partnership between different levels of government, environmental organizations and business in the implementation process. The poor level of compatibility between the specific environmental concerns of Greece and substantive policies pursued at the EU level generated serious problems with compliance to directives that imposed considerable costs of adaptation to the practically nonexistent environmental administration.

6th International Conference on Electronic Voting: Verifying the Vote, EVOTE 2014, Lochau / Bregenz, Austria, October 29-31, 2014

We present the initial set of findings from a pilot experiment that used an Internet-based end-to-end verifiable e-voting system and was held during the European Elections 2014 in Athens, Greece. During the experiment, which took place on May 25th 2014, 747 people voted with our system in special voting stations that were placed outside two main polling places in Athens, Greece. The election mimicked the actual election that was taking place which included a great number of parties. After casting their ballot, voters were invited to complete online a post-election questionnaire that probed their attitudes towards e-voting. In total, 648 questionnaires were collected. We present a description of the experiment and a regression analysis of our results. Our results suggest that acceptance of the e-voting system was particularly high especially among the most educated, the technologically adept but also -somewhat surprisingly- older generations.

Electronic Voting Systems – From Theory to Implementation

Electronic voting for local, regional and national elections and referenda is developing rapidly at a global scale as an efficient and low cost alternative to conventional methods of voting, with a positive impact on the quality of democratic representation. Still, despite the growing international experience, the harmonization of electronic voting systems with the legal and statutory frameworks poses a number of major legal, social and implementation challenges, subject to the national environment. This paper presents an overview of legal and social aspects of an electronic voting system focusing on the case of Greece.