Deirdre Curtin

Open government: connecting vision and voice:

The term open government is often used to describe initiatives of putting government information on the Internet. This conceptualization is too restricted since open government is not only about openness in informational terms (vision) but also about openness in interactive terms (voice). On the basis of an analysis of 103 articles, this article provides insight into the concepts of openness, transparency and participation, their interactions, and the manner in which they have been discussed in the literature. This analysis shows the differences and similarities between economic, political science and legal perspectives on open government and argues that a multidisciplinary approach needs to be taken. The authors conclude that open government is much too important to leave it to the ‘techies’: scientists and practitioners with backgrounds in law, economics, political science and public administration should also get involved to build sound connections between vision and voice that facilitate active citizenship. Points for practitioners This article provides guidelines for the realization of open government: (1) design open government for synergistic or complementary relationships between transparency and participation, (2) design open government for a diverse population, (3) design open government for direct and indirect effects, (4) design open government acknowledging a variety in desirables and (5) design for continuous learning about effects and side-effects. The authors emphasize that a diversified approach to the design of open government will be more fruitful in the long run than merely understanding it in terms of making information publicly available.

Holding (Quasi-) Autonomous EU Administrative Actors to Public Account

This article addresses problems of accountability in relation to two specific kinds of administrative actors in the EU system of multilevel governance, namely comitology committees and EU-level agencies. With regard to both sets of actors, the accountability issue is often framed in terms of delegation from a principal to an agent. This article explores the delegation of powers discourse and the question whether this framing adequately covers accountability forums and mechanisms that are emerging as a matter of legal and institutional practice. The latter sub-constitutional level is particularly relevant given the high degree of institutionalisation of both categories of administrative actors. Using these two categories of administrative actors as case studies, this article suggests that a delegation model of accountability in a democratic sense is not adequate and only captures part of emerging practice. A looser conceptual framing, understanding public accountability as a process in which power is checked and balanced by various actors, fits better within a more constitutional perspective on holding EU executive power to account.

Challenging Executive Dominance in European Democracy

Executive dominance in the contemporary EU is part of a wider migration of executive power towards types of decision making that eschew electoral accountability and popular democratic control. This democratic gap is fed by far-going secrecy arrangements and practices exercised in a concerted fashion by the various executive actors at different levels of governance and resulting in the blacking out of crucial information and documents – even for parliaments. Beyond a deconstruction exercise on the nature and location of EU executive power and secretive working practices, this article focuses on the challenges facing parliaments in particular. It seeks to reconstruct a more pro-active and networked role of parliaments – both national and European – as countervailing power. In this vision parliaments must assert themselves in a manner that is true to their role in the political system and that is not dictated by government at any level.

Agency growth between autonomy and accountability: the European Police Office as a ‘living institution’

Autonomy and accountability of public agencies are two sides of the same coin, yet often they are examined separately and at only one point in time. This contribution therefore examines the interaction between accountability and autonomy over time. It does so in the context of a European Union agency, the European Police Office (Europol), the creation of which has been the subject of much contestation and discussion in terms of its possibility to wield autonomy and escape accountability. The contribution looks at de jure aspects of both autonomy and accountability, but moves beyond a strictly formal analysis and investigates actual practices. Drawing on extensive document analysis and 26 in-depth semi-structured interviews with key agency officials as well as members of the relevant accountability forums, this contribution shows that tailored accountability arrangements, which are acceptable to the actors involved, reinforce autonomy, whereas an inappropriate and contested accountability system has the opposite effect, stifling autonomous development, as seems to have been the case with regard to Europol.

Positioning Accountability in European Governance: An Introduction

The special issue of which this paper forms the introduction takes as its central focus one particular aspect of democratic governance: accountability. It attempts to position a broad understanding of the notion of accountability within the overall context of the evolving political system of governance in Europe and in particular of the European Union. With accountability at the centre, we consider its relationship to a fairly wide range of other themes in any given political system. This introduction first looks to the concept of accountability as it stands alongside and within other major themes of contemporary political systems. The issue of accountability beyond the national democratic state is then considered, and in particular within what Sbragia has termed the ‘ecology’ of governance. The introduction concludes with summaries of the papers included in the special issue.

Conceptualizing Accountability in International and European Law.

This article introduces in general terms the concept of accountability and its potential relevance to international and European legal scholarship. It argues that the scale of the shifts in governance and public authority away from the territorial state towards different forms and levels of governance, within and beyond the parameters of the traditional nation state, call for shifts in accountability relationships beyond that applicable within the confines of the territorial state. This, in turn, requires a rethinking of the concept, aims and forms of accountability applying in international and European law. The article explores five aspects of the concept of accountability: the aims of accountability, the actors involved in processes of accountability, the institutions to which accountability must be rendered, the process of accountability, and the levels of accountability. In each regard, the concept of accountability enables us to move beyond traditional concepts of the international legal order such as liability and responsibility and to gain a better understanding of appropriate responses to abuses of power resulting from shifts in authority.

Public Accountability of Transnational Private Regulation: Chimera or Reality?

The legitimacy of transnational private regulation is contested where authority is exercised by private actors adopting rules and being involved in processes of implementation and enforcement. We eschew a general discussion of legitimacy in this context in favour of the more manageable sub-component, ‘accountability’. Drawing on the work of political scientists, we conceptualize public accountability both as a virtue and as a mechanism and explore its relevance with regard to transnational private regulation as opposed to its normal habitat, public regulation and authority. This article highlights the relevance and potential of accountability from both a democratic and a constitutional perspective to the realm of transnational private regulation.

Transparency and political participation in EU governance: A role for civil society?

Abstract This paper highlights the complex and fractured nature of EU governance, before examining various ways of introducing more light into the various dark recesses of current governance structures. The debate on transparency at the EU level is viewed through the prism of deliberative democracy and enabling more effective citizen participation in the governing processes. This model of democracy considers political participation by citizens in a broad sense which is not limited to participation in strictly political institutions (voting). From this perspective the ability of citizens to effectively participate in social dialogue, in the broad sense of the term, is a definite attribute of democracy. The ability to participate in social dialogue depends to a large extent on accessibility of information and accessibility of the dialogue itself. The role of advanced information technology is obvious. It not only facilitates access to relevant information crucial for will formation processes but also facili...

‘Accountable Independence’ of the European Central Bank: Seeing the Logics of Transparency

The European Central Bank (ECB) emerged from the financial crisis not only as the institutional ‘winner’ but also as the most central—and powerful—supranational institution of our times. This article challenges the so-called ‘accountable independence’ of the ECB across the range of tasks it carries out. Citizens ‘see’ the ECB today especially for its role in promoting austerity and its involvement as part of the troika and otherwise in the economic decision making of troubled Member States. Far from ECB monetary policy heralding a ‘new democratic model’, the ECB today suffers from a clear deficit in democracy. In between the grandiose concept of ECB ‘independence’ and the more performative ECB ‘accountability’ lies ‘transparency’. Across the range of ECB practices there is a need to take the related concepts of ‘transparency’ and of (democratic) ‘accountability’ more seriously, both in conceptual terms and in their relationship to one another.

The Kadi Case: Mapping the Boundaries between the Executive and the Judiciary in Europe

Counter-terrorism policy requires a delicate balance between important interests representing fundamental values of liberal democracies. This substantive issue, however, is preceded by the question who the final authority should be to decide where the tipping line of this balance is to be placed. What is the role of courts in finding this balance, and which decisions should be reserved for the executive? Journal available online.