Gijs Jan Brandsma

Accountability in the post-Lisbon European Union1

This special issue takes stock of recent post-Lisbon additions to the European Union’s accountability toolkit. It provides indications that older decision-making tools tend to be more accountable than newer ones, and that, in some areas, decision-making is shifting towards less accountable arenas. This introductory article reviews the debate on the gradual evolution of the European Union’s accountability system and introduces key aspects of the post-Lisbon era that can be expected to affect accountability in the European Union, and that have been overlooked by the literature thus far: delegated acts, economic governance and regulatory evaluations. The contributions to this special issue address each of these domains in detail and highlight the degree to which accountability has been enhanced. A final contribution shows how these arrangements fit into the wider landscape of already-existing European Union accountabilities and how this landscape has developed over time. Points for practitioners There is an apparent link between the relative novelty of the institutional setting in which a governance system is embedded and its accountability. Settings that include a strong role for the European Commission tend to be the most accountable ones, while those that rely mostly on intergovernmental logics, including those that have been created outside the Treaty framework, come with significant gaps.

EGPA and the Study of EU Public Administration

Administration has always been a focal point of European Union (EU) research. Yet, the study of multilevel and EU administrations as research subject in its own right is more recent. The Permanent Study Group has assembled some of the key contributors to the most prominent debates, namely the EU’s core administrations, the interplay between international or supranational and lower level administrative units, questions of administrative autonomy in public and semi-autonomous agencies, systemic changes due to multilevel interactions and questions of compliance, as well as normative questions of accountability and control more broadly. In sum, multilevel administration, crucially studies in the EU context, has developed an elaborate research agenda that generates generalisable findings for multilevel administrations and their implications for contemporary governance.

Transparency of EU informal trilogues through public feedback in the European Parliament: promise unfulfilled

ABSTRACT Significant parts of the EU’s legislative process remain shrouded in secrecy. In informal trilogues, representatives of the three main institutions negotiate compromises behind closed doors which are subsequently rubber-stamped in public meetings. While most research on (EU) transparency focuses on the availability of documents, this article investigates how much information on trilogue proceedings is shared with the general public through European Parliament (EP) committee meetings as the only forum to which public account must be rendered during the negotiation process. This article analyses the degree to which trilogues are reported back on, and the quality of feedback provided. Although the EP requires its trilogue negotiators to report back to its committees after each trilogue, the majority of trilogues is not reported back on at all, or not in time. Where feedback is given, its quality is often only poor. The EP thus does not deliver on its promises, which seriously undermines the legitimacy of the EU’s legislative process.

Participant-Level Accountability: Substantive Talks and Deafening Silence

The previous two chapters on system-level and committee-level accountability addressed both the accountability relationships as envisaged in the design of the comitology system, as well as the actual practices in this respect. The core features of the system are that it is meant to provide Council (or rather member state) control over the Commission’s executive activities, and that the European Parliament has gradually won ground in scrutinizing the decision-making that takes place within the committees. In practice we see that the committees indeed countervail the Commission’s powers, which can mainly be concluded from the various interaction patterns of the Commission and the member state representatives in the committees. In a material sense, this results in joint decision-making of the Commission and the committees together rather than ‘plain’ committee approval or disapproval of the Commission’s position without any room for reshaping the Commission’s proposed policies. This is also the reason why the European Parliament has criticized the set-up of the comitology system over the past decades: it sees the committees as means through which the member states curb the Parliament’s competences to scrutinize the executive.

Comitology: The System, the Committees and Their Participants

The first chapter introduced Corne Van Alphen. Patrick Van Veen and Frits Bloem are two of his colleagues in backstage Europe, and Box 2.1 shows their work in a nutshell. Van Veen and Bloem’s work is somewhat similar to that of Van Alphen’s work on the Rural Development committee. The meetings are chaired by the Commission, and member state representatives attend the meetings, speak to one another and vote on implementing measures. But their work differs in some other respects. Van Alphen generally meets his European colleagues once a month, while Van Veen attends committee meetings twice as often. Van Alphen’s committee allows farmers to employ certain techniques, whereas Van Veen’s committee governs the market for certain agricultural products. Other committees again, which so far haven’t been referred to in the examples, deal with regulation in other policy areas such as transport, research, health care, food safety and the environment. Together they vote between 2,000 and 2,500 times every year, on issues ranging from intervention stock levels of cereals to air quality regulation.

Committee-Level Accountability: System Meets Practice

The design of the comitology system is far from parsimonious. It is not just ‘institutionally schizophrenic’ (Brandsma, Curtin and Meijer, 2008) in the sense that it is a device pushed mainly by the Council in order to ‘rein in’ the supranational executive competences of the Commission. From its very inception, the comitology system has been Janus-faced in its accountability tasks. On the one hand, the committees are designed to be the control devices of the member states over the Commission. From the moment the very first committee was established, the Council has systematically created stricter procedures than the Commission had proposed. This has led, for instance, to the creation of regulatory procedures in the 1960s, and to the introduction of member state expert groups for delegated acts in the 2011 reform.

Accountability and Multi-Level Governance

Multi-level governance structures are mushrooming in the European Union to the extent that some nowadays speak of a European administrative ‘space’ (Hofmann, 2008; Egeberg and Trondal, 2009). Next to comitology, through which 2,000 to 2,500 measures are adopted each and every year, there is also a wide range of other, sometimes called ‘new’ administrative arrangements that include a fusion of both national- and European-level administrators. These include, for instance, national agencies and regulators allying together in networks that bypass national governments, sometimes under the auspices of the Commission; national experts, civil servants and more stakeholders who provide input to the Commission through its expert groups or open coordination systems; and member state civil servants preparing Council negotiations in its many working parties.

Comitology and Multi-Level Accountability

Comitology is the European Union’s most important mode of policymaking. Involving experts from the various member state civil services as well as those from the Commission, it not only produces the bulk of European decisions, directives and regulations, but also provides for a strongly organized space of interaction between officials working on the same policies within different jurisdictions. On the one hand, comitology has been depicted as a case of runaway bureaucracy. Several authors have pointed to its expertise-driven deliberations that make it hard to control politically (Dehousse, 2003), the lack of control powers of the European Parliament (Bradley, 1992, 1997) and the preference of the Council to, wherever possible, delegate broad decision-making powers to comitology, circumventing the involvement of the European Parliament (Heritier and Moury, 2011). These characterizations of comitology are well in line with the technocratic and even secretive character that is often attributed to multi-level governance settings in a more general sense (Oliver, 2009, p. 13–14; Papadopoulos, 2010, 1033–4).

System-Level Accountability: Conflict Over Control

Comitology is conventionally seen as an instrument through which the member states and the Council can hold the Commission accountable. But comitology also acts as a decision-maker in its own right, which begs the question: how is comitology itself held to account? Ever since the first comitology committees were set up, the system of delegating powers to the Commission while controlling these via committees of member state representatives has been controversial and the subject of bitter interinstitutional conflicts. Essentially, these were and still are about accountability, both from a popular control as well as from a checks and balances perspective. When the legislators delegate powers to the Commission, how do they envisage these powers being controlled through comitology? And how do the institutions balance one another’s powers through the set-up of the committee system?