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Repairing the Link? Civil Society’s Role Regarding Accountability Deficits of the German Government in EU Affairs

Jan Baars — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

National governments acting in the Council of the European Union can rarely be held to account by parliaments and the public. This is because secrecy prevails in Council negotiations, and institutions of democratic scrutiny often lack information and resources to effectively control the executive. This study focuses on the involvement of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) as a potential remedy to the lack of democratic control over governments’ positions in Council negotiations. Examining the German case, a qualitative analysis of 13 interviews with German CSO representatives shows that CSO involvement concentrates on direct dialogue with the German government: Although lacking formal sanctioning powers, CSOs engage in an informal, voluntary consultation with policy-makers, based on co-dependency. Thus, they enact a loose form of social accountability with the German government. In this role, CSOs are however constrained by several factors, such as access to policy-making arenas. The paper further shows that CSOs seldom trigger formal scrutiny mechanisms by alarming the Bundestag or the public on potential governmental wrongdoings. Therefore, they rarely make use of their second potential role as political accountability facilitators. As a result, this raises the question whether CSOs’ impact on the accountability deficit can make up for the lack of popular scrutiny in EU policy-making.

The Implications of Europeanized EU-Journalists on the Citizens and its Government

Livia Kümpers — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The national media plays a central role for European citizens by functioning as an information transmitter, ensuring fact-orientated news coverage, to ultimately fulfill a democratic role within the EU system. Not least due to enhanced EU integration, European news coverage of EU-related matters has significantly increased. This is important, as good news coverage is essential for citizens to hold their national government accountable. By conducting 26 semi-structured interviews with German and Italian EU-journalists, this research identifies EU-journalists´ exposure to Europeanization and assesses its impact on their views and framing of EU news. The research explores two potential effects from Europeanisation; a first looks at the possible detachment from the national audience while a second focuses on the quality of a journalists information network as a result of Europeanisation. The findings that Europeanization of EU-journalists improves access to exclusive information through an established quality information network thereby strengthening their accountability role. By contrast, Europeanisation can compromise journalists bridging role as they need to prioritizing the national audience´s interest when selecting EU affairs topics.

Will the Real Scrutinizer Please Stand Up? The Role and Control of the French European Affairs Committee Over Its Executive

Maud Bachelet — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

While traditionally considered the losers of European integration, scholars argue that national parliaments have clawed their way back to European affairs. The Lisbon Treaty has also sought to formally empower the national legislatures. However, little academic attention has focused on studying through which channels national parliaments have a say in the supranational arena. This explorative research aims at tackling this issue by analyzing what role the French European Affairs Committee (EAC) plays in EU affairs’ scrutiny and control of the executive. Through a qualitative design based on interviews with EAC members and content analysis, this paper shows that this French committee makes use of police-patrol oversight, rather than fire-alarm scrutiny to follow its executive’s behavior in the EU. However, the EAC remains legislatively powerless in the face of EU negotiations in the Council. Interviews reveal nonetheless that this is not perceived as a problem, as many respondents explain that national interests align at the supranational level, regardless of one’s political affiliation. This contradicts the argument of the importance of opposition in scrutinizing executive conduct. Instead, the French EAC is best conceived as an information hub, for other deputies and citizens, which reinforces the communicative function of the national legislature. This, in turn, questions the legitimacy of empowering national parliaments to solve the democratic deficit of the EU.

Media and National Accountability in the European Union

Rebecca Tronci — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In Western democracies, mass media are the main means through which citizens receive information regarding the European Union. Although national ministers play an important role at the EU level, citizens are not always aware of the national ministers’ activities within the Council. Since citizens mainly experience politics through the media, which act as mediators between the politicians and the public, this paper conceptualizes the media as an accountability forum. The research aims to explore the impediments EU-journalists face in fulfilling their watchdog role towards national governments. By conducting 26 in-depth semi-structured interviews in two EU member states Germany and Italy, this research explores the impediments journalists face at the structural and individual level. The findings revealed that although there is an increasing homogenization of the informational impediments, journalists seem to experience differences due to preferential treatments. Finally, organizational impediments such as political and economic pressure, and the way journalists conceptualize their role, also affect how and what they decide to report.

And yet, it moves: Lobbying Regulation in the Council of Ministers of the European Union

Erik Schmidt-Meinecke — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This study aims to explain the commitment of the Council of the European Union to the Inter-Institutional Agreement on a common Transparency Register for interest representatives with the Commission and European Parliament in 2021. To scrutinize this surprising turn in the hitherto transparency-averse position of the Council, this study draws on a set of elite interviews with Council sources and transparency stakeholders. The emerging data are analyzed through a theoretical framework grounded in institutionalist theory, grouped in a strategic, institutional, and ideational dimension. Evidence on a strategic dimension suggests a transparency-averse majority in the Council that explains the overall skepticism of the institution towards advancing lobbying transparency. The institutional dimension reveals the Council as compelled by norm-entrepreneurship and a logic of appropriateness instilled by other institutional actors in the Inter-Institutional Agreement. Lastly, the ideational dimension reveals shifting notions of transparency, as well as effective change agency and knowledge sharing through pro-transparency actors within the Council. The study concludes that, while a merely strategic analysis of institutional change fails to explain reform, a holistic institutionalist perspective, considering different dimensions of institutional change, is well suited to explain the advance of lobbying transparency in the Council. Further research could draw on the tentative findings of this research and attempt a longitudinal assessment of drivers and inhibitors of lobbying transparency in the Council.

Wait, who Controls the Council? The Role of the Dutch Parliament and Organized Interests to Hold the Council of Ministers Accountable

Robert Verboeket — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the role of organized interests as indirect scrutinizers of the Council of Ministers. Whereas the ministers of the Council are only accountable to national parliaments, the latter face many difficulties in controlling the former. This is problematic as it potentially increases the EU’s democratic deficit. This thesis researches a possible solution to this problem by testing McCubbins and Schwartz’s fire-alarm theory. McCubbins and Schwartz argue that organized interests can alarm national parliaments who can then scrutinize better. The research focuses on the Netherlands as a most likely case-study. Eleven interviews with prominent Dutch organized interests led to the conclusion that the fire-alarm model functions limitedly at best. The analysis points at two structural impediments -tradeoff and issue-dependence- that explain the lack of interaction between organized interests and national parliaments. Indeed, organized interests prefer contact and collaboration with other actors; most notably the Commission and the EP.

A Prerequisite for Accountability: Access to Information in the German European Affairs Council

David Baumgärtner-Griffiths — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Negotiations in the Council of the European Union have been described as non-transparent since access to certain documents concerning the deliberations is restricted. As a result, national parliaments struggle to hold their national governments to account. Parliaments, providing a direct link between voters and the executive, play a vital role in granting legitimacy to the EU. Their incapacity weakens the democratic legitimacy of the European project. Existing literature on the topic has examined the formal powers of national parliaments and how active they are. However, it has failed to explore their access to information. This paper analyses the access to information on deliberations in the Council by the German European Affairs Committee (EAC) in the Bundestag. Interviews were conducted with members of the German EAC and their EU policy advisors. The analysis revealed that the German EAC employs an extensive network of direct oversight, manually scrutinizing a large number of documents. Certain limitations of this method were revealed, as due to capacity constraints only select decisions were examined. Individual citizens, organized interest and the media were shown to play a role in triggering the oversight at times, thus providing the impetus to start the scrutiny process.