"Quis Custodiet Custodes? The European Commission's Policy-Making Role and the Problem of Democratic Legitimacy"

Matlary, Janne Haaland. (1993) "Quis Custodiet Custodes? The European Commission's Policy-Making Role and the Problem of Democratic Legitimacy". In: UNSPECIFIED, Washington, DC. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

[From the Introduction]. In this paper I shall take the liberty of posing a number of questions without providing any comprehensive answers to them. The stress is on the need to problematize the issue of democratic legitimacy with regard to non-plesbiscitarian policy-makers. This essay is thus exploratory in its discussion of democratic norms, yet presents empirical evidence that is the result of a major inquiry over several years. (In the discussion of democratic theory I assume knowledge of the main themes and theories referred to, and I have therefore not foot-noted this section in a formal way, i.e. as would be necessary for an article to be published. The themes in this section are much less developed than in the empirical section, and represents my own very early stage of thinking about these questions after an absence from political theory as a discipline for more than ten years.) The following work order obtains: First I seek to delineate the theoretical implications of the general problem of the 'democratic deficit' and the Commission's role in this. Then I move to an empirical substantiation of my claim that the Commission plays important policy-making roles both formally and informally. In the third and last section I discuss if and how these roles can be justified according to various democratic norms.

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