|
Forum
Paper Title: Democracy and the Administrative State in the European Union. A critical Analysis of Multi-level Governance, Infranationalism and Collaborative Policymaking (full
text)*
Abstract of Forum Paper:
This paper is concerned with democratic governance in and of the administrative state. A variety of legal devises, policy initiatives, institutional arrangements and political developments observed in the European Union (EU) provide the empirical setting from which to reflect on a normative, yet feasible, understanding of democracy in highly complex regulatory ‘states’, as well as for the evaluation of clusters of scholarly debates generated in Europe and the United States around these themes, with an overall orientation towards institutional/legal reform.
More precisely, I examine the notions of the European Union as a system of multi-level governance and as a regulatory ‘state’. I place special emphasis on those initiatives that point in the direction of fostering a system of ‘collaborative’ governance and ‘flexibility’ in the design of regulatory tools. A more detailed analysis is developed with regard to the Open Method of Coordination, whose nature and political/legal implications will be tested with the case of the growing Union intervention on education policies. This study is developed with the purposes of testing the empirical strength of such views of the European Union, assessing the feasibility of the above-mentioned techniques, and exposing the democratic dilemmas incited by such approaches.
Biography |
Top