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Is there a ‘Democratic Deficit’ in World Politics? A Framework for Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Andrew Moravcsik
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Abstract

Many scholars, commentators and politicians assert that international organizations suffer from a severe ‘democratic deficit’. This article proposes a basic framework for evaluating this applied ethical critique of global governance. It rests on two criteria. The first, philosophical coherence, dictates consistent adherence to one or more conception of democratic legitimacy (libertarian, pluralist, social democratic or deliberative). The second, pragmatic appropriateness, requires that any philosophical standard be calibrated to reasonable expectations in the ‘second-best’ world constrained by transaction costs, commitment problems, and justice claims. The latter judgement is in large part empirical, for which existing constitutional practices in advanced industrial democracies provide the most reasonable baseline. By these two criteria – regardless of which specific conception of democracy is adopted as a starting point – the European Union appears to be democratically legitimate. This establishes a point of democratic legitimacy on the continuum of international institutions that could be analysed using this framework.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , 2004 , pp. 336 - 363
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2004

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References

1 For exceptions, see F.W. Scharpf, Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic?, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999; Giandomenico Majone, Regulating Europe, London, Routledge, 1996; and Majone, Giandomenico, ‘Europe's Democratic Deficit’, European Law Journal, 4: 1 (1998), pp. 237–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Robert Dahl, ‘Can International Organizations Be Democratic? A Skeptic's View’, in Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon (eds), Democracy's Edges, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 19–36.

3 See the paper by David Held in this volume.

4 Though even so persistent questions arise as to how rigidly human rights should be maintained in the face of overwhelming widely-acknowledged threats.

5 For a critique that these cannot be so strictly separated, see Cass Sunstein and Stephen Holmes, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes, New York, Norton, 2000.

6 Jeremy Rabkin, Why Sovereignty Matters, Washington, DC, AEI Press, 1998. For a critique, see Andrew Moravcsik, ‘Conservative Idealism and International Institutions’, Chicago Journal of International Law, (2000), pp. 291–314.

7 Dahl, ‘Can International Organization be Democratic?’, op. cit.

8 Ibid., p. 23.

9 Ibid.

10 For the conservative variant of ‘sovereigntism’ associated with AEI, see Rabkin, Why Sovreignty Matters, op. cit., and the special issue of Chicago Journal of International Law (Autumn 2000).

11 For a liberal echo, see Rubenfeld, Jed, ‘The Two World Orders’, Wilson Quarterly, 27 (2003), pp. 22–36.Google Scholar The notion that the US is, overall, a more ‘democratic’ country than most European, in the sense of being more committed to strict ‘popular sovereignty’ is a curious one. For a critique, see Andrew Moravcsik, ‘The Paradox of US Unilateralism in Human Rights’, in Michael Ignatieff (ed.), American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, Princeton, Princeton University Press, forthcoming.

12 Dahl, ‘Can International Organization be Democratic?’, op. cit.

13 Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems, New York, Basic Books, 1977.

14 Yet they need not be so. Many libertarians believe that policy in the EU, as well as in Europe as a whole, is biased in a social democratic direction. For example, see Rabkin, Why Sovreignty Matters, op. cit.

15 See the paper by David Held in this volume.

16 Amitai Etzioni, Political Unification Revisited. On Building Supranational Communities, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.

17 Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement: Why Moral Conflict Cannot Be Avoided in Politics, and What Should Be Done about It, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1996.

18 Larry Siedentop, Democracy in Europe, London, Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 2000; Philippe Schmitter, How to Democratize the European Union … And Why Bother?, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.

19 Russell Hardin distinguishes the claims based on the ‘street-level epistemology … of an ordinary person’ and those claims that meet ‘standard epistemological criteria for justification’. Democracy must, he argues, be understood, at least in part, from the street level. As such, it is unlikely to impose more than a crude, largely negative constraint on policy-makers. Participation in majoritarian decision-making, therefore, takes place ‘on the margin’, rather than being the necessary characteristic of all democratic decisions. See Hardin, Russell, ‘Democratic Epistemology and Accountability’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 17 (2000), pp. 110–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 There are many reasons why such a notion might be philosophically defensible. Some simply postulate that individuals are to be accorded minimal natural or human rights as recognition of basic ‘human dignity’– as do most post-Second World War international human rights documents. (See, for example, Louis Henkin, Gerald L. Neuman, Diane F. Orentlicher and David W. Leebron, Human Rights, New York, Foundation Press, 1999.) One might postulate a near consensual preference in favour of a reduction in the individual risk of absolute deprivation, which would then be reflected in any institutional pre-commitments into the future that individuals must necessarily make under uncertainty. (This formulation appears to be empirically more accurate, as a description of human psychology, than the assumption that individuals generally favour a narrowing of inequality.) One might think of either restriction as a reflection of the varying ‘intensity’ of preferences, with individual preferences that can safely be assumed to be intense (e.g., against being tortured) counting for more than preferences that can be assumed to be less so (e.g., feeling or being marginally ‘safer’ from crime or terrorism).

21 If a given decision is of vital importance to the long-term well-being of those involved, then it is questionable whether they have a necessary obligation to obey government dictates, even if the democratic decision-making procedures by which the dictates were generated were clear and fair. See Brian Barry, ‘Is Democracy Special?’, in Brian Barry (ed.), Essays in Political Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 54–72.

22 Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984; Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, New York, W. W. Norton, 2003. Not an absolute tension, however. Cf. John Ely, Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1981.

23 Hardin, ‘Democratic Epistemology and Accountability’, op. cit.

24 This section draws Andrew Moravcsik, ‘Despotism in Brussels? Misreading the European Union’, Foreign Affairs, (May/June 2001), pp. 603–24; and Andrew Moravcsik, ‘Federalism in the European Union: Rhetoric and Reality’, in Robert Howse and Kalypso Nicolaïdis (eds), The Federal Vision: Legitimacy and Levels of Governance in the US and the EU, Oxford, Oxford University Press, (2002), pp. 163–87.

25 Siedentop, Democracy in Europe., op. cit.

26 Moravcsik, ‘Despotism in Brussels?’, op. cit.

27 Siedentop, Democracy in Europe, op. cit.; cf. Moravcsik, ‘Despotism in Brussels?’, op. cit.

28 The scholarly literature on European integration seems to pay disproportionate attention to exceptional cases of ‘spillover’ in cases such as gender discrimination, the initial experience with environmental policy and structural funding, the jurisprudence of supremacy and direct effect, the Commission's use of Article 90, and the possible, but as yet undocumented, effects of the Open Method of Coordination. These are important trends, but atypical of the EU as a whole.

29 One suspects a measure of ideology or opportunism. See Andrew Moravcsik, ‘A Tory Referendum’, Prospect, (July 2003) pp. 16–17.

30 Majone, Regulating Europe, op. cit.; and Majone, ‘Europe's Democratic Deficit’, op. cit.

31 Such institutional procedures are the conventional tool for protecting the interests of vital minorities – a design feature generally thought to be most appropriate to polities, like the EU, designed to accommodate heterogeneous cultural and substantive interests. See Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in 22 Countries, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990.

32 Dahl, ‘Can International Organization be Democratic?’, op. cit.

33 Simon Hix, Abdul Noury and Gerard Roland, ‘ ”Normal” Parliament? Party Cohesion and Competition in the European Parliament, 1979–2001’, paper presented at the Public Choice Society conference, San Diego, 21–3 March 2002.

34 Peter Ludlow, The Laeken Council, Brussels, Intercommunity, 2002.

35 Christian Joerges and E. Vos (eds), EU Committees: Social Regulation, Law and Politics, Oxford, Hart Publishing, 1999; Majone, ‘Europe's Democratic Deficit’, op. cit.; Zweifel, Thomas D., ‘Democratic Deficits in Comparison: Best (and Worst) Practices in European, US and Swiss Merger Regulation’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 41 (2003), pp. 541–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see Pierpaolo Settembri, ‘Transparency of the EU Legislator’, unpublished paper, University of Florence, 2003.

36 Majone, Regulating Europe, op. cit.

37 Scharpf, Governing in Europe, op. cit. For a more detailed discussion of Scharpf, from both positive and normative perspectives, see Andrew Moravcsik and Andrea Sangiovanni, On Democracy and Public Interest in the Europe Union, Center for European Studies Working Paper Series, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, forthcoming.

38 Yet they need not be so. Many libertarians believe that policy in the EU, as well as in Europe as a whole, is biased in a social democratic direction. For example, see Rabkin, Why Sovereignty Matters, op. cit.

39 David Vogel, Trading Up, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1995; Joerges and Vos, EU Committees, op. cit.

40 The life-cycle of an issue like Mad Cow Disease is just as it would be in any western democracy: some bureaucracies are captured; a crisis emerges; and reforms are put in place that lay greater emphasis on the broader public interest. Joerges and Vos, EU Committees, op. cit.

41 Also Scharpf, Governing in Europe, op. cit.

42 From the perspective of democratic theory, finally, it is important to note that Scharpf's proposals are concerned primarily to maintain social protection in richer member states. They are quite conservative in that they favour domestic redistribution over transnational redistribution; the defence of German welfare standards takes precedence over schemes for transnational redistribution. Scharpf's justification lies in the subjective perceptions of identity of national citizens in countries like Germany, which do not support a heavy commitment to redistribution.

43 For discussions of this argument, see Weiler, The Constitution of Europe, op. cit.; Schmitter, How to Democratize the European Union, op. cit.; Seidentop, Democracy in Europe, op. cit.

44 James Gibson and Gregory A. Caldcira, ‘Legitimacy, Judicial Power and Emerging Transnational Insitutions: The Court of Justice in the European Community’, mimeograph, University of Houston, 1993.

45 I am indebted to Bonnie Meguid for access to her systematic data on issue salience in European countries.

46 For an exception, see Weiler, The Constitution of Europe, op. cit.

47 Schmitter, How to Democratize the European Union, op. cit.

48 Herdegen, Matthias J., ‘Price Stability and Budgetary Restraints in the Economic and Monetary Union: the Law as Guardian of Economic Wisdom’, Common Market Law Review, 35 (1998), pp. 9–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49 See the article by David Held in this volume.