Accountability in the post-Lisbon European Union1
| Author | Eva Heidbreder,Ellen Mastenbroek,Gijs Jan Brandsma |
| Date | 01 December 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852316663312 |
| Published date | 01 December 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Special issue: Accountability in the post-Lisbon European UnionSpecial Issue Articles |
International Review of
Administrative Sciences
2016, Vol. 82(4) 621–637
!The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852316663312
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International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Article
Accountability in the post-Lisbon
European Union
1
Gijs Jan Brandsma
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Eva Heidbreder
Heinrich-Heine-University in Du¨sseldorf, Germany
Ellen Mastenbroek
Radboud University, The Netherlands
Abstract
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 account-
ability 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.
Keywords
accountability, European Commission, European Parliament, European Union,
multi-level governance
Corresponding author:
Gijs Jan Brandsma, Utrecht University, Bijlhouwerstraat 6, Utrecht 3511 ZC, Netherlands.
Email: g.j.brandsma@uu.nl
Introduction
Accountability is considered a cornerstone of democracy (Mulgan, 2003), and the
European Union (EU) has often been accused of showing shortages of account-
ability (e.g. Follesdal, 2006; Gustavsson et al., 2009; Juncos and Pomorska, 2011).
Originally, students of European integration portrayed the development of effective
accountability in the EU as a futile undertaking – and state a strong ‘impossibility
thesis’. Accountability at the EU level was argued to be inconceivable given the
absence of a European demos (Gustavsson et al., 2009) and the presence of myriad
lower-level actors (Papadopoulos, 2010) and multiple principals exerting variant
pressures on agents (Dehousse, 2008; Kelemen, 2002).
Various recent empirical contributions have questioned these sobering expect-
ations, arguing that the set of accountability mechanisms in place in the EU has
grown increasingly dense (e.g. Bovens et al., 2010; Wille, 2013). Much of the empir-
ical basis of these studies dates from the pre-Lisbon period. This special issue shifts
focus to the functioning of accountability in the post-Lisbon area, covering trends
linked to the new treaty and beyond. Three characteristics of this period stand out.
First, adoption of the Lisbon Treaty, and the institutional changes adopted in its
wake, can be expected to have affected accountability. Mainly, ‘Lisbon’ aimed at
strengthening the European and the national parliaments vis-a-vis both the Council
and the Commission. Second, various treaties outside the EU acquis have been
established in response to the financial crisis, which confer new powers on existing
EU institutions outside the scope of the Lisbon Treaty. Third, in the wake of better
regulation programmes, the usage of ex post legislative evaluations (an instrument
introduced before) has received more attention by the Commission. The value
added of this special issue is that it goes beyond the studies that evaluate the
implications of the Lisbon Treaty on accountability alone. It puts the accountabil-
ity changes introduced by the Lisbon Treaty into the broader context of treaty
changes, and devotes special attention to follow-up measures adopted in the wake
of the financial crisis, outside of the scope of the Lisbon Treaty itself. In doing so,
this special issue zooms in on relevant empirical cases in order to investigate the
wider evolution of the EU’s accountability framework.
Empirical studies into accountability, including EU accountability, used to be
scarce, but for about a decade, their numbers have been on the rise. This resulted in
a modest set of snapshots of the state of accountability in particular cases, and
occasionally also in analyses that include a longitudinal component (e.g. Jantz and
Jann, 2013). However, it has proven hard to aggregate findings from individual
studies on accountability and present either a general diagnosis of the overall state
of accountability, or to discern trends in the development of accountability regimes
over time (cf. Bovens et al., 2014: 2, 6, 17, 649–682). Scholars have attributed this to
two factors: first, there has been a tendency for students of accountability to keep
developing new definitions of accountability; and, second, consequently, concep-
tualizations of accountability that seek to capture the variety of accountability
instruments, as well as benchmarks for the appropriateness of those instruments,
also differ (cf. Bovens et al., 2014: 3–15, Brandsma and Schillemans, 2013).
622 International Review of Administrative Sciences 82(4)
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