Suchergebnisse

The EU's dependence upon exchanges with organised civil society as a proxy for popular participation makes its procedures for participatory governance critical for input legitimacy. The most recent of these is the European Transparency Initiative (ETI). The article examines the development of the lobby regulation element of the ETI, the detail of its operation and the concepts upon which it is founded, in order to consider its potential to contribute to wider goals of participatory legitimacy. The main energies devoted to creating the initiative were spent in the struggle to get it established, with relatively less attention given to the implications of operational issues involved in registration. Although transparency is the main focus, a legacy of predecessor initiatives on interest group representativeness, primarily spatial in concern, remain embedded in the scheme, which place limitations on advocacy-based groups. An alternative regulatory device to representativeness is that of accountability, which can be accommodated within the EU's existing framework of liberal democracy with elements of deliberative overtones, and of which traces can be found in the Code of Conduct associated with the registration scheme.

The absence of a formal place in representative democracy at EU level casts sub-national authorities more as actors of EU participatory democracy. Where they have specific interests to pursue their Brussels offices act in the same way as lobbyists, but public authorities are also capable of acting on broader interest sets. This analysis is geared to understanding variation in the extent to which the diversely constituted Brussels offices of the regions can act on a broad spectrum of civil society interests, and thus have potential as actors of European integration in connecting civil society with EU institutions. Differences in the orientation of offices towards either highly defined or broad agendas can be conceived in qualified principal-agent terms, in which the autonomy of offices to develop activities is the critical explanatory factor. This autonomy can be derived more from the structure of principals and from degrees of purpose they have than from asymmetries of power between principals and agents, which in turn can be drawn from typologies of degrees of devolved authority present in different member states. It predicts that territorial offices from member states with medium degrees of devolved authority have the greatest potential to act on a broad range of civil society oriented interests.