ARENA Report 01/2010
Anne Elizabeth Stie
This thesis seeks to to evaluate the EU’s co-decision procedure for its putative democratic qualities, and to contribute to the operationalisation of deliberative democracy by developing an analytical framework/evaluative scheme that can be applied to co-decision in particular and to public policy-making procedures in general.
Deliberative democracy states that democratic decisions are those that have withstood testing and critique in a publicly accessible manner. Democratic decision-making cannot be realised without elected politicians as the main decision-makers. Only they can establish the necessary link to citizens. Politicians can only claim to speak on behalf of citizens if they regularly justify their positions in public so that citizens can actually know what decision-makers are up to. Democracy is understood as a justificatory and reason-giving process where citizens are brought in and can hold politicians to account through public debate. The procedural conditions framing public policy-making processes should therefore seek to approximate the following procedural criteria: (1) democratic deliberative meeting places, (2) inclusion of affected and competent parties, (3) openness, (4) neutralisation of asymmetrical power relations and (5) decision- making capacity. The co-decision procedure is evaluated against these criteria
The main conclusion is that there is a tension between the formal provisions and the established practices of the co-decision procedure. It is shown that the formal set-up of the co-decision procedure has many democratic qualities. However, co-decision-makers have established practices that work against rather than in accordance with the formal provisions. In this way, the democratic qualities are effectively rendered passive due to so-called informal and secret ‘trialogues’. The scope and scale of these meetings between a limited selection of participants from the EP, the Council and the Commission run counter to and are largely incompatible with democratic decision-making. A privatisation of politics has never been compatible with democratic decision-making
ARENA Report 01/2010 (pdf)
ISBN 978-82-93137-73-3 (online) 978-82-93137-23-8 (print)