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This article offers an institutional approach to accountability in representative democracies. Theorising accountability comprises both settled polities with well-entrenched institutions and unsettled polities with weak or contested institutions, and it is argued that agency theory and formal principal–agent models giving priority to compliance and control usually make assumptions that are unlikely to apply to the latter type of polity. An institutional approach challenges principal–agent assumptions regarding what accountability means and implies, what is involved in demanding, rendering, assessing and responding to accounts and assigning accountability, and how accountability institutions work and change. Accountability is related to fundamental issues in democratic politics and the paper treats distributions of information, normative standards of assessment, authority and power relations as endogenous to democratic politics. The paper also holds that institutions affect actors’ identities and roles through socialisation, internalisation and habitualisation, as well as through external incentives. An aspiration is to take a modest step towards understanding areas of application for competing approaches to democratic accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Theoretical debate about the effects of politicisation on the democratic legitimacy of the European Union has tended to focus on the potential of conflict between European political parties or member state governments. At the same time, empirical sociological studies demonstrate that controversy about Europe continues to unfold primarily within national public spheres. There is as yet no genuine Europe-wide party system or public debate. This reveals a gap between the normative theoretical assessment of EU politicisation and empirical sociological analysis of this phenomenon. To reconcile this discrepancy, this paper develops three actually-existing trajectories of politicisation: the remote conflict, the international conflict and the domestic conflict. Each trajectory carries unique challenges and opportunities to the democratic legitimacy of the Union. It is argued that the domestic conflict trajectory is most promising from a normative democratic perspective. Paradoxically, this does not necessarily imply a renationalisation of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The debate on migration-related border controls has greatly expanded during the past decade. Special attention has been given to processes of contestation and of rights-claims enacted by migrants, drawing greatly on Isin’s work on acts of citizenship and Rancière’s articulation of the ‘uncounted’ and the political. Within this broad debate little attention has been devoted to the acts of common people in contesting current border management and especially in refusing the policing and the bordering of theirownterritory. By focusing on the Lampedusa borderland, this paper will explore and interrogate the verbal protests made by the people of Lampedusa in response to the drowning of some 366 African migrants on 3 October 2013. The protests were mostly against current border patrolling and its politics of (non-)life, which prioritise border protection against (migrants’) life protection. The call to protectingallhuman life, equally worthy of being protected, transformed these protests into political acts. Using and extending the work of Rancière, I explore the extent to which the people of Lampedusa have highlighted a ‘wrong’ and enacted ‘dissensus’ by contesting the (natural) securitised order of EU border management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

European Union (EU) negotiations take place within the framework of a set of formal and informal institutions. Member states negotiate in the organizational context of the Council and the European Council, take decisions through alternative procedures and decision rules, and sustain a set of norms for the conduct of negotiations. While the effects of these institutions on negotiation behaviour and outcomes have received extensive attention, the question of why these particular institutions have been established or evolved remains underexplored. This contribution makes an argument in favour of systematic attention to the design of negotiation institutions in the EU, and suggests that we should draw on general theoretical approaches to institutional design for these purposes. Moreover, rather than engaging in the exercise of trying to prove or falsify theoretical approaches, we should exploit the potential for explanatory complementarities in concrete empirical domains. To this end, the paper advances a domain-of-application approach to institutional design and illustrates its applicability to EU negotiation institutions through four empirical illustrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how the EU regulatory state expands into fiscal surveillance and what conflicts arise in the process. That the EU should have gone down the route of regulating budgets is puzzling. In Majone's original concept, the regulatory state is meant not to interfere with member states' budgetary redistributive policies. Yet the revision of the Pact strengthened the regulatory content of fiscal surveillance by reformulating the policy problem, strengthening delegated monitoring by the Commission, with Eurostat rather than DG Ecfin at its helm, and by extending control through specialised information. The analysis implies that the revision of the Pact in March 2005 cannot simply be dismissed as a watering down of its fiscal rules. However, there are limitations to regulatory expansion. One limitation is the inherent tension between the requirements of control and the economic justification of fiscal rules, another that economic justifications remain ambiguous and contentious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The market-enhancing regulations of the European Union (EU) place political and economic constraints on the Member States. This has been expected to induce convergence of social policies, generally in a downward direction. At the same time the notion of a European Social Model has been launched as a strategy to make marketization socially acceptable, pointing to a development in a different direction. This paper examines key aspects of the development of the main social insurance programs during the period 1980-2000 in 14 EU Member States. Are there significant signs of convergence in the replacement rates of social insurance programs and do broader development trends of the social insurance systems indicate converging institutional models? The results indicate divergence rather than convergence of social insurance replacement rates. In terms of institutional models there is no evidence of a common European Social Model in the area of social insurance over the past decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period since the early 1990s has seen a marked shift in the terms of Dutch European discourse, as dramatically highlighted by the country's 'No' vote in its 2005 referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty. The present paper examines the trajectory of this discursive shift, suggesting that a traditional 'federalist' referential has been replaced by an elite discourse focused primarily on defining the 'limits of Europe' in intersecting substantive and geographical terms. A general framework for the understanding of national discourses of European integration is first set out, highlighting the key role played by national elites as mediators between the European and the national political systems. The Dutch case is then examined against this background, chronicling the general terms of the 'critical turn' in national European discourse, the 2005 referendum campaign, post-referendum party positioning and discussions surrounding the 2007 Reform Treaty. Despite the persistence of strong, underlying support for Dutch EU membership, it is finally argued that The Netherlands has not (as yet) found a stable, cohesive national narrative of its 'fit' and 'place' in the contemporary (post-enlargement) project of European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]