European Governance and

the Democratic Deficit:

Where does Power Lie in the EU?
The European Union is one of the most important political structures in the world today and
also one of the most complex. With no government and so many sources of influence and
control, where does power really lie in the EU? Michelle Cini investigates.

or all students of politics, power is the core concept,

the number one tool of the trade. At its most basic
level, power is the ability to control ones environment, and within that environment to shape the conduct
of others. Back in 1974, Steven Lukes identified power
as having three dimensions: the first relates to observable behaviour in decision-making, x getting y to do
something they would not otherwise do; a second, the
capacity to stop things from happening, which includes
so-called non-decisions and can be more covert; and
the third, control over the political agenda.
With such definitions to hand, applying the concept
of power to the European Union should be relatively
straightforward. Indeed, if we are unable to talk about
where power lies in the Union, we should probably not
be talking about EU politics at all. But while our understanding of power, whether implicitly or explicitly,
underpins all informed debates about what the European project is and how it might evolve, the extremely
diffuse and complex nature of the EU makes this a more
challenging task than one might at first imagine.

Power in the EU
There are, inevitably, numerous ways in which to think
about power in the EU. Two closely interrelated characteristics of the European Union direct us along one
particular line of inquiry. The first follows from a fairly
innocuous observation about the EUs complexity, that
is, that the EU is polycentric. In other words, there
exist many potential centres of power in the Union.
We know this because we know that the EU comprises
27 member states, with 27 national governments, and
hundreds of regional and local authorities. It also comprises institutions and agencies, and involves myriad
political, economic and societal actors, all of whom
have some stake in or who seek to influence European
politics. Thus, we might expect, at the outset, power to
be distributed, albeit unequally, across a range of those

actors and institutions. Whether it is or not, then, is an

empirical question.
The flip side to the EUs polycentric character is that it
lacks a government. Even so, the EU is heavily engaged
in governing through its component parts: through the
European Council, which comprises, collectively, the
heads of government and state, and which determines
the strategic direction of the Union and provides leadership across a wide range of politically salient policies;
through the EU Council, which serves as a forum for
negotiation and which takes decisions in specific issue
areas; through the European Commission, which sets
annual and multi-annual political agendas and manages
EU programmes and the Budget; through the European
Parliament, which shares decision-taking responsibility with the Council; through individual, bilateral or
multilateral groups of national governments providing
leadership, often outside the formal framework of the
Unions institutions; through proactive agenda-setting
and, on occasion if this is not a contradiction in terms
by foot-dragging and resisting change; and, finally,
through a host of interests, NGOs and lobbyists, which
in a different way are involved in the governing of the
EU.

The flip side

of the EUs
polycentric
character is
that it lacks
a single
government

Governance but no Sign of a Government

An alternative starting point for identifying where power
lies in the EU is simply to look at the different member
states, or rather their national governments. A credible
assumption might be that those governments whose
countries enjoy the largest and the strongest economies,
and which have the largest populations and territories,
will be able to exercise power most effectively.
Germany inevitably comes top of the list of powerful
EU member states, while acknowledging other big beasts
of Europe: the UK, France and perhaps Italy and Spain.
Some commentators have even begun to see Poland as a
contender for membership of this bloc. Dominant theoApril 2011

13

retical accounts of the European integration

process support the view of the EU as, in
essence, an intergovernmental organisation,
even where they also recognise the distinctiveness of the institutional (and highly
institutionalised) environment in which national governments are now forced to relate
to each other. And even for non-adherents
of these theories, it would be hard to contest
the centrality of the (larger) member states
in wielding power in the EU.
Yet, we cannot ignore the power wielded
by the European Unions institutions, particularly those sometimes referred to as its
supranational institutions: the European
Commission, European Parliament and the
(European) Court of Justice. Leaving aside
the often intricate theoretical battles in
which scholars of the EU frequently engage,
the field of dispute tends to come down to
whether one believes, or can find evidence
to support the view, that the EU institutions
do more than just reflect and represent the
views of the (dominant) member states;
that they are able to exercise power in
their own right, autonomously and beyond
what might be deemed peripheral decisiontaking. These days there are perhaps only
a few students of the EU who would claim
that these institutions are the central repositories of EU power. The claims attached
to the European institutions tend now to be
subtler than this, as they seek to contest the
face-value assumptions, often adhered to
by policy-makers themselves, that the only
actors that really matter in international
politics are states.
Those who in the past might have been
labelled supranationalists are today often
attracted to an alternative way of understanding the EU. For this, we return to the
earlier observation about the EUs inherent
polycentrism: while there is no one government in or of the EU, there is governance. At
a superficial level, governance can be a bit
of a slippery concept, hard to pin down. It
implies a rather fluid, non-hierarchical and
less institutionalised process of governing
than is normally entailed by the idea of government, one that allows for but does not
necessarily assume the involvement of a
range of actors and organisations that have
the capacity, indeed the power, to shape
EU action. To talk of governance, then, is
to speak of the transformation of contemporary political and administrative life, in
which the traditional all-encompassing
central state is gradually being hollowed
out by devolution and decentralisation in
a downwards direction, and Europeanisation and globalisation looking upwards. In
such a scenario, the implications for our
14

Political Insight

understanding of power are clear: power

is wielded collectively, and this collectivity
is composed of different configurations of
actors and institutions in different policy or
issue areas. This makes broad generalisations about EU power difficult to sustain.
The danger is that now, when asked where
power lies in the EU, we might end up rather unhelpfully answering that it depends.

What about the People?

Should we accept this account of the EU,
we might also feel inclined to put a positive spin on what the diffuseness of power
implies for European-level democracy, the
assumption here being that the question
of power and the always topical issue of
democratic deficit are inextricably linked.
Thus, we might welcome the involvement
of a broader range of players within the policy process, exercising a more variable and
dispersed form of power, as a kind of neopluralist heaven which increasingly moves
governing out of the hands of a narrow and
exclusive set of governmental elites.
But this interpretation would be overly
optimistic. If power is indeed wielded
through so many networks, communities
and coalitions of actors and institutions,
which vary in their composition from case
to case, how can we know whom to hold accountable for EU actions? And in a practical
sense, accountability is surely a prerequisite
for democracy in Europe, as elsewhere.
It is worth noting that governance is itself
often associated with the kind of problemsolving managerialism in which rational
decision-making seeks to shunt both ideology and interests out of the policy process.
This implies the victory of a technocratic
or bureaucratic logic over a political one,
which may be intended to improve policy
effectiveness but can also serve to reinforce
long-standing and often ingrained prejudices about the nature of the EU. Seeing the
European Union as a governance system
may simply confirm the Union to observers
as elitist, insular and undemocratic. How
then might such negative perceptions be
addressed? One idea could be to encourage
new ways for citizens to engage in and with
European Union politics.
There are various means by which citizens might, themselves, wield more power
within the EU. Indeed those concerned
about the Unions image have been greatly
preoccupied over the past couple of decades with how the EU might appeal more
to ordinary citizens and involve them more
directly. Since the early 1990s, there have

been many new initiatives to bring Europe closer to the people, encouraging
citizen participation through the use of referendums, NGO activism, external expert
involvement in policy-making and even
direct access to EU elites via the internet.
It would be rather lame to say, after almost
20 years, that the jury was still out on these
initiatives; and it would be more honest to
report that while the experiments have
been interesting and have changed the way
that the EU does business in certain areas,
the results, in terms of public perception,
have been disappointing.

European Citizens Initiative

The European Citizens Initiative was an innovation included in the Treaty of Lisbon, with
the aim of enhancing participation in the EU.
The Citizens Initiative, the practical arrangements for which were set out in a regulation
agreed in December 2010, enables one million citizens who are nationals of at least a
quarter of member states to call directly on
the European Commission to bring forward
an initiative of interest to them in an area of
EU competence. The first petitions to get up
and running were initiated by Greenpeace,
against the authorisation of genetically modified crops in Europe, and by German MEP
Martin Kastler, seeking to ban shops from
opening on Sundays.

Institutional Solutions
The alternative to the participatory path
to EU democracy has led to more obvious
institutional solutions to the democratic
deficit. This has meant enhancing the
power of the European Parliament (and
to a lesser degree improving the input of
national parliaments) in EU policy-making.
But even though Parliaments co-legislative
role (working together with the EU Council) has increased substantially so much
so that some academics now claim that the
EU is no less democratic than any other socalled democratic polity the perception
that the EUs democratic deficit persists has
proved remarkably resilient and therefore
difficult to change.
Participation aside, the increased powers
of the European Parliament, along with its
willingness to stick its neck out in battles
with other EU institutions, certainly provides an institutional channel that allows
EU actors and institutions to be held to
account for the decisions they take. Yet,
the European Parliaments scrutiny role

 European Union, 2011

European Commission chief Jos Manuel Barroso is one of the EUs most powerful political actors

of any aspiring democratic polity. Yet, in

recent years there has been less interest
in the how of EU politics as the EU, and
the Commission especially, has sought to
recalibrate itself towards a more outputorientated focus on what the Union does,
what it can do and what it should be doing. Whether in terms of responses to the
economic crisis and its aftermath or in the
fields of foreign and defence policy and climate change, there are many big political,
economic and social issues to which the EU
might contribute.
Increasingly, attempts to make the EU
appear more legitimate in the eyes of its
citizens are focusing less on improving
processes of democratisation, but rather on
Europes actions, policy and, ultimately, its
Conclusion
contribution to addressing and, hopefully,
In all this talk of governance, power and resolving Europes and in some cases the
the democratic deficit, it is important to re- worlds problems. This shift away from what
member what this is all for. Improving the from the outside looks like an obsession with
quality of inputs into the decision-making institutional change as an end in itself is to be
system and investigating the process by welcomed, but it should not be assumed that
which decisions are made are vital parts the EU can now put to rest its earlier conhas its limits. National governments are
often reluctant to justify themselves before
a supranational assembly, which makes
scrutinising the EU Council fraught with
difficulty. Furthermore, the formal mechanisms of accountability, associated with the
representative model of democracy, prove
inadequate in our new era of EU governance and may even be exacerbated by efforts
to expand further the actors participating in
EU policy-making. As Mark Bovens argued,
new forms of accountability are needed in
the EU, not to replace but to supplement
the more traditional accountability mechanisms already in existence.

cerns about the democratic deficit. Citizens

in democratic polities are unlikely to buy into
the idea that power and democratic accountability can rest solely at the national level,
and that policy outputs suffice to legitimise
supranational or international governance
systems, even if this does seem to underpin
much of the current European Commissions
thinking on the matter.

References
Bovens, M. (2007) New Forms of Accountability
and EU-Governance, Comparative European
Politics, 5 (1), 10420.
Moravcsik, A. (2002) In Defence of the
Democratic Deficit: Reassessing Legitimacy
in the European Union, Journal of Common
Market Studies, 40 (4), 60324.

Michelle Cini is Professor of European Politics at

the University of Bristol. She is currently co-editor of
JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies.
April 2011

15

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