| The renaissance of the European Union and the struggle of the Euro have renewed questions whether EU institutions and policymaking processes are sufficiently accountable to the European electorate. Critics assert that the EU suffers from a "democratic deficit." Since Amsterdam, when the directly elected European Parliament gained new and important decision-making powers, EU critics have moved away from condemning institutional procedures. Instead, they emphasize excessive competencies of non-elected European bureaucrats to shape regulations and standards in the European "regulatory state" away from public scrutiny or participation. But most arguments of the democratic deficit suffer from two shortcomings. First, they fail to back assertions with recent empirical research. Second, seeing the EU as sui generis , they treat it in a vacuum and fail to compare it to other polities. This study aims to address these lacunae by systematically comparing the European regulatory state with two federal democracies, Switzerland and the United States. First, the study compares the three polities along established scales of democracy. Second, the study traces two recent cases of regulation to compare policy-making in action along a principal-agent model. We want to know whether the non-elected European Commission, compared to the Swiss and American government bureaucracies, is an agent accountable to its principals. One story is on regulating competition: how did the Commission, the US Department of Justice, and the Swiss Competition Commission regulate the proposed merger of Worldcom and Sprint? The other story is on regulating standards: how do the Commission, the US Food and Drug Administration, and the Swiss Federal Office of Health regulate the labeling of genetically modified foods? In the merger case, I find that regulation in the EU is less democratic than in the United States but more democratic than in Switzerland. In the food labeling case, I find the opposite: EU regulation is less democratic than Swiss but more democratic than US regulation. On the whole, the EU's regulatory and standard-setting processes compare favorably with those of the world's most liberal democracies. While there is room for improvement, EU decision-making processes do not suffer from a democratic deficit. |
