The 10 most recently published documents
As the most powerful executive actor in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the Eurogroup has faced continuous demands to improve its accountability record since the euro crisis. One reform introduced to meet these demands were the Economic Dialogue – a regular exchange of views between the European Parliament and the President of the Eurogroup designed to ‘ensure greater transparency and accountability’ in the EMU. This chapter investigates the practical functioning of the Economic Dialogues with the Eurogroup between 2013 and the 2019 European Parliament elections. Applying the theoretical framework of the introduction, the purpose is to examine the extent to which the Parliament focuses on procedural or substantive accountability when questioning the Eurogroup President. Moreover, the chapter investigates the reasoning of parliamentary questions in line with the four accountability goods identified at the outset (openness, non-arbitrariness, effectiveness, and publicness). The findings show that Members of the European Parliament are eager to question the extent to which Eurogroup decisions are substantively open and effective, and to a lesser extent whether they are arbitrary or protect EU interests more generally. The analysis is based on fourteen transcripts of Economic Dialogues with the Eurogroup President, which took place between 2013 and 2019.
This chapter provides the volumes general conceptual framework. It begins by addressing why new approaches to accountability are needed, arguing that accountability literature has reached a stalemate as a result of an impasse between deductive and inductive approaches to accountability in the EU. It then argues that overcoming the stalemate requires developing a generalised framework of what accountability is for, deriving four accountability goods to be used in subsequent chapters. The chapter argues that each of the goods can be delivered in procedural or substantive ways, focusing either on the process by which decisions are made or the substantive worth of decisions themselves. The chapter concludes by discussing the strengths and weaknesses of both varieties of accountability before mapping out how the concepts will be applied across policy fields and institutions in subsequent chapters.
This chapter serves as the general introduction to the volume. It discusses two major impasses plaguing EMU in the 2020s: the first, a clash between politicization of EMU decisions, on the one hand, and an institutional structure designed to reject political conflict, on the other; the second, a scholarly impasse between those analysing EMU accountability comparatively and those doing so through EMU specific standards. The chapter briefly introduces the core concepts used in the volume as a means of overcoming this impasse: the distinction between procedural and substantive accountability as well as the normative goods framework developed in Chapter 1. It finally provides an overview of the structure and content of the volume, concluding with a plea to focus scholarly attention on EMUs substantive accountability deficits.
The purpose of this working paper is to conduct a comprehensive review of existing literature that explores the relationship between business organizations and democracy. This review draws from various fields, including management, business ethics, sociology, international law, and other relevant disciplines for this Project and has several objectives. Firstly, it aims to provide insight into prior research on how democratic institutions regulate economic actors and how these actors, particularly large multinational corporations (MNCs), resist such regulation. Additionally, it examines how these economic actors develop behaviors and economic models that pose challenges to democratic governance, such as business-related human rights violations. In the initial part of the review, we delve into the historical and contemporary aspects of the relationship between business and democracy. Furthermore, the report explores how companies can contribute to shaping a more democratic future by addressing gaps in governance, especially in cases where populist governments fail to protect the rights of their citizens. It also considers the development of alternative business models, such as social enterprises and cross-sector partnerships. Moreover, it looks into how businesses can actively engage in democratic governance and promote principles of participation. The final section of the working paper involves a bibliometric analysis, including co authorship, co-citation, and keyword co-occurrence maps. This analysis is based on key references used by team members in their literature reviews and is designed to examine the connections that exist among various strands of research that support the research questions of the Rebalance Project.
The Present and the Future of Infringement Proceedings: Lessons Learned from Kavala v. Türkiye
(2023)
The Council of Europe is headed to its fourth summit under the shadow, most likely, of the unimplemented infringement proceedings judgment in the case of Kavala v. Türkiye. The aim of this article is to investigate what this persistent non-implementation teaches us for the present as well as for the future reform of infringement proceedings monitoring. Strengthening this is of inestimable importance for the future credibility of the Council of Europe, as well as the authority of the European Court of Human Rights in general. The lack of a clear strategy for handling non-implementation of infringement proceedings will have a dissuasive effect on the further use of such proceedings by the Committee of Ministers, it removes any teeth proceedings were ever intended to have. In this article I argue that the future of the effective monitoring of judgments resulting from infringement proceedings depends on: a) the foreseeable proceduralisation of the mechanisms to exert pressure on non-implementing states and, b), further judicialisation of the ECtHR’s handling of the remedies required to implement judgments resulting from infringement proceedings. In conclusion, I reflect on possible objections to this double call of proceduralisation and judicialisation as the basis of reform.
The increasingly litigated Article 18 ECHR aims at unmasking the ‘hidden agenda’ pursued by states that proclaim to be restricting human rights for legitimate reasons, but in fact do so for an ‘ulterior purpose’. These complaints generate complex evidentiary challenges. This article investigates the evidentiary regime of Article 18 since the delivery of the Grand Chamber Merabishvili v Georgia judgment in 2017. It shows that this regime is composed of a three-legged evidentiary test requiring: (1) that the Article 18 complaint is a fundamental aspect of the case, (2) the identification of an ‘ulterior purpose’, and (3) the predominance of this purpose in the state’s overall motivation. The article argues that this three-stage test is sui generis, despite borrowing elements from evidentiary regimes, both from other Convention provisions and externally, and that it lacks clarity and coherency: facilitating a higher standard of proof for the provision, which largely burdens applicants.
Does more media censorship imply more regime stability? We argue that censorship may cause mass disapproval for censoring regimes. In particular, we expect that censorship backfires when citizens can falsify media content through alternative sources of information. We empirically test our theoretical argument in an autocratic regime—the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Results demonstrate how exposed state censorship on the country's emigration crisis fueled outrage in the weeks before the 1989 revolution. Combining original weekly approval surveys on GDR state television and daily content data of West German news programs with a quasi-experimental research design, we show that recipients disapproved of censorship if they were able to detect misinformation through conflicting reports on Western television. Our findings have important implications for the study of censoring systems in contemporary autocracies, external democracy promotion, and campaigns aimed at undermining trust in traditional journalism.
International sports events and repression in autocracies: Evidence from the 1978 FIFA World Cup
(2023)
How do international sports events shape repression in authoritarian host countries? International tournaments promise unique gains in political prestige through global media attention. However, autocrats must fear that foreign journalists will unmask their wrongdoings. We argue that autocracies solve this dilemma by strategically adjusting repression according to the spatial-temporal presence of international media. Using original, highly disaggregated data on the 1978 World Cup, we demonstrate that the Argentine host government largely refrained from repression during the tournament but preemptively cleared the streets beforehand. These adjustments specifically occurred around hotels reserved for foreign journalists. Additional tests demonstrate that (1) before the tournament, repression turned increasingly covert, (2) during the tournament, targeting patterns mirrored the working shifts of foreign journalists, (3) after the tournament, regime violence again spiked in locations where international media had been present. Together, the article highlights the human costs of megaevents, contradicting the common whitewashing rhetoric of functionaries.
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, governments are increasingly concerned about the way in which citizens’ personal data are collected, processed and used during election campaigns To develop the appropriate tools for monitoring and controlling this new mode of “data-driven campaigning” (DDC) regulators require a clear understanding of the practices involved. This paper provides a first step toward that goal by proposing a new organizational and process-centred operational definition of DDC from which we derive a set of empirical indicators. The indicators are applied to the policy environment of a leading government in this domain – the European Union (EU) – to generate a descriptive “heat map” of current regulatory activity toward DDC. Based on the results of this exercise, we argue that regulation is likely to intensify on existing practices and extend to cover current “cold spots”. Drawing on models of internet governance, we argue that this expansion is likely to occur in one of two ways. A “kaleidoscopic” approach, in which current legislation extends to absorb DDC practices and a more “designed” approach that involves more active intervention by elites, and ultimately the generation of a new regulatory regime.