European democracies have been asked to survive a time of crisis. Over the last five years, all EU member States experienced the need of responding to the economic emergence with a package of reforms, addressing the public expenditure and thereby the way public institutions provide services and goods to citizens. Sharing a common situation which imposes to the governments the rule of “deciding fast” without jeopardizing their legitimacy and their democratic consensus, a picture taken from any planet other than the Earth would reveal the persistence of huge differences in the trajectories and in the remedies followed by the European MSs to adapt to this critical situation.
This paper is going to investigate the interaction between two apparently detached streams of events. The first is the chain of economic crisis-domestic policies, which is triggered by the dominant European input specially in lagging countries or in countries featuring serious problems of public debt. The second is the transformation of the mechanisms of checks and balances which has been taking place in most advanced democracies whereby representative institutions seem to lose some of their legitimacy whereas oversight institutions – what some scholars such as Stone Sweet, 2002 – call non majoritarian institutions. These are courts, of any kind, specially the constitutional courts and the courts of auditors. Do these two streams of events interplay? And if they do, how do the result of this interaction look like?
The paper aims to show the role played by the veto players in two parts of the policy cycle, policy adoption and policy implementation, in four EU democracies, Italy, Spain, France, Poland.
