The relationship between the europeanization and internationalization of political decision-making processes and democracy has become a vibrant field of research. Most studies have hitherto addressed formal EU institutions and intergovernmental organizations in view of their democratic qualities, including their interplay with democratic structures in their member states. European and international cooperation is however increasingly occurring outside formal decision-making bodies through networks of state executives acting below the level of central government. Whereas some defenders of transgovernmentalism have praised its intrinsic democratic qualities given its greater respect of state sovereignty and closeness to domestic regulatory systems (Slaughter, Global Administrative Law literature), others criticise its opaque institutional structures and indirect sources of power that elude democratic control (Papadopoulos; Shapiro). To our knowledge however no systematic empirical analysis exists of the democratic qualities of transgovernmental networks (TGN), let alone a comparative assessment across the wide variety of TGN. In this paper we present a first such analysis of six EU-internal and global TGN based on a differentiated conceptualization of republican, liberal and deliberative models of democracy. Our TGN come from three policy fields that represent different degrees of political salience and sensitivity for state sovereignty (banking, competition and environmental networks) and are composed of different state constituencies (EU-internal TGN and global TGN in the respective sectors). This comparative framework reflects our guiding hypotheses that the democratic qualities of TGN are a function of sectoral properties and membership composition. A third hypothesis is that the democratic qualities of TGN evolve over time and are a function of institutional diffusion and isomorphism. These hypotheses are assessed in a longitudinal perspective from the creation of the TGN until today.
