Repertoires of Legitimation of the European Commission: Stakeholders' Opinions, Evidence or Law?

In response to the democratic deficit of the European Union (UE), scholars developed different frameworks to analyse the democratic legitimacy of supranational organizations. Scharpf (1997) defined the complementary concepts of input and output legitimacy. The former is linked to electoral representation, the latter to policy outcomes. A third criterion called throughput legitimacy was introduced afterwards and has to do with the quality of governance processes (Zürn 2000, Risse and Kleine 2007, Schmidt 2013). Throughput legitimacy sheds light on governance, that is the functioning of the processes, and consists of five components: effectiveness, transparency, openness, inclusiveness and accountability (Schmidt 2013). Yet, such components might be contradictory, rather than complementary. Too much transparency might expose a lack of inclusiveness or openness (Schmidt and Wood 2019). Too much transparency might reduce policymakers’ room for manoeuvre and prevent them from reaching a decision (i.e.: jeopardize effectiveness). Therefore, our question is: how do supranational organizations deal with potentially conflicting components of throughput legitimacy – when trying to secure public consent? As part of the Better Regulation Agenda launched in 2001, the impact assessment (IA) process requires civil servants of the European Commission (EC) to follow a set of procedural steps and to appraise economic, environmental and social impacts of EU policy solutions they propose. In this process, they have to justify the legality of EU action as well as to gather evidence and stakeholders’ views to support their analysis and preferred option. Therefore, IA reports are invaluable tools to observe how the Commission deals with the potentially conflicting components of throughput legitimacy. Using a web-scrapping tool, we gathered IA reports for regulations and directives from 2015 to 2017 (i.e.: under the Juncker Commission) and reviewed the informational sources referred to in footnotes that are used as repertoires of legitimation. We created ad hoc dictionaries to automatically categorize the essence (evidence, law or stakeholders’ views) and origin (EU, non-EU, scientific, private) of each footnote. The quantitative analysis of this database makes it possible to identify when one type of informational source (or component of throughput legitimacy) is deemed more important than another (i.e.: inclusiveness vs. effectiveness). Therefore, this analysis shows how the EC combines elements of throughput legitimacy and eventually makes them complementary (instead of contradictory). Or, in other words, the way in which the EC is marrying citizens’ claims with evidence-based policymaking.