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Author: Christian Rauh
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781785521270
Category : Commercial policy
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
This book challenges the common image of the European Commission as an insulated technocracy immune to political pressures. Based on an innovative combination of public opinion, protest and media data, it first demonstrates that European integration has become increasingly politicised since the 1990s. Against this background, the Commission is now much more concerned about the public appeal of its policies. That, however, challenges and contradicts the well-worn patterns of supranational regulation in Europe. Rauh systematically compares 17 legislative drafting processes in consumer policy between 1999 and 2009. Based on first-hand insider accounts of involved officials, his analysis indicates that the Commission's policy choices indeed become more consumer friendly under higher levels of public awareness. While this improves the democratic quality of European decision-making, the book also reveals an enhanced conflict potential within the Commission and beyond which threatens to undermine the efficiency of legislative decision-making in the EU.
Author: Christian Rauh
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781785521270
Category : Commercial policy
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Get Book
Book Description
This book challenges the common image of the European Commission as an insulated technocracy immune to political pressures. Based on an innovative combination of public opinion, protest and media data, it first demonstrates that European integration has become increasingly politicised since the 1990s. Against this background, the Commission is now much more concerned about the public appeal of its policies. That, however, challenges and contradicts the well-worn patterns of supranational regulation in Europe. Rauh systematically compares 17 legislative drafting processes in consumer policy between 1999 and 2009. Based on first-hand insider accounts of involved officials, his analysis indicates that the Commission's policy choices indeed become more consumer friendly under higher levels of public awareness. While this improves the democratic quality of European decision-making, the book also reveals an enhanced conflict potential within the Commission and beyond which threatens to undermine the efficiency of legislative decision-making in the EU.
Author: Esmark, Anders
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1529200911
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
The rise of populist parties and movements across the Western hemisphere and their contempt for ‘experts’ has shocked the establishment. This book examines how the ‘post-industrial’ technocratic regime of the 1980’s – of managerialism, depoliticisation and the politics of expertise – sowed the seeds for the backlash against the political elites that is visible today. Populism, Esmark augues, is a sign that the technocratic bluff has finally been called and that technocracy posing as democracy will only serve to exasperate existing problems. This book sets a new benchmark for studies of technocracy, showing that a solution to the challenge of populism will depend as much on a technocratic retreat as democratic innovation.
Author: Christina J. Schneider
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108472311
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
The EU's perceived lack of responsiveness to ordinary citizens has created a serious crisis of democratic legitimacy that threatens its very survival. In this timely book, Schneider presents a comprehensive account of how EU governments signal responsiveness to the interests of their citizens over European policies.
Author: Eduardo Dargent
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107059879
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
Praised by some as islands of efficiency in a sea of unprofessional, politicized, and corrupt states, and criticized by others for removing wide areas of policy making from the democratic arena, technocrats have become prominent and controversial actors in Latin American politics. Through an in-depth analysis of economic and health policy in Colombia from 1958 to 2011 and in Peru from 1980 to 2011, Technocracy and Democracy in Latin America explains the source of these experts' power as well as the leverage they have across state policy sectors in Latin America.
Author: Jeffrey Friedman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190877170
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
Technocrats claim to know how to solve the social and economic problems of complex modern societies. But as Jeffrey Friedman argues in Power without Knowledge, there is a fundamental flaw with technocracy: it requires an ability to predict how the people whom technocrats attempt to control will act in response to technocratic policies. However, the mass public's ideas-the ideas that drive their actions-are far too varied and diverse to be reliably predicted. But that is not the only problem. Friedman reminds us that a large part of contemporary mass politics, even populist mass politics, is essentially technocratic too. Members of the general public often assume that they are competent to decide which policies or politicians will be able to solve social and economic problems. Yet these ordinary "citizen-technocrats" typically regard the solutions to social problems as self-evident, such that politics becomes a matter of vetting public officials for their good intentions and strong wills, not their technocratic expertise. Finally, Friedman argues that technocratic experts themselves drastically oversimplify technocratic realities. Economists, for example, theorize that people respond rationally to the incentives they face. This theory is simplistic, but it gives the appearance of being able to predict people's behavior in response to technocratic policy initiatives. If stripped of such gross oversimplications, though, technocrats themselves would be forced to admit that a rational technocracy is nothing more than an impossible dream. Ranging widely over the philosophy of social science, rational choice theory, and empirical political science, Power without Knowledge is a pathbreaking work that upends traditional assumptions about technocracy and politics, forcing us to rethink our assumptions about the legitimacy of modern governance.
Author: Jürgen Habermas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745686834
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Over the past 25 years, Jürgen Habermas has presented whatis arguably the most coherent and wide-ranging defence of theproject of European unification and of parallel developmentstowards a politically integrated world society. In developing hiskey concepts of the transnationalisation of democracy and theconstitutionalisation of international law, Habermas offers themain players in the struggles over the fate of the European Union(the politicians, the political parties and the publics of themember states) a way out of the current economic and politicalcrisis, should they choose to follow it. In the title essay Habermas addresses the challenges and threatsposed by the current banking and public debt crisis in the Eurozonefor European unification. He is harshly critical of theincrementalist, technocratic policies advocated by the Germangovernment in particular, which are being imposed at the expense ofthe populations of the economically weaker, crisis-strickencountries and are undermining solidarity between the member states.He argues that only if the technocratic approach is replaced by adeeper democratization of the European institutions can theEuropean Union fulfil its promise as a model for how rampant marketcapitalism can once again be brought under political control at thesupranational level. This volume reflects the impressive scope of Habermas?s recentwritings on European themes, including theoretical treatments ofthe complex legal and political issues at stake, interventions oncurrent affairs, and reflections on the lives and works of majorEuropean philosophers and intellectuals. Together the essaysprovide eloquent testimony to the enduring relevance of the work ofone of the most influential and far-sighted public intellectuals inthe world today, and are essential reading for all philosophers,legal scholars and social scientists interested in European andglobal issues.
Author: Miriam Hartlapp
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191511900
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
The European Commission is at the center of the European Union's political system. Within its five-year terms each Commission proposes up to 2000 binding legal acts and therefore crucially shapes EU policy, which in turn impacts on the daily lives of more than 500 million European citizens. However, despite the Commissions key role in setting the agenda for European decision making, little is known about its internal dynamics when preparing legislation. This book provides a problem-driven, theoretically-founded, and empirically rich treatment of the so far still understudied process of position-formation inside the European Commission. It reveals that various internal political positions prevail and that the role of power and conflict inside the European Commission is essential to understanding its policy proposals. Opening the 'black box' of the Commission, the book identifies three ideal types of internal position-formation. The Commission is motivated by technocratic problem-solving, by competence-seeking utility maximization or ideologically-motivated policyseeking. Specifying conditions that favor one logic over the others, the typology furthers understanding of how the EU system functions and provides novel explanations of EU policies with substantial societal implications.
Author: Christopher J. Bickerton
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198807767
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
This is a book about a contemporary transformation in democratic politics: the rise of a new political field, techno-populism.
Author: Eri Bertsou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000043606
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
This book represents the first comprehensive study of how technocracy currently challenges representative democracy and asks how technocratic politics undermines democratic legitimacy. How strong is its challenge to democratic institutions? The book offers a solid theory and conceptualization of technocratic politics and the technocratic challenge is analyzed empirically at all levels of the national and supra-national institutions and actors, such as cabinets, parties, the EU, independent bodies, central banks and direct democratic campaigns in a comparative and policy perspective. It takes an in-depth analysis addressing elitism, meritocracy, de-politicization, efficiency, neutrality, reliance on science and distrust toward party politics and ideologies, and their impact when pitched against democratic responsiveness, accountability, citizens' input and pluralist competition. In the current crisis of democracy, this book assesses the effects of the technocratic critique against representative institutions, which are perceived to be unable to deal with complex and global problems. It analyzes demands for competent and responsible policy making in combination with the simultaneous populist resistance to experts. The book will be of key interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, political theory, policy analysis, multi-level governance as well as practitioners working in bureaucracies, media, think-tanks and policy making.
Author: Jens Steffek
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019266039X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
As climate change and a pandemic pose enormous challenges to humankind, the concept of expert governance gains new traction. This book revisits the idea that scientists, bureaucrats, and lawyers, rather than politicians or diplomats, should manage international relations. It shows that this technocratic approach has been a persistent theme in writings about international relations, both academic and policy-oriented, since the 19th century. The technocratic tradition of international thought unfolded in four phases, which were closely related to domestic processes of modernization and rationalization. The pioneering phase lasted from the Congress of Vienna to the First World War. In these years, philosophers, law scholars, and early social scientists began to combine internationalism and ideals of expert governance. Between the two world wars, a utopian period followed that was marked by visions of technocratic international organizations that would have overcome the principle of territoriality. In the third phase, from the 1940s to the 1960s, technocracy became the dominant paradigm of international institution-building. That paradigm began to disintegrate from the 1970s onwards, but important elements remain until the present day. The specific promise of technocratic internationalism is its ability to transform violent and unpredictable international politics into orderly and competent public administration. Such ideas also had political clout. This book shows how they left their mark on the League of Nations, the functional branches of the United Nations system and the European integration project. Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, and environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states to supranational institutions, subnational governments, and public-private networks. It brings together work that advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford
