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Warleigh, Alex --- "Informal governance: improving EU democracy?" [2004] ELECD 24; in Christiansen, Thomas; Piattoni, Simona (eds), "Informal Governance in the European Union" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004)

Book Title: Informal Governance in the European Union

Editor(s): Christiansen, Thomas; Piattoni, Simona

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781843763512

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: Informal governance: improving EU democracy?

Author(s): Warleigh, Alex

Number of pages: 14

Extract:

2. Informal governance: improving EU
democracy?
Alex Warleigh

INTRODUCTION: INFORMAL GOVERNANCE AND
POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION IN THE EUROPEAN UNION
The goal of this chapter is to ask what contribution, if any, informal gover-
nance can make to the EU's democratization process. This is an important
question because so much of the EU's policy-making process relies, and is
likely to continue to rely, on informal governance, defined in the introduction
to this volume as pertaining to non- or incompletely codified procedures of
interaction and decision between actors, and non-publicly enforced routines
and relations between actors. Thus, an important part of the `normative turn'
in EU studies (Bellamy and Castiglione 2000) is the need to address this ques-
tion as part of the investigation of what kind of democracy is appropriate for
the EU. My approach here is empirical rather than strictly theoretical ­ I
attempt to investigate two instances of informal governance in the EU and
assess what contribution they have made to its democratization.
Decision-making in the EU, at least in the most traditional areas of policy-
making, is a dynamic process which demands that actors from different insti-
tutions and interest groups collaborate and compete to secure the outcomes
they desire. As I point out elsewhere (Warleigh 2001b), the EU has no single
policy-making process, using different decision rules and policy styles accord-
ing to both the policy area and the stage in its development. Because the EU
is a `fused' polity ­ that is, one ...