Improving European democracy and legitimacy for crisis and post-crisis times

Building on previous tasks, this paper takes stock of the state of Europe’s multi-level democracy and legitimacy in crisis times and makes recommendations on how to safeguard both principles. We recommend a system of democratic auditing in good times and bad.

Our first recommendation is that there should be regular 5-year democratic audits of the EU and of Member State Democracies (MSDs) before European elections, so that the results of the audits are available for citizens to assess during the EP election campaign. This assures that the democratic audit is directly politically relevant.

Our second recommendation is that there should also be special democratic audits of the handling of emergencies. That will require a double adaptation of democratic auditing i) to the EU and ii) to emergency politics. To adapt democratic auditing to the case of the EU and its member state democracies (MSDs) we recommend developing indicators of how well the EU and MSDs comply with input, output, and throughput standards of democratic legitimacy. See also the indicators we developed in the initial REGROUP application and our earlier paper (Fossum and Lord 2023). To adapt democratic auditing of the EU and its MSD’s to the special problem of emergency politics, we recommend developing additional indicators. These could include but go beyond indicators based on the Council of Europe standards for emergency politics. For Council of Europe standards, see also our earlier paper (Fossum and Lord 2023).

Our third recommendation is that for the democratic audits of EU and MSD responses to emergencies we recommend process traces of key decisions. The process traces should shed added light on how well decisions taken by the EU and MSDs at critical junctures in their handling of emergencies meet the standards set out in our indicators of democratic standards under conditions of emergency.

Our fourth recommendation is to collect and systematize as much of the existing research as possible so as to provide as complete a picture as possible with a view to discern as robust as possible lessons. These should also insofar as relevant be incorporated in the next audits.

Keywords: democratic audit, European Union, emergency politics, legitimacy, pandemic

This paper is part of work package 5.