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Multilevel Democracy: A Comparative Perspective

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Configurations, Dynamics and Mechanisms of Multilevel Governance

Part of the book series: Comparative Territorial Politics ((COMPTPOL))

Abstract

Treating electoral accountability as a necessary institutional precondition of both input- and output-oriented democratic legitimacy, the chapter explores its realization in several variants of multilevel government. Whereas US “dual federalism” and German “joint-decision federalism” differ significantly in the allocation of governing powers and in coupling or decoupling of governing processes, they are highly effective in establishing the political accountability of governments to electorates on both levels. By contrast, both the EU and the European Monetary Union (EMU) lack a politically accountable government. And whereas EU legislation might draw upon the democratic legitimacy of national governments, the present EMU regime must be able to control and override the exercise of national governing powers by democratically accountable national governments.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hanna Pitkin captured the gist of John Stuart Mill’s theory of representative democracy, distinguishing between “apparent” and “real” interests and equating the latter with the public interest, in a metaphor: “Only the wearer can tell if the shoe pinches. But this does not mean that the wearer knows in advance which shoe will pinch him; in fact, it is much more likely that a shoe specialist will know this better than he” (Pitkin 1967, p. 204). The optimistic assumption is, of course, that by the time of the next election the citizen-wearers will reward the competent government-shoemaker.

  2. 2.

    That does not apply to the legislative “codification” of Treaty-based ECJ decisions. Given the legal uncertainty created by the constitutional status of rules announced in particular cases, governments have a common interest in systematizing, generalizing and limiting their impact (Schmidt 2018).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), Cologne, Germany

    Fritz W. Scharpf

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  1. Fritz W. Scharpf
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Correspondence to Fritz W. Scharpf .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Nathalie Behnke

  2. Department of Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Jörg Broschek

  3. Institute for Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Jared Sonnicksen

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Scharpf, F.W. (2019). Multilevel Democracy: A Comparative Perspective. In: Behnke, N., Broschek, J., Sonnicksen, J. (eds) Configurations, Dynamics and Mechanisms of Multilevel Governance. Comparative Territorial Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05511-0_14

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