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DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2012

Democratic deficit is the gap between the potential democratic control exercised by citizens of a nation and the actual amount of democratic control available because of the transfer of decision making to non-elected agencies.

Many social scientists are of the belief that this 'democratic deficit' has increased substantially because of free trade agreements, the deregulation of corporate activity, the growth of multinational corporations which are now beyond the ability of any one nation to control and the growth of super bureaucracies designed to coordinate cross-border activities.

Why there is a Democratic Deficit in the EU: a Response to Majone and Moravcsik
ANDREAS FOLLESDAL, University of Oslo, SIMON HIX, London School of Economics
Abstract: Giandomenico Majone and Andrew Moravcsik have argued that the EU does not suffer a ‘democratic deficit’. This article differs on one key element: whether a democratic polity requires contestation for political leadership and over policy. - princeton.edu/~amoravcs/library/hix.doc

Culture lag and democratic deficit in Ireland: Or, ‘Dat's outside de terms of d'agreement’ 
J. P. O'Carroll, University College, Cork, Ireland.
The main characteristics of the institutional context of policy making in Ireland are examined and their more latent consequences for community development delineated. The emphasis on partnership at all levels, on nation and, ironically, on community, is shown to contribute more to the legitimation of the state than to the cause of community development. This has created difficulties in responding adequately to new policy issues such as redistribution and immigration. The case of Ireland is seen as merely an extreme example of the more widespread failure to discriminate adequately between the nature and appropriate functions of the community, the public sphere and the state. The development of the public sphere is stymied with the result that communities cannot democratically articulate their differences or develop a sense of agency and skills in self-organization. - cdj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/37/1/10

Models of Democracy - Elite Attitudes and the Democratic Deficit in the European Union 
Richard S. Katz, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA 
Most current debate about the democratic deficit equates democracy with party government and popular direction of policy (popular sovereignty). Alternative conceptions of democracy, pluralist or veto-group liberalism, are more consistent with European political and social circumstances and with EU institutions. After developing the difference between popular sovereignty and liberal models of democracy, the paper uses data from a survey of members of the European Parliament and members of the national parliaments in the EU to show that MP orientations with respect to these democratic values contribute significantly to explaining their evaluations of the quality of EU democracy and their preferences for EU institutional development. - eup.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/1/53

The Democratic Deficit in the European Union - Much Ado about Nothing? 
Christophe Crombez, University of Leuven, Belgium, and Stanford University, USA
This paper studies the democratic deficit in the European Union (EU). It examines what constitutes a democratic deficit, analyzes whether there is one in the EU, and offers suggestions for a solution. I focus on the output of the legislative process and study whether policies deviate from those emerging in other political systems. In particular, I present a formal model of policy-making in a bicameral system, apply it to the EU, and compare the EU with the United States. I conclude that the institutional setup of the EU does not lead to policies that are fundamentally undemocratic, and that the composition of its institutions is not inherently less democratic than that of the US political institutions. I also find, however, that a democratic deficit may exist owing to a lack of transparency and an excess of delegation in the legislative process. - eup.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/1/101

ICANN and the Concept of Democratic Deficit - DAN HUNTER, University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, Vol. 36, Spring 2003 
Abstract: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an institution besieged. It has endeavored to be democratic but its attempts to do so have been disastrous. The typical explanation for this is that the problem is with ICANN: it fails to meet its democratic obligations. My view is that the problem is with our understanding of "democracy." Democracy is an empty concept that fails to describe few, if any, of our genuine political commitments. In the real world, the failings inherent in "democracy" have been papered over by some unusual characteristics of the physical political process. However, in online trans-national institutions like ICANN, democracy is exposed as a poor substitute for a number of other conceptions of our political commitments. 
This Article seeks to articulate these political commitments and to explain why democracy and ICANN are such a poor mix. It begins by charting the rise of ICANN and its attempts to be democratic. It then explains why democracy is an empty shell of a concept. It then explores some features of democracy and ICANN, explaining why the online world exposes limitations in implications of democracy such as the nature of the demos, the idea of constituencies, direct democracy, voting, and the like. It concludes that ICANN's example demonstrates that democracy is in fact anything but a coherent general theory of political action. We need to consider, then, whether we should continue to berate ICANN for its undemocratic actions. - papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=400000

THE SOLUTION TO THE 'DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT' : A NEW TYPE OF GOVERNANCE FOR THE EUROPEAN UNION? - Author: PECH L.
Abstract: Without radically upsetting the institutional and political balance of the Union, the Commission's White Paper on Governance, published 25 July 2001, proposes a new basis for the EU's institutional legitimacy. However, this conceptual re-foundation gives rise to new and fundamental questions. To speak of governance within democracy is indeed unthinkable unless 'governance' is redefined as a form of government where the legitimacy of public action (as well as its efficiency) is made possible by a 'proceduralisation' of law. The failure to promote legitimacy with concepts borrowed from the vocabulary of the nation-state is nevertheless puzzling: should the 'participatory democracy' be considered a substitute for representative democracy? Even if this is not the case, it is uncertain whether 'participatory democracy' sufficiently embodies the democratic ideal, at least at the European Union level. - ingentaconnect.com

The Impact of Democratic Deficits on Electronic Media in Rural Development, Robin Van Koert 
Abstract: In the second half of the 1990s the enthusiasm for the potential of ICTs, or electronic media, to facilitate, or even to create, economic development in developing countries was buoyant. In a sense, ICTs were expected to create information flows which would no longer be limited by geographical boundaries. As a result, experts on rural development in developing countries claimed that, finally, people in rural areas in developing countries would have access to huge amounts of information. Those same experts also typically envisaged the advent of free flows of information, which would elude conventional restrictions on information flows imposed by nation-states concerned with the impact of such free information flows on government power. Governments, so it seemed, would no longer be capable of denying their citizens access to the large pools of information available through the Internet.
Amidst the enthusiasm for the "liberating potential" of ICTs, I decided to conduct in-depth research on the validity of the widely accepted premise that the influence of the political situation in a nation-state on the free flow of information was rapidly diminishing. The basic assumption of my research was that the value of the "democratic deficit" of a nation- state would be more decisive for the actual role of ICT in rural development than the intrinsic interactivity of ICTs. In order to test the basic assumption, I conducted field research in Indonesia (1998), Peru (1999) and Vietnam (1998). The qualitative research data suggested that the level of interactive use of ICT in rural development efforts appears, to a large extent, to be determined by the state of democracy in a nation-state. Unsurprisingly, the research data indicated that the value of the "democratic deficit" increased from Peru, through Indonesia, to Vietnam. At the same time, the level of interactivity of ICTs in rural development decreased in the opposite direction.
In this paper I will present the main results and conclusions of the research, which indicate that, despite the unique and acknowledged decentralizing features of the Internet, governments continue to be capable of controlling information flows, either through political or economic restrictions on the use of ICT, or electronic media. 
Although this may not be a revolutionary finding, it is a conclusion which serves as a reminder that the way technology eventually contributes to rural development by and large is still determined by the nature of the socio-political and economic context of a given nation-state. - apnic.net/mailing-lists/s-asia-it/archive/2002/04/msg00009.html 

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