Not Worth the Net Worth? The Democratic Dilemmas of Privileged Access to Information

Guri Rosén and Anne Elizabeth Stie
Additional contact information
Guri Rosén: ARENA—Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, Norway
Anne Elizabeth Stie: Department of Political Science and Management, University of Agder, Norway

Politics and Governance, 2017, vol. 5, issue 3, 51-61

Abstract: In this article, we discuss the democratic conditions for parliamentary oversight in EU foreign affairs. Our point of departure is two Interinstitutional Agreements (IIAs) between the Council and the European Parliament (EP), which provide the latter with access to sensitive documents. To shed light on this issue, we ask to what extent these contribute to the democratic accountability in EU foreign policy? It is argued that the IIAs have strengthened the EP’s role in EU foreign affairs by giving it access to information to which it was previously denied. This does not mean, however, that this increase in power equals a strengthening of the EP as a democratic accountability forum. First of all, both IIAs (even if there are differences between them) fail to maximise the likelihood that the plurality of views in the EP as a whole is reproduced. Secondly, and more importantly, the EU citizens are largely deprived of opportunities to appraise how their elected representatives have exercised their role as guardians of executive power.

Keywords: democratic accountability; European Parliament; European Union; secrecy; transparency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/946 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:poango:v5:y:2017:i:3:p:51-61

DOI: 10.17645/pag.v5i3.946

Access Statistics for this article

Politics and Governance is currently edited by Carolina Correia

More articles in Politics and Governance from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().