E-participation does not necessarily lead to less corruption: Highlights from the Master’s

With this new series, we aim to present the highlights of promising research conducted by Master’s students at the Institute of Public Administration. As we all know, Master’s theses an range from a simple exercise in independent research to interesting and innovative research that often represents the first steps of a young scholar. While we do not claim the findings of such theses take on board all the debates in the scientific community as a PhD thesis is expected to do, we expect their insights and conclusions can inspire new debates.

Today, the first summary of findings offered, is based on a Master’s thesis just defended in our institute, by Nina Straathof. The thesis asks the question whether internet use by governments, in the form of e-participation initiatives, contributes to reduction of corruption. The research uses the United Nations index for e-participation to define (changing) levels of e-government and World Bank good governance indicators (control of corruption) to establish changes in levels of corruption. The relationship between these two should not be expected to be straightforward  as the thesis established based on a review of existing literature. Where systems of corruption are linked to political rent seeking, e-participation initiatives are not necessarily contributing to reduction of corruption (Bussell, 2011). Therefore, the student expected that internet use and internet censorship would also matter – if internet is censored, citizens cannot act as government watchdogs.

Figure 1. E-participation and corruption control for different values of internet use

Conducting several different analyses to establish the relationship between e-government, internet use (World Bank development indicators) and corruption, including various control variables such as GDP and human capital, the author finds that internet use matters more and more for control of corruption, especially in the last ten years. Changes in internet use were found to correlate positively with changes in control of corruption. E-participation, on the other hand, was found to have a negative relationship with control of corruption, especially in countries with low levels of internet use. In other words, internet use was crucial and found to moderate the relationship between e-participation and control of corruption. The last finding in particular is interesting and should be explored further. Does it mean that e-participation and e-services have nothing to do with control of corruption or that, when internet use is low, they somehow become another way of excluding large parts of the public and therefore contribute to perceptions of corruption?

Figure 2. Internet use and corruption control for different values of Freedom on the Net

In memoriam: Margaret Thatcher’s speech in Bruges

Remembering Margaret Thatcher through her speech in Bruges:
“The European Community is one manifestation of that European identity, but it is not the only one.
We must never forget that east of the Iron Curtain, people who once enjoyed a full share of European culture, freedom and identity have been cut off from their roots.
We shall always look on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities.”

The full speech is available here.

The Bruges speech was delivered at the College of Europe in 1988, in the aftermath of signing the Single European Act. A friend commented recently that if she gave the same speech today she would be considered too pro-EU. I wonder.

Pragmatic Optimism: The View from Poland

As we have done in the last three years, we have been receiving speakers for an Honours class dealing with European affairs. This year’s class was entitled ‘Visions of Europe’ and invited speakers to share their vision for the future of the EU and the wider Europe. Students, in their turn, have been making short movies with their own ideas of the future of Europe. So far we have had a really exciting line up of speakers. Among them, the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland, Jan Borkowski, offered a contribution which struck me as markedly different from current rhetoric in the Netherlands or, for that matter, the UK. He labelled Poland’s approach ‘pragmatic optimism’ – as, according to him, being pro European is consistent with the Polish national interest even if defined in hard realist terms. For Poland, he suggested, the EU is the most practical way of balancing power in Europe between the big powers and between large and smaller states, with the Commission as guarantor of fair play. The ambassador’s talk – detailing the current Polish position towards the EU – could be described with key words such as ‘optimist’, ‘centrist’, ‘pro-active’, ‘national interest’, ‘shared responsibility’. I was struck by how unusual these words sounded in the context of recent discourses on European integration in the Netherlands. Could not help wondering what key words we would find in the Dutch discourse.

The growth and decline of EU legislation over time

Some of the most persistent myths about European integration concern the questions what and how much does the EU do. While the big decisions taken at inter-governmental conferences get all the media attention, day-to-day policy making remains in the shadow, so the public gets a very skewed picture of the daily activities of the EU.

To shed some light on this issue, I developed a presentation of the growth (and decline) of EU legislation over time since 1967.  I gathered all  legal acts (more than 100 000) adopted by the European Communities/European Union and graphed the developments for the last 50+ years. To understand the development of EU legislative productivity one needs to pay attention to the very different types of legal acts the EU can adopt, so the presentation takes this into account and gives a rather detailed view of the data.

The main conclusions one can get from examining the presentation are the following:

1) over the last 15 years the growth in legislative productivity has slowed and even reversed. Currently the EU adopts on average no more rules than during the late 1970s and early 1980s;

2) the decline is productivity is especially pronounced if one looks only at important legislation. Much of the legal output is Commission legislation which is more similar to government and ministerial decrees at the national level and doesn’t have the same importance as real laws.

3) even nowadays, one third of all legal rules adopted concern the agricultural sector.

You are encouraged to look at the entire presentation for details, but the overall picture that appears is hardly one of a union in uncontrolled expansion. Actually, all EU institutions with all their advisory and expert bodies, and all their internal and external consultation committees,  and all their highly-trained bureaucrats and seconded national experts, and all their conferences and conciliation have managed to produce over the last few years a laughably small number of new important legislation.  During the entire 2012 the EU adopted 6 (six) new directives!

Which might actually be a good thing, but please bear this in mind the next time you hear about these faceless bureaucrats in Brussels controlling our lives with their ever-increasing web of rules.

Did the Dutch foreign minister just invite the Commission to monitor core democratic values in the member states?

As reported by Bloomberg here, the Dutch foreign minister and his German, Finnish and Danish colleagues have sent a letter to the European Commission’s President Barroso, urging the Commission to develop a mechanism for the EU to be able ’to react swiftly and effectively to ensure compliance’ among its 27 member states with the EU’s fundamental values. This, according to the Financial Times, was a measure prompted by the recent constitutional amendment in Hungary affecting the country’s Constitutional Court. According to the Bloomberg news report, the ministers said in the letter that: ‘There are limits to our institutional arrangements when it comes to ensuring compliance,’ …’Neither the procedures enshrined in the treaties nor the EU fundamental rights charter provide for sufficiently targeted instruments….the Commission, ’should have a stronger role’ in safeguarding fundamental values. The proposed mechanism ‘should be swift and independent of political expediency’. 

So let me get this straight, the Dutch foreign minister and his respective and respected colleagues suggest that when the Netherlands changes its constitutional arrangements, it should be checked by the European Commission? With all respect to the democratic credentials of the Danes, Germans, Finnish and Dutch, they either seem to think that this new monitoring mechanism and the respective instruments would only ever be applied to the new member states – in which case, this would be symptomatic of the two tiered, crypto discriminatory approach to new rules in the enlarged EU (to apply to anyone but Northern Europe?). Or they expect it will apply to them too, in which case they – at least in the Dutch case – forgot to tell the electorate and their fellow politicians they propose an external check on Dutch democracy. I can think of a whole host of Dutch commentators that would be very, very upset…Or is this European integration by stealth again?

The EU’s Budget Negotiations and the Dutch Government: A Commentary

The Dutch government’s mission for last week’s budget negotiations, which had to be secured by Prime Minister Rutte, was three-fold: First, to maintain the 1 billion euro rebate on The Netherlands’ contribution to the EU. Second, to lower total EU spending. This goal might have seemed ambitious, given that new EU budgets had always been higher than the previous one, and given that the European Commission had asked for and increase of 5,5 per cent compared to the old 2007-2013 budget.

Third, Rutte’s goal was to modernize the budget in order to create more financial room for investing in the EU’s earning capacity, in areas such as research, innovation, transport, energy and digital networks.

While the latter goal is the most substantive in nature, the first two are highly political: Rutte seemed to be particularly keen on being able to demonstrate that he could succeed in making Brussels “give in and give up”, and to show that he could come home with spoils of some sort for the national electorate.

The first of these goals has been achieved: Rutte managed to maintain the Dutch rebate. The second goal was also successfully negotiated: for the first time in the history of the EU the budget has been pushed down. This makes The Netherlands part of the winning team in last Friday’s decision making process, together with Britain, Germany, Sweden and the other net-contributors.

By contrast, Rutte was not successful in securing a more modern EU budget: spending on Competitiveness for Growth may increase by 40 per cent to more than 125 billion euro, it still remains a very modest part of the total budget (12,6 per cent compared to 32,6 per cent for regional development and 37,4 per cent for agriculture).

So it can be concluded that Rutte has succeeded politically but lost in more substantive terms. In his first response to the press, Rutte stated: “Of course it is not possible to get everything you want when you negotiate with 27 member states. But we keep our rebate, for which we fought hard, and the total budget will be smaller. That’s appropriate, because all member states have to cut their spending”.

What Rutte does not mention is that since the last budget was made, the member states have asked the EU to do more, for instance in the field of regulating the financial services and national budgets, foreign policy and fighting cross border crime. The EU institutions will have to perform these additional tasks with fewer funds. For The Netherlands, there is a clear analogy with what the present central government demands from local authorities: policy decentralization has been paired with budget cuts for municipalities.

Another part of the budget that pleased the Dutch government is the demand for all EU institutions to cut down 5 per cent of their staff in the next years. Those EU-civil servants that remain will have to work longer hours without additional compensation and will face a salary cut of 6 per cent, seen as a “token of solidarity” with indebted EU member states. This measure tallies nicely with the recurrent debate on public sector rewards in The Netherlands. Just last week, there was outrage in Dutch newspapers and TV shows in response to the news that more than 3000 EU civil servants enjoy a higher salary than the Dutch prime minister himself.

The failure to truly modernize the EU’s budget is seen by many as a missed opportunity to use the budget negotiations as stating an ambition for Europe, rather than underlining the popular perception that EU budgets are more about finding a “gloomy compromise between political opportunism and subsidy addiction” as the Dutch Commissioner Neelie Kroes for Europe’s Digital Agenda called the budget agreement in the papers.

In sum, Rutte succeeded in achieving the two political goals that prevent him from losing political prestige domestically, but he failed to triumph in terms of creating more common added value for Europe, by moving away from the old economy and embrace the new economy. This can be taken as an indication of Europe’s long road ahead, both in terms of economic recovery and in terms of increasing multi-level political legitimacy.

Challenges for European regions: social-economic problems and the need for more Europe-wide democracy

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Randstad Regio last week in Brussels, the question arose what the future is for European regions. The economic crisis seems to strengthen the tendency towards centralization both in the European Union (for example, fiscal policy making) as well as in its member states. Still, regions as well as municipalities could play an important role in the Union that is troubled by limited legitimacy. Many citizens do not regard the Union as the government that is providing public services to them.

The economic crisis has led, as an emergency measure, to closer European cooperation on fiscal policy making. With the coming into force of the Fiscal Compact, the member states have designed a complex arrangement of fiscal norms as well as monitoring devices to control national government spending. What is fascinating about this development is that the increase of European fiscal power will reinforce a call for a European view on social-economic policy. Fiscal and social-economic policy making often go hand-in-hand and cannot be easily disconnected. National budgets were often used to combat economic stagnation and to stimulate economic growth and employment. Moreover, these problems have a strong spatial component, because economic problems are not the same in all parts of the EU (or a country if you wish), while solutions to these problems often have a strong regional component. Here lies a first challenge to European regions in the coming years. How can they support and contribute to social and economic development, together with others? And how can regions participate in the further development of these policies both at the national and the European level? In my view, their input will be essential for the success of these policies.

The second and but connected issue relates to the role of citizens in Europe—since 2013 is the year of the European Citizen, it warrants further attention. In his speech on the future of Europe David Cameron mentions one point I agree with and that is that citizens still have a problem identifying Europe as a government for them. I disagree with Cameron that a possible British exit would be the right answer to this problem, but that is a different issue. It seems that so far we have not given a good answer to this problem. In a reply to Cameron, the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schultz, proposes to have more transparency and ‘open’ debates in Europe. I am not convinced that this is the way to go.

Our national governments, including regions, are struggling with the increased mobility of goods, persons and services, while citizens also would like to see their local and national choices being respected. In trying to be as efficient and effective as possible, the Union seems to have taken on more and more tasks over time. Many problems nowadays have cross border effects suggesting that solutions need to be developed at the European level. But is that really necessary? Not all problems with cross border effects need to be resolved by Brussels. Not all problems put on the European agenda need to lead to Europe-wide legislation. Subsidiary needs to be taken seriously, also when it concerns the distribution of tasks between national and sub national governments. Unfortunately, for many the consequences of greater mobility are not yet clear. Moreover, often this discussion is dominated by nationalism and populist rhetoric. Still, what is needed is a discussion about the role of various levels of governments in Europe, including regions. If we want to be democratic, we may have to live with some policy inefficiency. When regional governments can no longer adapt their policy to the demands of their citizens, our democracies will be in danger. That is a second challenge for all of us, also for regions!