Towards a more accountable EU: retrospective and roadmap

One of the key indicators for the democratic quality of European governance is the extent to which both European and national policy actors who populate EU institutions can be - and are - held to account by democratic forums. Much discussion has been focused on the relative merits of various proposals to institutionalize accountability in the complex, multilevel web of European governance structures. However, other than a few descriptions of existing formal accountability arrangements, there have been few efforts to describe and evaluate how existing accountability mechanisms actually operate. This paper will try to fill this gap, based on a major, four year empirical project into patterns and practices of accountability in European governance. First, we provide a theoretical framework for the evaluation of EU accountability, which consists of three perspectives on the EU and three accountability perspectives. Then we provide empirical trend reports for four major EU institutions (Commission, comitology, Council and agencies). Finally, we extrapolate the likely development of EU accountability practices post Lisbon.