When, if Ever, is International Administrative Power Democratically Legitimate? A Study of Politics and Public Administration in Europe

Expert institutions, such as the WTO and EU, can prescribe detailed policies to member states. These far-reaching discretionary powers of international public administrations over national democracies have become a cause of democratic concern. Yet, discretionary powers are not democratically illegitimate per se, because decision-making might meet democratic standards. In this paper, I seek to investigate a democratic principle that can simultaneously legitimate international administrative power, yet rejects expert dominance over democratic decision-makers. I inquire specifically into the case of the EU. Thereby, I aim to contribute to the emergent normative literature on the democratic legitimacy of international public administrations. Firstly, I argue that the Weberian ideal of a politics-administration dichotomy (PAD) underpins modern relationship between democratic politics and state administration. I vindicate this normative principle in the face of persistent criticism in the governance literature. Secondly, I argue that a democratic PAD requires conceptual adaptation to the specific context of the EU’s multi-layered polity. The concern is that a continued reliance on Weberian concepts of party politics and hierarchical bureaucracy is anachronistic. I propose novel concepts of democratic politics and international public administrations by extracting ideal-types from empirical literature on EU governance. Democratic politics in the EU simultaneously incorporates conflicts between partisan values and state interests, while expertise administration requires both technical and local knowledge. I conclude that these novel conceptions can provide the foundation for adapting a Weberian PAD to the EU context. Moreover, they raise additional, normative concerns about the autonomy of EU experts. As such this study yields important insights into the democratisation of international governance.