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.
