The Missing Democratic Legitimacy of the EU’s Semiconductor Policy

Measures to foster semiconductor chips innovation and production across the EU have been among the key elements of the bloc’s new turn to industrial policy. Such measures are very much in line with industrial policies introduced in the US and other parts of the world. Yet, crucial aspects of EU semiconductor policies - such as the conditionality of awarding state aid, who decides on this conditionality, and the way in which this aid relates to EU’s broader cohesion and sustainability objectives - have remained outside of public scrutiny and debate. This is very different from the US, where the Chips Act has provoked intense debates, with both Republicans and Democrats problematizing a) whether the Act is not an example of corporate welfare and b) scrutinising the conditions under which companies can receive state aid and their resulting obligations to the public. Starting from the classical theoretical framework of input, throughput and output legitimacy of EU policy, our paper investigates the legitimacy of the EU’s semiconductor policy. To this end we analyse parliamentary questions and answers in the European Parliament, as well as in six member states’ parliaments, the European Commission’s public consultation on the Chips Act Package, as well as open letters and opinion pieces by EU civil society and experts on the progress of the policy so far. Preliminary results suggest that questionable output legitimacy of current semiconductor policies is accompanied by an almost complete lack of input and throughput legitimacy. From a critical perspective, our findings on the deficiencies in the legitimacy of the EU’s semiconductor policy lead us to question the EU’s current approach on industrial policy and digital infrastructure more generally.