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Scharpf, Fritz W.
Working Paper
Interdependence and democratic legitimation
MPIfG working paper, No. 98/2
Provided in Cooperation with:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Suggested Citation: Scharpf, Fritz W. (1998) : Interdependence and democratic legitimation,
MPIfG working paper, No. 98/2
This Version is available at:
http://hdl.handle.net/10419/41689
MPIfG Working Paper 98/2, September 1998
Interdependence and Democratic Legitimation
by Fritz W. Scharpf (scharpf@mpifg.mpg.de)
Fritz W. Scharpf is director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne
Introduction
The premise of the Bellagio Project on Democracy has been that, in recent decades,
Western democracies have come to suffer a decline of political "trust" or "confidence" in,
or popular "satisfaction" with, the "performance" of their representative institutions, and
that this decline needs to be taken seriously as a potential threat to the viability of
democratic government (Putnam 1998). The terms used also suggest that the project starts
from an implicit principal-agent model in which citizens-as-principals have come to be
dissatisfied with the performance of their political agents. If we assume that this is
empirically true, and that the change does reflect a deterioration of perceived
performance, rather than the rising (or increasingly conflicting) expectations of citizen-
principals, there still are two fundamentally different working hypotheses from which one
might begin the search for an explanation. Growing dissatisfaction could be caused by
factors that have reduced the fidelity of agents -- i.e., their willingness to act in the
interest of their principals. But it also could be caused by factors that have constrained the
objective capacity of agents to achieve the outcomes expected by principals. Whereas the
project as a whole is exploring the first of these working hypotheses, my own paper will
focus on a particular type of capacity constraints: growing international economic
interdependence. In doing so, I will not review the empirical evidence regarding changes
in the levels of popular satisfaction, except to note the high degree of variance among
countries (Newton, 1998; Katzenstein 1998). Instead, I will examine the analytical and
normative arguments that could link economic internationalization to citizen satisfaction,
and ultimately to the democratic legitimacy of national political systems. I will argue that
one should indeed expect such links to exist, but that their effect on legitimacy will be
strongly mediated by the characteristics of national political discourses.
Interdependence as a Challenge to Democratic Legitimacy
From the Athenian city state to the modern nation state, democratic self-government has
been defined by reference to the territorially-based constituencies of local, regional, and
national governments. It is true that self-governing associations with a geographically
dispersed membership and with internal structures and procedures of a democratic
character do exist. Examples that come to mind are professional associations, labor
unions, some clubs, and perhaps some non-governmental organizations like Amnesty
International or Greenpeace. However, the governing powers which such associations are
able to exercise over their membership are either very limited, depending essentially on
voluntary compliance, or they are exercised "in the shadow of the state", on whose laws
and enforcement machinery they must rely when voluntary compliance is not
forthcoming. The monopoly of legitimate coercion, at any rate, on which the problem-
solving capacity of democratic self-government continues to depend, has only been
achieved within territorially defined units.
But if democratic self-government is defined by reference to territorially limited
constituencies, it must be vulnerable to increasing military, economic, technical,
ecological and communicative interdependence among territorial units. Under such
conditions, choices within a given unit will create, and suffer from, external effects. Spill-
outs may reduce the effectiveness of domestic choices, and spill-ins may produce
domestic outcomes that have not been chosen internally. In the following sections, I will
explore the reasons why the lack of congruence between the constituencies of democratic
governments and the populations that are affected by governing decisions may be
considered a major problem for democratic legitimacy.
Input- and Output-Oriented Democratic Legitimacy
Democracy is a concept with a variety of meanings, but when we speak of "democratic
legitimacy," the reference must be to arguments that can be used to justify the exercise of
governing authority -- i.e., of the authority to adopt collectively binding decisions, to
implement these with resources taken from the members of the collectivity, and
ultimately by resort to the state's monopoly of legitimate coercion. Legitimating
arguments, then, must be arguments that are able to establish a moral duty to obey these
collectively binding decisions even if they conflict with individual preferences.[1] In the
modern period, the concept of democracy has become the major foundation of such
legitimating arguments. Their basic appeal was most succinctly expressed, in Abraham
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, by reference to the triple identity of the governed
("government of the people"), the governors ("government by the people") and the
beneficiaries of government ("government for the people"). But why should Lincoln's
formula create a moral duty to obey acts of government?
Leaving aside for the moment the first element that defines the collectivity that is to be
self-governing ("government of the people"), the formula points to two analytically
distinct dimensions of democratic legitimation, one input-oriented, the other one output-
oriented (Scharpf 1970). In the input dimension, "government by the people" implies that
collectively binding decisions should originate from the authentic expression of the
preferences of the constituency in question. Government, in other words, is meant to be
self-government, and compliance can be expected because the laws are self-determined,
rather than imposed by an exogenous will. In the output dimension, "government for the
people" implies that collectively binding decisions should serve the common interest of
the constituency. Obedience is justified because collective fate control is increased when
the powers of government can be employed to deal with those problems that the members
of the collectivity cannot solve either individually, or through market interactions, or
through voluntary cooperation.
However, by using the singular term for describing the plural originators and beneficiaries
of democratic government, both of Lincoln's criteria avoid the critical question of how
the exercise of governing authority, and the duty to obey its commands, should be
legitimated if "the people" is not considered either an organic unity or an aggregate of
homogeneous individuals, but an association of individuals and groups whose preferences
may diverge and whose interests may conflict with each other. Within a purely input-
oriented frame of reference, there are two possible responses to this problem. The first
postulates that government should be consensual, based on the widest possible agreement
among the individuals and groups affected, whereas the other one seeks to justify
decisions based on the expressed preferences of a majority of the membership (Lijphart
1984; 1991).
From an input perspective, consensual democracy has first-rate credentials, resting
ultimately on the Roman-law maxim of volenti non fit iniuria (meaning that if you have
consented you cannot claim damages). Its weakness lies in the output dimension since, in
the face of divergent or conflicting preferences, the search for consensus may prevent the
adoption of any effective solution. Hence output-oriented concepts tend to favor
majoritarian democracy because of its greater problem-solving efficiency (Buchanan/
Tullock 1962), but must then try to assure that majoritarian policies will indeed serve the
public interest. I will return to that point shortly.
Within a purely input-oriented frame of reference, the justification of majority rule is
more demanding than is often assumed.[2] As I have tried to show elsewhere (Scharpf
1997a, chapter 7), it must ultimately presuppose preferences of the majority that will
somehow include the welfare of the minority as an argument -- an assumption that must
rule out not only the possibility of hostile majorities (think of Nazi Germany or Bosnia)
but also the "bloody-minded" pursuit of rational self-interest. At bottom, therefore,
notions of democracy that rely exclusively on the "will of the people" as a source of
political legitimacy must assume conditions of a strong collective identity, and a
pervasive sense of common fate and common destiny, that overrides concerns based on
divergent preferences and interests. Only if these Rousseauian assumptions are fulfilled, is
it indeed possible to treat the preferences of the majority as a true expression of the
volonté générale which the minority, being mistaken, would be wrong to oppose.
But in light of the totalitarian potential of the Rousseauian tradition (Talmon 1955), and
of pervasive misgivings about the cognitive and normative shortcomings of "populist
democracy" (Sartori 1965; Riker 1982), modern democratic theory rarely derives
legitimacy primarily from the belief that "the people can do no wrong." Where input-
elements dominate, theorists take care to restrict the domain of "participative democracy"
to the micro-level of local or shop-floor decisions (Lindner 1990), to emphasize
procedural safeguards against the dangers of "direct democracy" (Luthardt 1994), or to
insist that policy inputs should arise from public debates that have the qualities of truth-
oriented deliberations and discourses (Manin 1987; Dryzek 1990; Schmalz-Bruns 1995;
Habermas 1996). In effect, the ideal of "deliberative democracy" may also be understood
as a concept that builds a bridge between input- and output-oriented legitimating
arguments by insisting on specific input procedures that will favor qualitatively acceptable
outputs by regulating "the flow of discursive option- and will-formation in such a way
that their fallible results enjoy the presumption of being reasonable" (Habermas 1996,
301). I will return to this point below.
In any case, however, input-oriented justifications of majority rule are complemented
everywhere by output-oriented criteria with a negative and a positive thrust. In addition
to requiring that government should be capable of achieving effective solutions to
collective-action problems, output-oriented criteria must also define what governments
should not be allowed to do, in order to be considered "government for the people." The
emphasis here is on institutional arrangements that are meant to provide protection against
the danger that governing powers of the majority will be abused to the detriment of
minorities or individuals, and to assure that these powers will only be used to further the
common interests of the members of the constituency, rather than the special interests of
office holders and their clienteles. These institutional arrangements include constitutional
guarantees of individual rights, an independent judiciary and other forms of "checks and
balances" as well as the mechanisms of representative democracy which, on the one
hand, provide opportunities for public debate, reflection and criticism that are thought to
discriminate against self-serving policy choices (Habermas 1962; Elster 1986) and which,
on the other hand, are meant to assure the direct or indirect accountability of office
holders to the general electorate.[3]
Countries differ greatly in the extent to which their institutions emphasize the negative
requirements of output-oriented legitimacy by creating veto positions and electoral
vulnerabilities that make it more difficult to coordinate and employ the policy resources
available to government as a whole in coherent and effective policy choices (Tsebelis
1995). These differences between, say, the concentration of powers in the British
"Westminster Model," and the dispersion of powers in the present German constitution
(with coalition governments, opposition veto in the federal chamber, an activist
constitutional court, and an independent central bank) are rooted in historical experiences
and path-dependent courses of institutional evolution, and there is no reason to expect
convergence (Pierson 1997).
With regard to the positive dimension of problem-solving effectiveness, by contrast,
democratic theory has generally built on the foundations of the sovereign "Westphalian"
state. It is taken for granted, therefore, that the democratic state, like its absolutist
predecessor, is potentially omnipotent within its own territory and able to control its
external boundaries. There are physical constraints on the internally available resources,
and boundaries may be violated by military invasions from abroad. Within these limits,
however, the democratic state is as capable as its non-democratic predecessors and
competitors of taxing its residents, of regulating their actions with the force of law, of
requisitioning their property and their services, and of requiring them to risk their lives.
Any limits on these capabilities are thought to be self-imposed -- either by constitutional
norm or by political choice. In principle, therefore, the state has the means to achieve all
normatively acceptable and politically consented domestic purposes, and governors are
rightly held politically accountable for failing to do so.
Interdependence and the Loss of Congruence
If this now seems an unrealistic idealization, in light of growing international
interdependence, it is one that was closely approximated in the most important
relationship between the state and the capitalist economy not so long ago. In the first
three decades following the Great Depression and the Second World War, Western
democracies had finally learned to control the cyclical crises of the economy, and they
were able to meet the aspirations of their citizens for full employment, rising mass
incomes, rising levels of education, lower inequality, and social security in times of
unemployment and sickness, and in old age. Only recently, however, has it become
evident how much this "Great Transformation" (Polanyi 1957) depended on the fact that,
after the rampant protectionism of the 1930s and the Second World War, capitalist
democracies were for a while able to control their economic boundaries: Goods and
services that did not conform to domestic regulations or that threatened the survival of
domestic producers could be excluded, the outflow of capital could be prevented, and
immigration was tightly controlled. Under these conditions, national political processes
were able to choose among a wide range of options, and while the Scandinavian welfare
states differed greatly from the German social-market economy or from post-New-Deal
America, all were equally economically viable and legitimated by broad political support.
During these "golden decades", interdependence was slow in increasing under American-
led international regimes of "embedded liberalism" (Ruggie 1982), and it was not until
the 1980s that pre-1914 levels of international integration in product and capital markets
were again reached and surpassed (Hirst/ Thompson 1995; Bairoch 1997).[4] Since then,
however, the nation state has again lost control over its economic boundaries. This is
most obvious within the European Union, where the completion of the internal market for
goods, services, and capital is now being topped by the creation of a monetary union. But
beyond Europe as well, repeated rounds of GATT and WTO negotiations have drastically
reduced tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade in goods and services, and the explosive
increase of transnational money flows has eliminated any chance of maintaining protected
national capital markets.
Consumers are thus free to buy goods and services regardless of their location of
production; firms are free to produce at any location without endangering their access to
the home market; capital is free to take advantage of profitable opportunities for
investment or speculative transactions around the globe and around the clock; and
workers are free to choose their places of work at least within the European Union.
Governments however, being held accountable for the economic and social welfare of
their constituents, must be concerned about the potential loss of jobs if demand for
nationally produced goods and services should decline, if firms should relocate their
production to other countries, if capital owners should prefer investment opportunities
offered elsewhere, if highly-skilled workers decide to emigrate, and if taxpayers or their
taxable resources should leave the national territory.
The Impact of Regulatory Competition
As a consequence of the potential mobility of economic actors and factors there is now a
much greater degree of interdependence not only between the formerly
compartmentalized national economies, but also between national policy choices that have
an effect on the economy. If one government cuts its social security contributions, that
reduces the international competitiveness of products from other countries that have not
done so; and if one country cuts its rate of corporate taxation, that will create incentives
for firms to relocate their company headquarters. Hence it is indeed wrong to think that
only firms are in competition with each other. Economic interdependence creates a
constellation in which nation states find themselves competing with each other for market
shares in product markets, for investment capital, and for taxable revenues, and in which
that competition constrains their choices among macroeconomic, regulatory and tax
policy options.
From the perspective of democratic legitimacy, therefore, economic interdependence
between self-governing territories raises two problems: On the one hand, the growing
importance of external effects undermines the congruence between the "people" that is
being governed, and the "people" that is supposed to govern -- choices that may be
legitimated in one country (e.g., the interest-rate policy of the German Bundesbank) may
have a direct impact on the economy of another country (e.g., unemployment in France)
where this choice was not, and would not be, democratically legitimated. In effect, this
reduces the ability of all governments to achieve the purposes, and to solve the problems,
that have high salience for their citizens. On the other hand, the competition for mobile
factors of production and taxable assets imposes a redistributive bias on national policy
choices that will shift burdens from mobile actors and the owners of mobile capital onto
immobile actors and of the owners of immobile assets. Again, there is no reason to expect
that these policy shifts would be legitimated by corresponding shifts in the authentic
preferences of citizens in the competing countries.
At the normative level, both of these changes are widely interpreted as a loss of
democratic legitimacy, and at the empirical level they may generate growing
dissatisfaction with the government of the day, and perhaps a more general disaffection
with the democratic political system as such, reflected in political abstention, alienation
or growing support for system-critical movements and radical political parties. The
conclusion therefore seems to be that increasing economic interdependence is indeed
likely to generate problems for democratic legitimacy at the national level. But before I
examine this conclusion more closely, it is necessary to check if international or
supranational solutions might avoid, or at least alleviate, the problems faced at the
national level.
Supranational Remedies?
If government within a territorially limited unit is considered ineffective in the output
dimension as well as unresponsive in the input dimension, territorial enlargement and
functional centralization would seem to provide the logical solution to the problems of
interjurisdictional interdependence. This at any rate is the standard prescription of fiscal
federalism (Oates 1977); it is the logic behind the long-standing recommendations to
overcome the deficiencies of joint-decision making in German federalism by merging
several Länder to create larger units with fewer externalities (Scharpf 1988); and it is of
course the logic driving European political integration.
In general, centralization is justified in output-oriented terms. But this is only plausible if
it is also assumed that decisions at the higher level are taken under majoritarian or
hierarchical rules and cannot be blocked by the veto of constituent governments. From an
input-oriented perspective, by contrast, centralization appears problematic even within the
nation state, where competencies would be exercised by a central government with clear
democratic legitimacy. If citizen preferences differ, and if policies must be uniform,
centralization will necessarily reduce the goodness of fit between preferences and policy
choices (Buchanan/ Tullock 1962, chapter 6).[5] It is at the supranational level, however,
where the centralizing solutions that are justified by output-oriented arguments become
truly problematic. In the following sections, I will discuss these problems by reference to
the European Union.
The Preconditions of Majority Rule
Governing systems that are able to overrule dissenting interests need to be legitimated,
and before it is meaningful to talk about either input- or output-oriented legitimation
arguments with regard to the European polity, it is now necessary to discuss a
precondition which is usually taken for granted in a national context: the definition of the
constituency that is ready to be governed by majority rule. In Lincoln's triad, this refers to
"government of the people" that I skipped above - and that Giovanni Sartori (1965, 26)
found to pose "insoluble problems of interpretation". The difficulties are well illustrated
by the examples of some countries (like Canada, Belgium, the former Czechoslovakia, or
Bosnia) where ethnic, linguistic or religious divisions seem to undermine the legitimacy
of majority rule, and of some other countries (like Switzerland, the Netherlands, or the
United States) where cleavages of a similar nature do not have nearly the same
delegitimating effects. Regardless of the main criterion of sameness or difference,
however, it seems obvious that a "we identity" (Elias 1987) that is shared by the members
of the constituency is a logically necessary precondition of democratic legitimacy.
In the input dimension, we-identity is necessary to justify "my trust in the benevolence
(and perhaps even solidarity) of my fellow citizens" (Offe 1998, 17) --which implies that
the welfare of the minority must also be an argument in the preference function of the
majority. In the output dimension, identity is necessary to define the membership in the
community whose "common interests" are thought to justify governmental action even if
it should entail individual sacrifices. In neither dimension is it possible to name a single
set of necessary and sufficient criteria for what constitutes an effective we identity --
common language, culture, religion, history or institutions play important but differing
roles. There is also no reason to assume that only one specific type of collectivity may be
invested with the characteristics of collective identity. Individuals may identify with
different units of reference -- religious, partisan, territorial, local, regional, national,
European, etc. -- in different contexts or for different purposes. Moreover, collective
identifications may differ greatly in their intensities, and thus may permit rather different
levels of sacrifices and involuntary redistribution to be legitimated.
But while the willingness to accept sacrifices for the purpose of solidaristic redistribution
seems remarkably high at the level of established nation states (Hicks/ Swank 1992), it
also seems clear that no political unit above the national level has as yet developed a we
identity of comparable intensity. This is true even of the European Union, which has gone
further than any other supranational or international organization toward establishing
institutions that resemble constitutional democracies at the national level. But even if
further institutional reforms invested the directly elected European Parliament with the
full range of competencies of a national parliament, there is no reason to think that its
majority decisions could legitimate salient sacrifices imposed on a dissenting minority.
The reason is succinctly expressed by Joseph Weiler (1996: 523) in an article that
criticizes the exclusive focus on ethnic identities, but nevertheless acknowledges that
"democracy does not exist in a vacuum. It is premised on the existence of a polity
with members -- the Demos -- by whom and for whom democratic discourse with
its many variants takes place. The authority and legitimacy of a majority to compel
a minority exists only within political boundaries defined by a Demos. Simply put,
if there is no Demos, there can be no operating democracy."
To drive the point home, Weiler then constructs a counterfactual:
"... imagine an Anschluss between Germany and Denmark. Try and tell the Danes
that they should not worry, since they will have full representation in the Bundestag.
Their shrieks of grief will be shrill not simply because they will be condemned, as
Danes, to permanent minorityship (that may be true of the German Greens too), but
because the way nationality, in this way of thinking, enmeshes with democracy is
that even majority rule is only legitimate within a Demos, when Danes rule Danes."
Turning to Europe, he then concludes that "it is a matter of empirical observation that
there is no European Demos -- not a people not a nation." It is hard to see how this
conclusion could be denied, and with each territorial expansion, the hope that the multiple
peoples of Europe would soon develop a common political identity, and a common space
of political communication and policy-oriented discourse, has receded further into the
future. This is not meant to discourage efforts that could advance political integration.[6]
For the time being, however, the European Union cannot yet rely on the foundation of a
collective identity that would be strong enough to legitimate majority rule.
The Limits of Supranational Legitimacy
If Europe cannot yet be a majoritarian democracy, that places severe limitations on its
capability to act in the face of politically salient disagreement. As it is, the European
Union is relying, for the legitimation of its policy output, on a combination of hierarchical
and consensual decision processes. Hierarchical authority is most clearly exemplified by
the competencies of the European Central Bank which, under the rules adopted in the
Maastricht Treaty, was constructed to be even more independent from political inputs and
political accountability than is the German Bundesbank (which it will replace as the
author of monetary-policy choices for the members of the European Monetary Union).
But whereas the formal independence of the ECB, and the scope of its hierarchical
authority, were legitimated by the explicit and highly politicized decisions of national
governments and parliaments, much less political attention had accompanied the
expansion of the judicial authority of the European Court of Justice (Weiler 1982).
Nevertheless, the authority of the Court, together with the active use of independent
enforcement powers granted to the European Commission, have been used to define and
enlarge the reach of "negative integration" -- meaning the legal rules that restrict the
capacity of national governments to interfere with the free movement of goods, services,
capital and workers throughout the internal European market (Scharpf 1996). The most
important extension was achieved through the application of European competition law to
service-public areas such as telecommunications, air, road and rail transport, and energy
supply which before had been considered exempt from full market competition in
practically all European countries (S. Schmidt 1998). But even though this may have
strained the authority of the law to its limits, the legitimacy of judicial law-making has
not been seriously undermined.[7]
By contrast, European policy processes of "positive integration" -- meaning the active
regulation of the economy -- depend on broad political agreement. It would be wrong to
equate this with the classical model of intergovernmental negotiations. The European
Parliament is rapidly approaching the point where its veto cannot be overruled in most
important fields of European legislation, and the practical importance of the European
Commission's monopoly of legislative initiative (in addition to its unilateral enforcement
powers) can hardly be overestimated. Nevertheless, national governments represented in
the Council of Ministers are ultimately decisive for the adoption of European legislation,
and even though decisions by qualified majority are possible in an increasing number of
policy areas, the requirements are set so high that small groups of governments with
similar interests cannot be overruled. In fact most decisions in the Council are adopted by
broad consensus.
But if European legislation thus avoids the threat to political legitimacy that would arise if
substantial interests could be overruled by self-interested majorities, one of two
consequences is likely to occur: Either policy choices will be blocked by disagreements
among national governments, or the burden of legitimating European policy solutions is
shifted back to the political systems of member states. In both cases, the outcome will
add to the difficulties of democratic legitimation at the national level -- either because
problem-solving deficits will persist, or because policy choices must be accepted that
may, on the input side, not conform to the authentic preferences of national constituencies
or that may, on the output side, not be optimal solutions if judged by criteria of the
national interest. Since there are indeed areas where EU policy-making processes are
highly effective, and others where the problem-solving capacity of the Union is very low
(Scharpf 1997b), both types of legitimacy problems must in fact be dealt with at the
national level. I will begin with an examination of the input-oriented problems that will
arise at the national level precisely when European policy processes are successful in
producing effective policy outputs.
International Problem-Solving and National Preferences
In order to clarify the implications of internationally agreed policy solutions for national
democracy, I will refer to a highly simplified model of intergovernmental negotiations
(Figure 1). Assume three countries, A, B, and C, facing a problem that none of them
could solve nationally, but that could be solved through international cooperation
requiring the agreement of all three countries. While all of them dislike the status quo
(located at SQ = 0), each prefers a different one of three feasible coordinated solutions,
located (in unidimensional and interval-scaled utility space) at points A=1, B=3, and C=5,
respectively. Assume also that these "ideal points" are determined, ex ante and in strictly
input-oriented procedures, by the citizens (i.e., the median voter) in each country.
However, if we should further assume that negotiators from each country are strictly
bound by these expressed preferences, it is clear that none of the cooperative solutions
could find the agreement of all three countries, and that the undesired status quo would
continue. Thus, if negotiations are to serve any purpose at all, the negotiating
governments must be allowed to agree to solutions that do not match the ex ante
preferences of their constituents -- provided that the solution chosen must increase the
welfare of the country (i.e., reduce the distance from the country's ideal point) in
comparison to the status quo.
Figure 1: Negotiations in Single-Issue Space
If only the ex-ante positions of each country are considered, the only generally acceptable
solution would be located at point A, which represents the lowest-common-denominator
outcome. It satisfies the preferences of the most "conservative" country A and is still
preferred to the status quo by B and C. The famous Coase Theorem tells us, however, that
negotiations could do better. In the absence of transaction costs, they should be able to
achieve an overall welfare maximum (Coase 1960). If distances from each country's ideal
point are interpreted as welfare losses, Figure 2 shows that this welfare maximum (i.e. the
minimum of aggregate losses) is located at point B, rather than at point A. But since
solution B would, by itself, be less attractive to country A than the status quo, its veto
would need to be bought off by side payments -- say, one unit each from countries B and
C, which these could well afford to pay from the gains which they will achieve if the
agreed-on solution is located at B, rather than at A.
Figure 2: Welfare Losses in Negotiated Agreements
So far, so good. For each country, this outcome is the best that it can reasonably expect to
reach in a world in which solutions cannot be unilaterally imposed but do depend on the
voluntary agreement of all parties involved.[8] In that sense, the output-oriented
legitimacy of the negotiated outcome would be fully assured. But what about input-
legitimacy? In order to appreciate the difficulties here it is useful to consider the
preconditions that must be created in order to make Coasian outcomes possible in the real
as distinguished from the model world.
In order to achieve the welfare-maximizing outcome, the parties must somehow
overcome the "Negotiators' Dilemma" (Lax/Sebenius 1986; Scharpf 1997a, chapter 6)
which arises from the simultaneous presence of common interests (in finding the best
overall solution) and competitive interests (in maximizing the distributive share of one's
own side). This implies that all aspects of the constellation -- available policy options,
their likely effects, and the valuation of these effects by all parties involved -- would have
to become transparent to all of them. Moreover, the parties would need to agree on a
normative rule for distributing the costs and the gains of cooperation. These are extremely
demanding preconditions, depending to a large degree on the development of mutual
trust, or at least mutual understanding, among the negotiators directly involved.[9] If they
are not met, the Negotiators' Dilemma will induce self-serving negotiating strategies that
will produce inferior outcomes or frustrate agreement altogether.
With regard to input-oriented legitimacy, this analysis seems to lead to two dismal
conclusions. First, it is clear that negotiations cannot reach their optimal outcome (i.e.,
the outcome maximizing total welfare for the group of countries as a whole) without
systematically departing from ex-ante citizen preferences in most or all countries.
Second, and more important here, the specific reasons for these departures cannot be fully
communicated to the constituencies in each country. If it is assumed that mutual
understanding and mutual trust among negotiators is an essential precondition for optimal
negotiated solutions, it follows that intergovernmental negotiations are unlikely to succeed
in the glare of total publicity, and if that is so, there will be an inevitable communication
gap between the international and national levels of this two-level game (Putnam 1988).
It is this systematic gap which poses the most serious threat to democratic legitimacy.
Where it exists, the opposition in each country cannot only claim that the outcome
achieved does not conform to ex ante citizen preferences, but also that the national
interest was sold short by incompetent or illoyal negotiators.[10] Governments, on the
other hand, arguing that this was the best that could be obtained under the circumstances,
would have to refer to inside information about feasible options, and to informed guesses
about the true preferences and outside options of the other governments -- none of which
could be fully scrutinized and verified in public or parliamentary debates.
Moreover, given the difficulties of re-negotiation, governments can no longer afford to
respond to criticisms and suggestions raised in public debate, even if the outcomes need
to be approved by parliament, or by referendum. Instead, agreements must be presented
as a fait accompli that confronts the democratic sovereign with a take-it-or-leave-it
proposition whose rejection will cause the collapse of the cooperative international effort.
Also, given the joint responsibility of all negotiating governments, no single government
could in truth be held politically accountable for the ultimate outcome.[11] If that is so,
intergovernmental negotiations will indeed disable the institutional mechanisms that
connect government action to the expressed preferences of constituents or to the scrutiny
of parliaments, political parties, and public debate.[12]
It is true that the need to discipline domestic preference formation has always been an
obstacle to demands for a "democratic foreign policy" -- except under hegemonic
conditions when one government is able to impose domestically generated preferences on
its external partners. What is new is that with increasing transnational interdependence the
same compulsion is now manifest in ever larger areas of what used to be purely domestic
policy choices. In effect therefore, the more policy choices are moved from the national
level to the level of intergovernmental negotiations, the more the institutions that are
meant to assure input-oriented influence and accountability are losing their
effectiveness.[13]
Legitimate Democracy without Omnipotence
Thus we seem to face a veritable dilemma. As interdependence increases, the nation state
finds its former range of policy options exogenously constrained, and some previously
legitimated policy choices will now become less effective, more costly, or downright
unfeasible -- which must be counted as a loss of democratic self-determination even if
new options are also added to the policy repertoire. It is true, however, that constraints do
not rule out choice, and that it may indeed be possible to achieve the former (or newly
consented) policy objectives through the choice of new policy instruments (Scharpf 1999).
In that case, output-oriented legitimacy may still be maintained. But the new policy
instruments must be adopted either in domestic choice processes that are extremely
sensitive to international constraints or in processes of negotiations at the international
level. In both cases, the increase in output effectiveness seems to have a high price in
terms of input-oriented legitimacy.
The Inevitable Corruption of Input Legitimacy?
In the input dimension, conventional notions of "popular sovereignty," and expectations
that governments should carry out the "will of the people," are directly challenged by the
increasing importance of external economic and institutional constraints. Ever more
frequently, policy choices that would be both domestically popular and economically
feasible must be avoided out of respect for the legal constraints of GATT rules and
European law, or as a consequence of decisions by the WTO, the European Commission,
or the European Court of Justice. Conversely, policy choices that would be both legally
permissible and domestically popular must be ruled out because they could have
disastrous consequences for the international competitiveness of national producers, for
the confidence of investors, or for the stability of the national currency in global money
markets.
As external legal and economic constraints multiply under conditions of growing
international interdependence, the role of experts and of specialized knowledge will
increase to an extent that may render the role of authentic but untutored popular
preferences and demands practically insignificant. All this is even more true if solutions
can only be achieved through international negotiations. In short, popular approval and
popular demand are becoming less and less sufficient for assuring, or even for justifying,
corresponding policy choices. As a consequence, input-oriented legitimating arguments
will become less plausible, and government at the national level must increasingly depend
on output-oriented legitimation arguments alone.
In fact, much of this is happening already. As more and more domestic policy areas have
become internationally interdependent, governments are increasingly tempted to invoke
Bismarck's Primat der Außenpolitik -- meaning that foreign policy should override
domestic political considerations -- to immunize policy choices with an international
dimension against the demands and criticisms of domestic public opinion, political
parties, parliaments and other democratic input processes. To the extent that they succeed,
the remaining legitimating arguments take on a paternalistic and technocratic character,
insisting that under difficult circumstances and in a dangerous environment the
government is doing the best it can to promote and defend the national interest, and that
any demands for more direct participation and control could only make a difficult job
even more difficult. When that is accepted, partisan controversies and political attention at
the national level are likely to be diverted in two directions - personalities and scandals
on the one side, and policy outcomes (rather than policy choices) on the other side.
Elections will then be either about candidates and their personal qualities and
deficiencies, or they will be about the performance of the stock market, the level of
unemployment, the rate of inflation, the size of the public-sector deficit, or even natural
disasters like floods and earthquakes, without regard for the question of whether the
government was in any way responsible for these outcomes. In other words, input-
oriented politics in general, and political accountability in particular, will lose their
connection to, and their disciplining effect on, policy choices.
Toward Internationally Embedded Policy Discourses?
The question is whether this could be otherwise. A positive answer does require a
reconsideration of the role that input-oriented mechanisms could and should play in the
democratic process. I begin by returning to the discussion of intergovernmental
negotiations. The input-oriented objections presented above are fully compelling only
when they are raised against negotiated solutions for problems that could just as well
have been dealt with at the national level. In German federalism, we have indeed
identified instances of Überverflechtung in which the practice of joint-decision making
went far beyond the "objective" need for coordination in the face of important
interdependencies (Scharpf 1988), and the same may be true in some European policy
areas as well. But as economic interdependencies increase, these instances will become
rarer, and the input-oriented critique of intergovernmental negotiations will be weakened.
With regard to problems that cannot be solved at home, within the boundaries and with
the means of the nation state, the relevant criterion for judging solutions cannot be
conformity to the solipsistic preferences of citizens of that state. For any country that is
not a hegemon, the interests of necessary partners in a cooperative solution must be
considered as well. Preferences formulated within a national frame of reference are
relevant for defining the "ideal points" of a country's negotiators. But it is not reasonable
to expect that negotiated outcomes should conform to any one of these national
aspirations. Instead, the most that one could legitimately ask for, within a national frame
of reference, is that the outcome should be better than the "best alternative to negotiated
agreement" (BATNA), and that it should come as close to nationally defined aspirations
as is possible, given the bargaining constellation and the BATNA positions of the other
countries.
For democratic theory, this implies that it can no longer treat popular preferences as being
exogenously given. In order to be normatively relevant, they must relate to policy
outcomes that could be considered feasible within the international context in which the
choice must be made. As a consequence, "democratic decisionism" (Greven 1998) and
the assumptions of omnipotence associated with "popular sovereignty" are no longer
theoretically viable options. Within the context of input-oriented theories, these
requirements are met by concepts of "discursive" or "deliberative democracy" which insist
on procedures of "will formation" that are supposed to lead to "reasonable" conclusions
(Habermas 1996). However, in trying to avoid the pitfalls of unrefined populism,
Habermas and others tend to insist on extremely demanding "procedural" preconditions
that would assure a very high degree of moral and intellectual sophistication in public
debates. In the tradition of "critical theory," these demands are not meant to be
practicable - and if they could be approximated, political discourses would be restricted to
a small elite of philosopher-kings.
If we start instead from the policy-oriented "discourses" that are in fact going on within
existing Western democracies, they are indeed largely elite affairs - conducted by
politicians, spokespersons for interest groups, prominent experts and journalists under the
filtering, amplifying and distorting conditions of the media. Discussion takes place in
many specialized policy communities with specialized publics of interested non-elites. At
the same time, specialized discussions are linked into the more general political discourse
carried on among policy generalists in governments, parliaments, political parties,
associations and the media, on issues that could potentially catch the attention of the
wider public and affect the outcomes of general elections. It is in these interwoven
patterns of communications among specialists, generalists, and communicators that
problem definitions are proposed and rejected, that policy options are presented, criticized
and justified, that political performance is being evaluated, and that political trust and,
ultimately, legitimacy is constantly being generated, eroded or destroyed.
These communications will surely not approximate ideal debates among philosopher-
kings. What matters, however, is that they are conducted in public, and that they allow
statements to be supported and contradicted in ways that may catch the attention of
unspecified non-elites. The importance of these two conditions - publicness and
contestation - can hardly be overstated. Publicness works as a powerful censorship
mechanism (Elster 1986), allowing only public-regarding communications to be made. It
simply would not do to publicly justify a political demand or a policy proposal in terms
of what it would do for yourself or your own group. That does not rule out self-serving
communications. In public debates, however, self-interest is forced to masquerade as
public interest - at which point the possibility of contestation allows competing interests
or public-interested critics to challenge such claims.
From the perspective of democratic theory, public discourses may serve two critical
mediating roles in the relationship between governors and the governed (V. Schmidt
1997; 1998). On the one hand, they greatly reduce the information costs of non-elites.
Reasonably interested members of the public will have a chance to sort out the pros and
cons of policy proposals and to form an opinion of government performance either in
terms of their own self-interest or in terms of the public interest - which then may enter
into their electoral choices. For the governors in turn, public discourse provides a
sounding board for trying out problem definitions and policy solutions, and an early
warning system for issues that might achieve electoral salience - which is critical for the
mechanism of "anticipated reactions" that links policy choices to voter reactions (Scharpf
1997a, chapter 8).
What matters for input-oriented democracy is the quality of these public discourses. They
may perform an orienting and a legitimating function if they communicate the wider
framework of ongoing policy controversies, the definition of the situation and the
political aspirations in light of which problems and options can be meaningfully
considered. For the individual citizen, such discourses provide the context within which it
is possible to make sense of what is happening, and to respond to specific policy choices
by approval, unconcern, or active opposition. For the public as a whole, orienting
discourses provide the stimuli in response to which the electoral expression of political
support or opposition can indeed claim, and bestow, a maximum of democratic
legitimacy.
But in what way would a realistic reformulation of "discursive democracy" provide a
more promising perspective on the legitimacy deficits associated with increasing
international interdependence? The answer lies in the connection between the orienting
and the legitimating function. In order to maintain legitimacy even under conditions of
international interdependence, national policy discourses must provide orientations that
are free of the suggestions of omnipotence that still infect not only conventional notions
of popular sovereignty but also the mutual recriminations between governments and
oppositions -- where governments claim exclusive credit for everything that seems to go
well, while the opposition blames the government for everything that seems
unsatisfactory. Instead, orienting discourses should provide a realistic picture of the
country's present place and future options in an institutionally and economically
integrating world; they should reassess policy goals with a view to their feasibility under
international economic and institutional constraints; and they should emphasize the search
for policy instruments that are still viable under these constraints.
When it is made clear, moreover, that important national goals can no longer be achieved
through purely national action, the possibility of pursuing them through internationally
coordinated or supranational action will be understood as a gain, rather than a loss, of
collective fate control. If that is acknowledged, the national interest can no longer be
defined in solipsistic terms, and policy options must be discussed in light of the relevant
decision rules and actor constellations at the international level, and with an empathetic
understanding of the preferences, worldviews and capabilities of the other countries
involved. As a consequence, the information and communication gap discussed above
will be greatly reduced. National policy discourse will be able to shadow more closely the
real choice situations that governments must deal with at the international level, and
governments will have less opportunity to escape from political accountability by the
mere reference to external necessities and constraints.
Is this an impossible ideal? I think not. Small European democracies have long had much
more open economies than the larger European states, let alone Japan and the United
States. As a consequence, they have never been able to control their policy environment
or to indulge in omnipotence fantasies (Katzenstein 1984; 1985). Nevertheless, they have
done very well economically over the past decades, and some of them are also now much
more successful in coping with the challenges of economic interdependence and systems
competition than their larger, previously more self-sufficient neighbors. They also seem
to have higher levels of public trust or political satisfaction than is reported for the larger
countries that have only more recently felt the full thrust of international economic
interdependence (Katzenstein 1998).
It seems plausible, therefore, that the secret of the economic and political success of small
and open countries, like Switzerland, Austria, Denmark or the Netherlands, lies precisely
in their ability to conduct policy discourses that are based on a realistic understanding of
their own capabilities and constraints, and to focus debates on those policy alternatives
that could be feasible and effective in an international policy environment that is
characterized by high degrees of institutional integration, economic interdependence and
regulatory competition (Visser/ Hemerijck 1997). Under these conditions, public opinion
will not proceed from solipsistic definitions of policy problems and policy goals, and
when that is assured, the existence of international constraints, and the need for
international cooperation will not be experienced as a delegitimating disappointment, but
will have been taken into account all along. For these countries, democratic legitimacy no
longer presupposes omnipotence and is not challenged by the realization of their
interdependence.
There is no reason why the larger democracies should not also come to live with
international interdependence. But the lesson they need to learn from the successful small
and open countries is that orienting discourses do require political leadership. They cannot
merely reflect untutored popular opinions and preferences, but must impose the discipline
of Freud's "reality principle" on policy-oriented public debate. If that is not achieved,
effective international problem solving will remain domestically vulnerable to populist
appeals to wishful thinking, nostalgia for past national grandeur, resentment of foreign
influences, or xenophobia. It is the responsibility of policy elites to communicate the
extent to which international involvement, cooperation, and trustworthiness have become
a precondition for the effective pursuit of the national interest. If they succeed, policy
discourses even in the larger countries should be able to maintain the tenuous linkage
between the perceptions and preferences of non-elites and policy choices that are effective
under the constraints of an increasingly interdependent international environment -- and
then there would be no reason to fear that international interdependence would undermine
democratic legitimacy.
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Notes
1 The presumption is, of course, that governments which, in the absence of legitimacy,
could not count on voluntary compliance but would have to rely purely on the exercise, or
the threat, of superior force, would only be able to reach comparatively low levels of
governing efficiency.
2 The general assumption is well stated by Michael Greven who postulates: "The crucial
idea, from which the legitimacy of government in democracies derives, is the possibility
of participation of all citizens, based on the mutual recognition of their civic and political
equality... Precisely because and if this is true, democratic theory implies that the
outcome of political will-formation has a claim to recognition and legitimacy even
among those whose arguments failed in the discussion and whose preferences were
defeated in a vote." (Greven 1998, 480; my translation).
But why should the mere chance of equal participation have legitimating force? At
bottom, the argument seems to rest on the logic of the duel: you have no reason to
complain if you have fought and lost in a fair fight. Under the conditions of modern mass
democracies, this logic may indeed be relevant for candidates for political office. It is
harder to see why it should persuade individual citizens.
3 Representation and accountability based on general elections have been thought to
counteract the dangers of self-interested majorities since the Federalist Papers (Cooke
1961). The argument can be restated in in rational-choice terms, if it is first assumed that,
for any individual voter, the vote is a "low-cost decision" (Kirchgässner 1992) -- meaning
that the probable effect on individual self-interest is so low that it is reasonable to think
that at least some voters will be motivated by public-interest considerations (Brennan
1989). If that is granted, the anticipation of a public-interest oriented swing vote creates
strong incentives for office holders to select policies that can be publicly defended as
serving common interests, rather than special interests (Scharpf 1997, chapter 8).
4 These data are often cited to suggest that, since "globalization" is nothing new, there
should also be no reason to be concerned about its political impact. But that argument
forgets that international capitalism before 1914 and again in the 1920s was characterized
by deep economic crises. Before 1914, political democracy was underdeveloped in most
countries, and the level of political aspirations -- and hence the potential impact of
economic performance on political trust --was much lower than it is now. In the interwar
period, however, the crises of international capitalism had serious, and in the case of
Germany catastrophic, consequences for the viability of political democracy.
5 Both the assumption and the conclusion can be questioned: In the Jacobine tradition of
French democracy, centralization is considered desirable precisely because it imposes
uniformity and hence civic equality (V. Schmidt 1990). Conversely, centrally imposed
policy might at least in theory also provide for differentiated solutions that would fit the
differing conditions or preferences of subgroups or regions within the larger constituency
or territory. An example might be the Spanish constitution which grants differing degrees
of autonomy to different regional units. In general, however, the empirical association
between centralization and rule uniformity seems to be quite strong.
6 A plausible proposal was recently promoted by Jacques Delors. It would require
European parties to nominate their own candidates for the office of President of the
European Commission in the European elections. This would not only force governments
to nominate the winning candidate for confirmation by the European Parliament, but it
would also focus public attention in all member states on the competition for a highly
visible European office, and it would put European issues on the agenda of the European
election campaign, which so far is dominated by purely national concerns. Moreover, this
option could be realized without any change in the treaties. So far, however, European
parties do not seem to be responding.
7 However, in the face of growing political unease, the Court and the Commission
themselves have recently become more sensitive to the limits of negative integration
(Scharpf 1999).
8 The negotiated solution would not necessarily be the one preferred by the median
voter in a larger country (A+B+C), since negotiations tend to equalize the bargaining
powers of the participating countries regardless of differences in the size of their
populations.
9 The difficulties of reaching agreement are reduced, and the approximation of Coasian
outcomes is facilitated, if negotiations are "embedded" in stable network constellations,
and conditions can be improved even more through institutional arrangements that
increase transparency, that provide for the good services of an "agenda setter," and that
may generate mutual trust through the evolution of normative "regimes" (Scharpf 1997,
chapter 6).
10 In the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany, when Adenauer had to defend
the disappointing outcome of negotiations over the "occupation statute," he was attacked
by the leader of the opposition as being "the Chancellor of the Allies."
11 Exactly the same criticism is directed at the effect of interstate and federal-state
negotiations in the joint-decision system of German federalism (Scharpf 1988).
12 The same argument, without democratic-theory pretensions, supports the proposition
that European integration is strengthening national governments in relation to other
national and subnational political actors (Moravcsik 1993; 1994).
13 For an early recognition of the problem, see Kaiser (1971).
Copyright © 1998 Fritz W. Scharpf
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