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Democracy is an essential condition of membership in the EU, yet the EU itself is said to suffer from a serious democratic deficit. The paradox is more apparent than real — one cannot safely extrapolate democratic norms from the national to the supranational level. The members of the EU are not individuals but corporate bodies, and democratic principles do not directly apply to such a polity. Arguments about Europe’s democratic deficit implicitly assume that the EU must eventually become a full-fledged federal state, but this is not what the majority of European voters apparently want. At best, federation is only one of several possible outcomes of the integration process. In reality, the democratic deficit is the price we pay for attempting to pursue political objectives by non-political means.

This chapter concludes the volume. In normative terms, the Judiciary revisions imposed on CEE since 1989 (and now the West) exhibit an unmistakable pattern: they transfer political power away from majoritarian institutions to non-majoritarian ones, from elected officials to judges; exclude the ‘sovereignty people’ from a voice in the Judiciary’s make-up; and insulate judges from accountability and liability to democratic boundaries. This Template amounts to the Americanization of the European Judiciary, and reflects the Network Community’s ambition to rule through the Judiciary (in Europe, but perhaps globally). In causal terms, a nexus was discovered explaining the Template’s puzzling ubiquity: the agency of a class of transnational elites sharing a collective identity and solidarity; their paradigmatic assumptions about the Judiciary’s role in democracy, and the coerciveness of their hegemonic discourses, which the public is unable to fathom or negotiate. The Network’s motivation is not solely the aspiration to solve mankind’s problems, but the all-too-human will to the power to arbitrate between all other political actors. A crucial but ‘invisible’ causal factor was the omission by the main veto players, elected representatives in parliaments, to forestall their own disempowerment.

This chapter provides an overview on how policy analysis is done in Constitutional Autonomous Agencies (CAAs) in Mexico, with a particular focus on two of them: the Instituto Nacional de Evaluacion para la Educacion (INEE, or National Institute of Evaluation for Education); and the Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones (IFT, or Federal Telecommunications Institute). The CAAs represent a new kind of public agency for the Mexican politico-administrative system. From an international perspective, CAAs are similar to non-majoritarian institutions existing in other jurisdictions: they are formally independent; their heads are neither elected nor hierarchically accountable to the executive power; and their internal life is not tied to political cycles. The chapter describes the legal background and organizational features of both INEE and IFT; analyses how these institutions gather information, assess policy options, and make decisions; and underlines the main challenges that both institutions are currently facing for developing their policy analytical capacities and performing their broader policy tasks.

Chapter 13 offers a compact summary of the main theoretical and empirical insights the book has produced. It shows that the process of position formation inside the EU Commission already captures the political complexity of supranational decision-making in Europe. Power and conflict inside this central institution are indispensable for understanding Europe’s legislative agenda. The inside view, furthermore, challenges common perceptions of the EU Commission as a unitary actor, an expertise-driven technocracy, or an insulated, non-majoritarian institution. Internal processes deviate heavily from these patterns at times and different types of Commission agency co-exist inside Europe’s central agenda-setter. By showing how these agency logics play out in practice, the book offers several leverage points for inducing policy change in Europe.