The Legitimacy of EU Executives During Emergency Pandemic Politics

• In Event: The EU’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Issue of Democratic Legitimacy

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic pushed EU executives to act in ways that generally went outside the bounds of everyday politics into the realm of emergency politics. Emergency politics, while necessary to protect the population at large, to ensure positive outcomes, can undermine long-established democratic rights, political norms, and administrative processes. In the terms of democratic theory, the legitimacy of a public authority’s governing activities can be put at risk even when ensuring good outcomes (performance or ‘output’ legitimacy) if it leads to suspension (however temporary) of political responsiveness (political or ‘input’ legitimacy) and of executives’ efficacy, accountability, transparency, inclusiveness or openness (procedural or ‘throughput’ legitimacy). So, what are the trade-offs, if any, among different forms of legitimacy? This paper seeks to answer this normative question empirically in comparative perspective, by exploring responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in the European Union, including the EU executive and its member-state executives. It will examine the dilemmas for executives’ democratic legitimacy not only at the inception of the crisis but also over time in the different phases of the pandemic, to consider the extent to which the problems were exceptional or led to more long-lasting damage to democracy and legitimacy.

Author

• Vivien A. Schmidt, Boston University