Yardsticks, Paradigms, and the Beast

This paper aims to support the position questioning the relevance of the European democratic deficit because conventional yardsticks have changed –but from a policy‐process viewpoint. Starting from Rodrik’s “augmented trilemma”, I’ll argue that conventional yardsticks revolve around the “government model” of the Bretton‐Woods compromise, where limited capital mobility allowed the segmentation of the economic space into domestic markets that the Musgravian approach to public goods put under political control. But the paradigm shift of the 1980s freed capitals and hence pushed political systems to choose their new position within the trilemma: adopting the golden straitjacket and delivering even public goods via national (quasi‐)markets, as in the UK; or giving up the State primacy and relying on overlapping markets and local communities’ deliveries, as in Sweden. In both cases, I’ll show how policy legitimacy there lies on the outcome side of policies and effectiveness evaluation –a new arena where distinctive modes of stakeholders’ and policy‐takers’ participation draw “unconventional” accountability mechanisms and thus re‐design political rights. Since its commitment toward the neo‐lib paradigm, it’s instead to these two models that the EU governance system could refer in order to fix its legitimacy problems – given the international integration wave still keeps up.