accountability – University of Bristol Law School Blog

Albert Sanchez-Graells, Professor of Economic Law, University of Bristol Law School

This blog post is based on the paper that was jointly awarded the Best Paper Prize Award 2024 by the Society of Legal Scholars. The paper will be published in Legal Studies in due course.(*)

Public procurement is concerned with the award of contracts for the supply, for pecuniary interest, of goods, services or works to the public sector. At its heart, public procurement governs the expenditure of public funds and, ultimately, should ensure that such expenditure is in the public interest. One could be forgiven for simplifying the goal of procurement to ensuring that public money is well spent, which could be further elaborated (following Schooner 2002) to encompass promoting integrity and value for money in the award of public contracts, and acting transparently to facilitate accountability. Even at this level of simplification, however, there is scope for contestation of e.g. what value for money entails (with a long-running debate on price/quality trade-offs), or whether it can or must (solely) be promoted through market-based competition (see e.g. Sanchez-Graells 2015, addressing the objections raised by Arrowsmith 2012 and Kunzlik 2013). (more…)

By Dr Athanasios Psygkas, Lecturer in Law (University of Bristol).

When academics, policymakers, media commentators, and citizens talk about a European Union (EU) “democratic deficit,” they often miss part of the story. My new book, From the “Democratic Deficit” to a “Democratic Surplus”: Constructing Administrative Democracy in Europe (Oxford University Press, 2017), challenges the conventional narrative of an EU “democratic deficit.” It argues that EU mandates have enhanced the democratic accountability of national regulatory agencies by creating entry points for stakeholder participation in national regulation. These avenues for public participation were formerly either not open or not institutionalized to this degree.

By focusing on how the EU formally adopted procedural mandates to advance the substantive goal of creating an internal market in electronic communications, I demonstrate that EU requirements have had significant implications for administrative governance in the member states. Drawing on theoretical arguments in favor of decentralization traditionally applied to substantive policy-making, the book illustrates how the decentralized EU structure may transform national regulatory authorities into individual sites of experimentation and innovation. It thus contributes to debates about federalism, governance and public policy, as well as about deliberative and participatory democracy in the United States and Europe. (more…)