Proactive transparency in the form of electronic provision of documents is required by law in the EU. It has long been acknowledged in law and technology studies that digital technology can have legal consequences when implemented to perform a legal function. Consequently, the technological design of document registers has the ability to limit as well as enhance access to documents. When technology can have such regulatory powers, incorporating it into a legal function requires closer attention as to how or why it is so. This article will provide a close analysis of the European Commission’s main Register of Documents (RegDoc) to study the implications of technological design for access to documents. Transparency is approached through a procedural view, highlighting its mechanisms. The article uses a HCI based walkthrough method for the case-study artefact critique of the RegDoc. The main findings suggest that there are two specific affordances of the RegDoc that limit access, especially for users who do not have pre-existing knowledge of the documents they are searching for. These affordances are, first, the scope of the dataset and, second, searchability. Overall, designing technology for legally relevant functions should take into account the wider legal framework that the technology aims to cater for. Attention should be paid to the affordances that can make a legal difference in a technology created to perform a legally relevant task.

The aim of the present contribution is to assess how infringement proceedings under Articles 258 to 260 TFEU have dealt with ‘systemic’ breaches of EU law by the Member States’ authorities. It will be argue that two, or possibly three, strands of case-law appear to specifically concern systemic breaches of EU law.

In its evaluation cycle, the European Commission emphasises the importance of good data and the systematic involvement of a plurality of policy stakeholders, including citizens. Findings from European Union policy evaluation should inform further law-making, encourage learning and provide accountability. Transparent and inclusive formal procedures and tools are seen as essential for securing citizen participation in risk regulation; however, the Commission faces numerous challenges in securing engagement, particularly concerning the complexity of policy issues and the formal procedures for institutionalised consultations. Considering the Commission’s work from a proceduralist perspective, the article engages with Vivien Schmidt’s notion of “throughput legitimacy” to explore recent procedural innovations emerging since the Better Regulation agenda that have sought to enhance accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness, ensuring fairer and more balanced input on EU policy performance. The article argues in favour of greater throughput legitimacy in ex post policy evaluation but recognises challenges to the promotion of evaluation tools and their use by citizens.

The European Commission’s 2020 draft Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability set the ambitious goal of achieving a “Toxic-Free Environment”. Those ambitions were harshly criticised by a team based in Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (or BfR); they claimed that toxicological risks from chemicals had already been minimised and were optimally regulated. This paper outlines evidence to support the Commission’s implication that the European Union’s chemicals regulatory regime is suboptimal. It also criticises the BfR team’s contentions by reference to empirical findings (eg concerning tumours, congenital anomalies and the toxicity of mixtures) and by disentangling their conceptual confusions.

The question of how best to tackle anthropogenic climate change is a thorny one: besides scientific uncertainty regarding the consequences of climate change, another difficulty is that the recommendations of climate experts may clash with the priorities of citizens, interest groups and political institutions. With the European Green Deal, the European Union (EU) recently made significant advances in climate policy; at the same time, and as is well known, the EU and its institutions have long been criticised for their “democratic deficit” and for their failure to involve all civil society actors equally in EU law-making processes. This article sheds light on the legal framework governing civil society participation in EU law-making, and more specifically on the Commission’s consultations pursuant to Article 11(3) of the Treaty on European Union. It then critically assesses selected features of two consultations conducted by the Commission in connection with the European Climate Law, which it evaluates from the perspective of the EU primary law principles of democracy, openness and transparency. Through this analysis, and by suggesting how future climate consultations could be further improved, the article aims to contribute to the (still nascent) legal scholarship on civil society participation in environmental and climate policy.

In this study we test whether interest organizations that are confrontational towards EU institutions are less successful than their more cooperative counterparts in obtaining funding from the European Commission (EC). The transfer of public funds to interest organizations is a key dynamic in state-civil society relationships. Research shows that organizations, especially public groups, often heavily rely on public funds to the point that, without funds, many would cease to exist. ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’ is thus a popular expression among leaders of organizations who apply for funds. Scholars document a widespread perception among group leaders that a confrontational attitude towards the state can lead to curtail of public funds. This perception is based on the assumption that state institutions use public funding to discipline confrontational interest organizations. We test this assumption using quantitative and qualitative data collected from a survey of 270 interest organizations who applied for EC funding between 2015 and 2018. Our findings suggest that, while almost half of our survey respondents feel that critical attitudes towards the EU would have negative consequences for their funding applications, empirically, confrontational and cooperative organizations have the same chances of obtaining EC grants. This finding is robust across different interest organization categories, including when non-applicants and mortality anxiety are considered in the analysis. The results add a new layer to resource dependency theory pointing at the incongruence between an organization’s perception of its relationship with public institutions and the observation of that relationship.

This Article represents the first comprehensive study of the EU query process, a form of flexible extra-judicial cooperation between the European Ombudsman and the national ombud offices on the interpretation and application of EU law across member states. The way this cooperation is constructed brings imminently to mind the preliminary reference procedure: A national office submits a query within the scope of EU law to the European Ombudsman who, after consultation with the Commission—in the vast majority of cases—provides a reply. Upon closer examination, however, this Article illustrates key differences between the two procedures, while pointing out the added value of the EU query procedure compared to the preliminary reference. More specifically, while the interpretation that is provided is not authoritative or legally binding (among other differences), thanks to the flexibility of this instrument, interpretative guidance is provided at an early stage in case a problem in the interpretation and application of EU law arises, and thus litigation may be avoided. Furthermore, the EU query procedure serves as a reliable source of information for both the European and the national sides. However, this Article also identifies a number of challenges in relation to the transparency of the scheme, its effective functioning, as well as its interplay with other instruments, such as the infringement procedure.

A lack of political legitimacy undermines the ability of the European Union (EU) to resolve major crises and threatens the stability of the system as a whole. By integrating digital data into political processes, the EU seeks to base decision-making increasingly on sound empirical evidence. In particular, artificial intelligence (AI) systems have the potential to increase political legitimacy by identifying pressing societal issues, forecasting potential policy outcomes, and evaluating policy effectiveness. This paper investigates how citizens’ perceptions of EU input, throughput, and output legitimacy are influenced by three distinct decision-making arrangements: (a) independent human decision-making by EU politicians; (b) independent algorithmic decision-making (ADM) by AI-based systems; and (c) hybrid decision-making (HyDM) by EU politicians and AI-based systems together. The results of a preregistered online experiment (n = 572) suggest that existing EU decision-making arrangements are still perceived as the most participatory and accessible for citizens (input legitimacy). However, regarding the decision-making process itself (throughput legitimacy) and its policy outcomes (output legitimacy), no difference was observed between the status quo and HyDM. Respondents tend to perceive ADM systems as the sole decision-maker to be illegitimate. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for (a) EU legitimacy and (b) data-driven policy-making and outlines (c) avenues for future research.

This article draws on empirical research conducted with European Commission officials in three Directorates-General and its other services on their perception of how the legislative and policy-making process facilitates the interaction of science and environmental law. This article deploys Sheila Jasanoff's theoretical framework of co-production as an important lens to examine how the European Commission creates this interaction of science and law in environmental policy making and identifies how the Commission incorporates different voices and stakeholders in this policy area. The Commission can be seen as a vehicle of co-production of science and law in EU environmental policy by building strong expert identities, putting in place institutional processes and instruments, and creating discourse between scientists and lawyers leading to outputs of co-production. It is argued that in actively facilitating co-production, the Commission underpins the legislative and policy-making process with its institutional values.

Interest groups are key intermediary actors between civil society and public officials. The EU has long emphasized the importance of interacting with representative groups that involve their members. Additionally, there is an increasing trend toward the professionalization of groups that invest in organizational capacities to efficiently provide policy expertise. Both member involvement and organizational capacity are crucial features for groups to function as transmission belts that aggregate and transfer the preferences of their members to policymakers, thus reinforcing the legitimacy and efficiency of governance systems. Yet, not all groups have these organizational attributes. This paper quantitatively examines the effects of interest groups’ investment in member involvement and organizational capacity on the level of access to EU Commission officials. The results indicate that member involvement does not pay off in terms of higher levels of access. In contrast, groups with high organizational capacities have more meetings with public officials of the Commission.