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Glossary of shared terminology (A to B)
| An agency is an (more or less) independent body that operates outside the line of hierarchical control by the central government.
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| The absence of a centralized (international) authority.
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| Pure arguing as a communicative mode can be analytically distinguished from pure bargaining in modal, procedural and structural aspects. In respect to modal terms, arguing is characterized by the use of empirical and normative validity claims in contrast to pragmatic demands and threats. In procedural respect, processes of arguing can not be sequential but are reflexive, in that actors’ arguments and reasoning refer to prior statements and arguments. The validity claims, on that the arguments are based, are assessed upon specific criteria, which have to be commonly comprehensible. Validity claims thus refer to some external authority and are – in structural respect – triadic in nature. On that basis we define arguing and persuasion as non-manipulative reason-giving in order to alter actors’ choices and preferences irrespective of their consideration of other actors’ strategies. Defined that way, it is not presumed that arguing is more effective than bargaining or even naturally efficient and, thus, automatically leads to a reasoned consensus. But it is presumed that this communicative mode rather leads to a reasoned consensus than to a compromise without a change in the actor’s preferences, because actors are submitted to the better argument and may change their preferences accordingly. We will know a consensus when the result is a) surprising, b) beyond the lowest common denominator, and c) when actors give the same reasons for its achievement.
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| Of democracy stress the importance of intermediary structures in a society like interest associations and political associations.
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| Rules which political or economic actors impose on themselves.
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| The process that involves the engaging practice of search and comparison. Policy makers, in this case, are able to identify policies or practices that yield supposedly superior outcomes. It consists of identification and imitation of any successful or best practice. A ‘contextualised benchmarking’ requires: collection of data on outcomes and policies that lead to them; assessment of outcomes and study of how policies work; and some determination about whether the institutional environment surrounding the policy is similar to that of the observing system. The OMC is usually identified as a contextualised form of benchmarking. On the opposite, a ‘decontextualised benchmarking’ ignores the local conditions under which policies must be implemented.
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A third way of governance that some have labelled as “Brusselisation”. Briefly, this concept means that “while the relevant competencies do remain ultimately at the disposal of the Member States, the formulation and implementation of policy will be increasingly Europeanized and Brusselized by functionaries and services housed permanently at Brussels”.
[Esther Barbé: The Evolution of CFSP Institutions: Where does Democratic Accountability Stand?, The International Spectator 2/2004 - External link] |
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