Policy-Making By Subterfuge: Interest Accommodation, Innovation and Substitute Democratic Legitimation in Europe - Perspectives From Distinctive Policy Areas

Abstract

The institutional context of European policy-making, its redistributive content, sheer scope, and the need to accommodate diverse, and often conflicting, interests and goals, together tend to have a stalling effect on the policy-making process. Policy innovation continues despite this, owing to strategies of subterfuge; i.e. decision-making escape routes used by policy-makers to circumvent potential deadlock. Subterfuge is used across policy sectors and has an impact on the three interconnected polity issues of the accommodation of diversity policy innovation and democratic legitimation.