Architecture and policy-making: comparing experimentalist and hierarchical governance in EU energy regulation

Abstract:

This article contends that the same set of decision-making procedures can be used more or less experimentally or hierarchically, depending on strategic uncertainty and de facto polyarchy. It distinguishes architectures from policy-making, and offers widely applicable indicators to better distinguish more experimentalist or hierarchical institutional designs from how decision-making actually occurs.

It argues that polyarchy can be understood in both de jure and de facto terms, and shows that neither is fixed; equally, it proposes an alternative operationalization and shows that strategic uncertainty neither consistently rises nor gradually declines, but varies cyclically. It suggests that strategic uncertainty and de facto polyarchy might be jointly sufficient for experimentalist policy-making. Rather than a linear trend in which hierarchical governance re-emerges and experimentalist governance declines, it finds cyclical variation. More broadly, it extends claims that functional and political accounts are not mutually exclusive from questions of bureaucratic structures to their actual operation.