Opening the black box: where does throughput legitimacy hide? A case study research on the National Energy and Climate Plans of Austria and Ireland to examine whether the European Union safeguards and guarantees the democratic legitimacy
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2025-08-29
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en
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Democratic legitimacy within the topic of climate change in the European Union is a major concern for institutions and individuals. National Energy and Climate Plans of Member States need to measure up to the requirements which the European Commission set up. The goal of this research was to analyse whether the European Union’s governance system allows for citizen representation that operates responsively and responsible with creating proper outcomes effectively through the criteria of accountability, transparency, inclusiveness, and openness. The research used literature on input, output, and throughput legitimacy as theoretical framework. Throughput legitimacy can be divided into two discourses, namely the coordinative discourse and the communicative discourse which can be linked to respectively output legitimacy and input legitimacy. The legitimising mechanisms of input, output and throughput are also divided between the level of the EU and the national level which is called split-level legitimacy (Schmidt, 2020, p. 56). The central question of this research is ‘How does the European Union guarantee and safeguard the democratic legitimacy and solve the split-level legitimacy problem in the context of the National Energy and Climate Plans?’. To answer the central question, this research executed a content analysis with two case studies being the NECPs of Austria and Ireland. The analysis revealed that the European Union guarantees and safeguards the democratic legitimacy by thoroughly monitoring the Member States and giving them recommendations on how they should improve and implement the National Energy and Climate Plans. We gained more insight into democratic legitimacy within the split-level legitimacy design, but it is complex to draw a strict conclusion on how the European Union will solve the split-level legitimacy problem. This research showed that it is important to uncover throughput legitimacy in order to comprehend the split-level legitimacy.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen