What is accountability good for in the EU’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU)? In a new article in the Journal of European Public Policy, Mark Dawson and Adina Maricut-Akbik discuss four normative ‘goods’ that accountability is supposed to deliver: openness, non-arbitrariness, effectiveness, and publicness. Different accountability forums can address the normative goods in two ways: one centred on the processes through which actors take decisions (procedural accountability), the other focused on the merit of the decisions themselves (substantive accountability). In practice, there are both payoffs and trade-offs in choosing one alternative over the other, and the choice should be political in EMU.
Marc Dawson and Adina Maricut-Akbik (2020). 'Procedural vs substantive accountability in EMU governance: between payoffs and trade-offs.' Journal of European Public Policy, pp. 1-20.