European Fiscal Federalism (Part 5): Democratic deficit, Budgetary empowerment, institutional competition and shifting the status quo

Steps in this direction:

In the previous posts ( 1, 2, 3) I have described the economic logics for an EU fiscal policy and the political economy argument for delegation of such powers to the European Commission (4). In this context, I would like to highlight the recent report that a group of European Socialists are lobbying their party to pursue US style primaries to appoint their candidate for the 2015 European Commission Presidency. There is an equivalently irrefutable logic behind this type of process, which has been explored by Hix and Follesdal in a 2006 article on the EU's democratic deficit. This initiative could also be the beginning of something along the lines of the Wallstrom candidacy imagined by Hix.