Actions Speak Louder Than Words: Assessing the Democratic Accountability of Europe's New Industrial Policy

Abstract

This article asks “who controls the controllers” now that the European Commission—long responsible for controlling the conduct of industrial policy in the EU's internal market—increasingly pursues its own industrial policy objectives. We draw on delegation theory to establish why the Commission should be held accountable for its industrial policy-making and, based on a distinction between procedural and substantive accountability, develop a simple typology of accountability outcomes that helps us distinguish between full accountability, partial accountability, and unaccountability in the realm of industrial policy. To assess empirically whether and how the Commission has been held accountable in its pursuit of industrial policy, we leverage a new dataset that tracks Commission follow-ups—both in writing and in terms of policy actions—to 432 points raised in own-initiative reports by the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research and Energy between 2019 and 2024. Our analysis suggests that the Commission has been far more responsive in “words” than in “actions”, which carries implications for our understanding of executive-legislative relations and democratic accountability not only in industrial policy but also in other EU policy domains.