The Transatlantic Trade and Investment partnership (TTIP) can be considered a game changer among trade agreements. TTIP not only aims to shape tomorrow’s trade policy, but has also had a huge influence on the democratic legitimacy of the EU. Based on recent literature on democratic legitimacy in the EU, this paper studies how the TTIP negotiations score in terms of input and throughput legitimacy. Our results show that these negotiations have had their fair share of problems, such as the disproportionally large influence of corporations and a lack of transparency and accountability. However, these legitimacy problems occurred mainly in the first months of the negotiation process. Due to large scale protests and critiques from civil society, measures were taken to boost the legitimacy of the process.

This article discusses the Europeanisation of Flemish political parties. Based on a dataset spanning the period 1999-2014, the article assesses whether the increase in EU salience at the level of the party (elites) after 2010 resulted in increased Europeanisation, defined as the increased mentioning of the EU in party programmes (i.e. programmatic Europeanisation) and the incorporation of the EU in political party structures (i.e. organisational Europeanisation). Our empirical analysis shows that salience does not adequately explain the level of Europeanisation. Rather, the ideological position of parties seems to provide for a stronger case. The findings therefore call for more in-depth research on intervening variables in order to better explain the varying Europeanisation of (Flemish) political parties.

Since the summer of 2013, the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) are negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Especially for the EU, this is one of the policy priorities for the present term. TTIP is supposed to bring much-needed growth and jobs and to enable the EU to remain a global standardsetter, all without lowering EU levels of regulatory protection. Opponents of the agreement, however, fear that TTIP would lead to a regulatory race-to-the-bottom. This article scrutinizes these claims through a detailed document analysis complemented with a number of interviews. It is embedded in the political-economic literature on the trade-regulation nexus as well as on exporting standards and secondary literature on past EU-US regulatory cooperation attempts. We argue that the effects of TTIP are dependent on the concrete mode of regulatory convergence chosen in the agreement. If, as seems presently most plausible, the negotiators opt for bilateral mutual recognition as their preferred mode for regulatory convergence, the plausibility that TTIP would lead to global standards is reduced. The risk of running into a regulatory race-to-the-bottom increases in that case, but will ultimately depend on the number of sectors where this mode is applicable and under which conditions this is applied. We conclude that the probability is low that the TTIP agreement being negotiated will lead either to a significant increase in global standards or to a direct large-scale race-to-the-bottom.