Deirdre Curtin
Biographic Data
| ID | 4003157 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Deirdre Curtin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Deirdre |
| FAMILY NAME | Curtin |
| SIGNATURE | CURTIN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | European University Institute |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0976-0319 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 293 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Cracking AI secrecy
In core government and for public tasks hugely sensitive for citizens such as migration governance in Europe, the use of AI systems developed and provided under contract gives migration authorities and private providers the power to keep their deployment secret and to refuse access to their key components. This article explores the complex interplay between public and private drivers of secrecy surrounding procured AI technologies in European mig…
Second order secrecy and Europe’s legality mosaics
In today’s information society the citizen is ever more visible to government and to private companies while paradoxically government itself becomes ever more secret. This asymmetry is not caused by secrecy implying deliberate or intentional concealment of information. Rather, it results from systems of secrets held by remote or non-visible public and private actors, having been put together in an invisible manner. Second order secrecy is enhance…
Accountability and European Governance
Challenging Executive Dominance in E uropean Democracy
Executive dominance in the contemporary EU is part of a wider migration of executive power towards types of decision making that eschew electoral accountability and popular democratic control. This democratic gap is fed by far‐going secrecy arrangements and practices exercised in a concerted fashion by the various executive actors at different levels of governance and resulting in the blacking out of crucial information and documents – even for p…
Overseeing Secrets in the EU
Formulating policy and overseeing implementation require access to information. Yet in (national) security matters executive officials have considerable discretion to conceal from the public and from parliaments information they consider sensitive. If executive officials are given largely unchecked power to conceal from the public and from parliament(s) whatever information they consider sensitive, part of the essential machinery of democracy is …
Open government
The term open government is often used to describe initiatives of putting government information on the Internet. This conceptualization is too restricted since open government is not only about openness in informational terms ( vision) but also about openness in interactive terms ( voice). On the basis of an analysis of 103 articles, this article provides insight into the concepts of openness, transparency and participation, their interactions, …
Public Accountability of Transnational Private Regulation
The legitimacy of transnational private regulation is contested where authority is exercised by private actors adopting rules and being involved in processes of implementation and enforcement. We eschew a general discussion of legitimacy in this context in favour of the more manageable sub‐component, ‘accountability’. Drawing on the work of political scientists, we conceptualize public accountability both as a virtue and as a mechanism and explor…
Transparence et participation
Le présent article vise à déterminer si et dans quelle mesure les règles et pratiques juridiques actuelles de l’Union européenne en matière de transparence et de participation encouragent les principes démocratiques récemment ancrés dans le traité sur l’Union européenne. Il se concentre essentiellement sur la façon dont les principes de transparence et de participation ont été formulés et surtout mis en œuvre dans la pratique, afin d’examiner leu…
Agency growth between autonomy and accountability
Autonomy and accountability of public agencies are two sides of the same coin, yet often they are examined separately and at only one point in time. This contribution therefore examines the interaction between accountability and autonomy over time. It does so in the context of a European Union agency, the European Police Office (Europol), the creation of which has been the subject of much contestation and discussion in terms of its possibility to…
Positioning Accountability in European Governance
The special issue of which this paper forms the introduction takes as its central focus one particular aspect of democratic governance: accountability. It attempts to position a broad understanding of the notion of accountability within the overall context of the evolving political system of governance in Europe and in particular of the European Union. With accountability at the centre, we consider its relationship to a fairly wide range of other…
Tradition and innovation
We argue in this article that Europe has in fact had a kind of executive order for centuries but that we only now see that the contours of this order are qualitatively different from the intergovernmental order inherited from the past. We ascribe this phenomenon in particular to the consolidation of the European Commission as a new and distinctive executive centre at the European level. It seems as if this institutional innovation triggers signif…
Does transparency strengthen legitimacy
Does enhanced transparency, through the Internet, boost the legitimacy of the EU? In this paper we present a critical perspective on the assumptions underlying the relation between transparency and legitimacy. We reconstruct three assumptions from EU
Private Interest Representation or Civil Society Deliberation? A Contemporary Dilemma for European Union Governance
The European Commission’s White Paper on Governance in July 2001 focused attention, in a rather preliminary manner, on the role that ‘civil society’ could and should play in the process of further democratizing decision-making in the European Union. ‘Civil society’ has itself been trying to make this point for some years in the European context and now seems to have acquired some institutional allies in that regard. The European Economic and Soci…
Race Discrimination and the European Union Anno 1996
The question of the legal competence of the EU to adopt binding measures to assist in combatting racial discrimination has traditionally not received much attention. The Treaty on European Union does not include a general prohibition of discrimination but only of (pay related) sex discrimination. Moreover, the Treaty provision outlawing discrimination on grounds of nationality has generally been interpreted as limited to discrimination between na…
Open government
The term open government is often used to describe initiatives of putting government information on the Internet. This conceptualization is too restricted since open government is not only about openness in informational terms ( vision) but also about openness in interactive terms ( voice). On the basis of an analysis of 103 articles, this article provides insight into the concepts of openness, transparency and participation, their interactions, …
Does transparency strengthen legitimacy
Does enhanced transparency, through the Internet, boost the legitimacy of the EU? In this paper we present a critical perspective on the assumptions underlying the relation between transparency and legitimacy. We reconstruct three assumptions from EU
Tradition and innovation
We argue in this article that Europe has in fact had a kind of executive order for centuries but that we only now see that the contours of this order are qualitatively different from the intergovernmental order inherited from the past. We ascribe this phenomenon in particular to the consolidation of the European Commission as a new and distinctive executive centre at the European level. It seems as if this institutional innovation triggers signif…
Agency growth between autonomy and accountability
Autonomy and accountability of public agencies are two sides of the same coin, yet often they are examined separately and at only one point in time. This contribution therefore examines the interaction between accountability and autonomy over time. It does so in the context of a European Union agency, the European Police Office (Europol), the creation of which has been the subject of much contestation and discussion in terms of its possibility to…
Overseeing Secrets in the EU
Formulating policy and overseeing implementation require access to information. Yet in (national) security matters executive officials have considerable discretion to conceal from the public and from parliaments information they consider sensitive. If executive officials are given largely unchecked power to conceal from the public and from parliament(s) whatever information they consider sensitive, part of the essential machinery of democracy is …
Challenging Executive Dominance in E uropean Democracy
Executive dominance in the contemporary EU is part of a wider migration of executive power towards types of decision making that eschew electoral accountability and popular democratic control. This democratic gap is fed by far‐going secrecy arrangements and practices exercised in a concerted fashion by the various executive actors at different levels of governance and resulting in the blacking out of crucial information and documents – even for p…
Positioning Accountability in European Governance
The special issue of which this paper forms the introduction takes as its central focus one particular aspect of democratic governance: accountability. It attempts to position a broad understanding of the notion of accountability within the overall context of the evolving political system of governance in Europe and in particular of the European Union. With accountability at the centre, we consider its relationship to a fairly wide range of other…
Transparence et participation
Le présent article vise à déterminer si et dans quelle mesure les règles et pratiques juridiques actuelles de l’Union européenne en matière de transparence et de participation encouragent les principes démocratiques récemment ancrés dans le traité sur l’Union européenne. Il se concentre essentiellement sur la façon dont les principes de transparence et de participation ont été formulés et surtout mis en œuvre dans la pratique, afin d’examiner leu…
Private Interest Representation or Civil Society Deliberation? A Contemporary Dilemma for European Union Governance
The European Commission’s White Paper on Governance in July 2001 focused attention, in a rather preliminary manner, on the role that ‘civil society’ could and should play in the process of further democratizing decision-making in the European Union. ‘Civil society’ has itself been trying to make this point for some years in the European context and now seems to have acquired some institutional allies in that regard. The European Economic and Soci…
Public Accountability of Transnational Private Regulation
The legitimacy of transnational private regulation is contested where authority is exercised by private actors adopting rules and being involved in processes of implementation and enforcement. We eschew a general discussion of legitimacy in this context in favour of the more manageable sub‐component, ‘accountability’. Drawing on the work of political scientists, we conceptualize public accountability both as a virtue and as a mechanism and explor…
Race Discrimination and the European Union Anno 1996
The question of the legal competence of the EU to adopt binding measures to assist in combatting racial discrimination has traditionally not received much attention. The Treaty on European Union does not include a general prohibition of discrimination but only of (pay related) sex discrimination. Moreover, the Treaty provision outlawing discrimination on grounds of nationality has generally been interpreted as limited to discrimination between na…
Second order secrecy and Europe’s legality mosaics
In today’s information society the citizen is ever more visible to government and to private companies while paradoxically government itself becomes ever more secret. This asymmetry is not caused by secrecy implying deliberate or intentional concealment of information. Rather, it results from systems of secrets held by remote or non-visible public and private actors, having been put together in an invisible manner. Second order secrecy is enhance…
Race Discrimination and the European Union Anno 1996
The question of the legal competence of the EU to adopt binding measures to assist in combatting racial discrimination has traditionally not received much attention. The Treaty on European Union does not include a general prohibition of discrimination but only of (pay related) sex discrimination. Moreover, the Treaty provision outlawing discrimination on grounds of nationality has generally been interpreted as limited to discrimination between na…
Private Interest Representation or Civil Society Deliberation? A Contemporary Dilemma for European Union Governance
The European Commission’s White Paper on Governance in July 2001 focused attention, in a rather preliminary manner, on the role that ‘civil society’ could and should play in the process of further democratizing decision-making in the European Union. ‘Civil society’ has itself been trying to make this point for some years in the European context and now seems to have acquired some institutional allies in that regard. The European Economic and Soci…
Does transparency strengthen legitimacy
Does enhanced transparency, through the Internet, boost the legitimacy of the EU? In this paper we present a critical perspective on the assumptions underlying the relation between transparency and legitimacy. We reconstruct three assumptions from EU
Tradition and innovation
We argue in this article that Europe has in fact had a kind of executive order for centuries but that we only now see that the contours of this order are qualitatively different from the intergovernmental order inherited from the past. We ascribe this phenomenon in particular to the consolidation of the European Commission as a new and distinctive executive centre at the European level. It seems as if this institutional innovation triggers signif…
Positioning Accountability in European Governance
The special issue of which this paper forms the introduction takes as its central focus one particular aspect of democratic governance: accountability. It attempts to position a broad understanding of the notion of accountability within the overall context of the evolving political system of governance in Europe and in particular of the European Union. With accountability at the centre, we consider its relationship to a fairly wide range of other…
Public Accountability of Transnational Private Regulation
The legitimacy of transnational private regulation is contested where authority is exercised by private actors adopting rules and being involved in processes of implementation and enforcement. We eschew a general discussion of legitimacy in this context in favour of the more manageable sub‐component, ‘accountability’. Drawing on the work of political scientists, we conceptualize public accountability both as a virtue and as a mechanism and explor…
Transparence et participation
Le présent article vise à déterminer si et dans quelle mesure les règles et pratiques juridiques actuelles de l’Union européenne en matière de transparence et de participation encouragent les principes démocratiques récemment ancrés dans le traité sur l’Union européenne. Il se concentre essentiellement sur la façon dont les principes de transparence et de participation ont été formulés et surtout mis en œuvre dans la pratique, afin d’examiner leu…
Agency growth between autonomy and accountability
Autonomy and accountability of public agencies are two sides of the same coin, yet often they are examined separately and at only one point in time. This contribution therefore examines the interaction between accountability and autonomy over time. It does so in the context of a European Union agency, the European Police Office (Europol), the creation of which has been the subject of much contestation and discussion in terms of its possibility to…
Open government
The term open government is often used to describe initiatives of putting government information on the Internet. This conceptualization is too restricted since open government is not only about openness in informational terms ( vision) but also about openness in interactive terms ( voice). On the basis of an analysis of 103 articles, this article provides insight into the concepts of openness, transparency and participation, their interactions, …
Accountability and European Governance
Challenging Executive Dominance in E uropean Democracy
Executive dominance in the contemporary EU is part of a wider migration of executive power towards types of decision making that eschew electoral accountability and popular democratic control. This democratic gap is fed by far‐going secrecy arrangements and practices exercised in a concerted fashion by the various executive actors at different levels of governance and resulting in the blacking out of crucial information and documents – even for p…
Overseeing Secrets in the EU
Formulating policy and overseeing implementation require access to information. Yet in (national) security matters executive officials have considerable discretion to conceal from the public and from parliaments information they consider sensitive. If executive officials are given largely unchecked power to conceal from the public and from parliament(s) whatever information they consider sensitive, part of the essential machinery of democracy is …
Second order secrecy and Europe’s legality mosaics
In today’s information society the citizen is ever more visible to government and to private companies while paradoxically government itself becomes ever more secret. This asymmetry is not caused by secrecy implying deliberate or intentional concealment of information. Rather, it results from systems of secrets held by remote or non-visible public and private actors, having been put together in an invisible manner. Second order secrecy is enhance…
Cracking AI secrecy
In core government and for public tasks hugely sensitive for citizens such as migration governance in Europe, the use of AI systems developed and provided under contract gives migration authorities and private providers the power to keep their deployment secret and to refuse access to their key components. This article explores the complex interplay between public and private drivers of secrecy surrounding procured AI technologies in European mig…
Law (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Public Administration (9 works) · European Union Policy and Governance (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Business (7 works) · Public Administration (7 works) · Accountability (6 works)