New Model of Regulatory Decision Making and the Public Administration Reforms. The Romanian Context

Representation is the key to the proper functioning of any democracy and an important value itself. But, a good functioning of the democracy must take into account as a primary value not only representation, but also the means of solving the problems. The last decades represented for EU members a period in which the public's trust in deciding structures has suffered a major decrease. In terms of declin of public trust, in a 15 year period from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s, according with World Values Survey, the public's confidence in parliament fallen significantly in many European countries. For exemple, in Finland, from 65 to 33 per cent, in Germany from 51 to 29 percent and in Spain from 48 to 37 percent. In Romania the situation is resembling in the way that the trust in policy makers have fallen. Polls indicate that the public's trust decresed from 44 to 21 per cent in period 2003-2007. This profound distrust proven by the E.U citizens shows "citizen's rejection of policy making behind closed doors" and "the government by annoncement", where decisions have been taken without public consultation. The top-down form of risk communication in which regulators/government communicated a one -way fashion to the public was the modus operandi. This present paper is focused upon researching the institutional changes and the approaches neccessary to make the new model not a threat to European policy making processes, but a contribution to ensuring a better regulatory framework for Europe. The main conclusions one may draw from this presentation, aim at offering possible answers to the following questions: 1.How can we ensure that the stakeholder participating in the policy process is the way for rebuilding the public trust? 2 How can we ensure that transparency in policy making does not lead to unnecessary amplification of risks and public confussion? 3. Is placing citizens' priorities on different levels in the multilevel governance structures suggesting multiple possibilities for influencing the European agenda by forces other than the public opinion?