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This volume examines the 'Convention on the Future of Europe' as a moment of European constitutional politics. It discusses the contested nature of constitutional politics in the EU, and how the Convention dealt with these issues. The book also assesses the Convention's aftermath

AbstractThis article suggests that there are many ways of characterizing the transformations of contemporary democracy, but that particularly Peter Mair's analysis of the 'hollowing out' of democracy suggests that we are witnessing a process of democratic disempowerment, with citizens becoming disaffected and political elites more insulated. A particular terrain of such a process is that of political representation. This article focuses on the conceptual and institutional transformations of the 'standard version' of political representation and whether the shift from a more formal and centralised system, based on authorization and control, to more informal, diffuse and trust‐based processes of representation may still meet the normative requirements of democratic politics.

This article offers a brief summary of Albert Weale's (2013) book on democratic justice and the social contract and discusses in more detail its central argument about the democratic social contract, which rests on mutual advantage, deliberative rationality and rough bargaining equality. The article contextualises Weale's argument, showing how it emerged from his own scepticism towards previous social contract theories. It explores the distinctiveness of Weale's own social contract theory, discussing its main aspects: its logic, its rationality and its legitimacy. The piece concludes by offering two brief critical arguments about issues of method (the 'empirical' approach) and substance (the philosophical anthropology of the social contract).

Modern democracy is often considered to be tantamount to representative
democracy. In her most recent statement on representation, Hanna Pitkin
admits that when writing The Concept of
Representation (1967), she took the relationship between
representation and democracy to be unproblematic: "… like most people even
today, I more or less equated democracy with representation, or at least
with representative government. It seemed axiomatic that under modern
conditions only representation can make democracy possible" (2004, 336).
Almost forty years later, Pitkin's view is that "representation has
supplanted democracy instead of serving it" (2004, 339). She concludes her
analysis asking whether democracy can be saved from the increasing turn (or
return) of political representation to more elitist forms of government and
dominion.