Suchergebnisse

Japanese foreign policy since the late 1980s has exhibited many signs of liberal internationalism: a generous development assistance package despite its economic malaise, an expanded presence in international peacekeeping and peace-building missions, and a multi-faceted, people-centered approach to international security. This article, however, draws attention to the (non)liberal character of Japanese activism by shedding light on Japan's entanglement in democracy assistance, a trademark liberal internationalist project. Two features stand out in this juxtaposition. First, democracy assistance has been seen as supplementary-rather than parallel-to the peace and development initiatives in Japan's diplomatic repertoire. Second, when democracy was indeed played up, the act nonetheless exposed the myriad innate contradictions between the liberal paradigm and Japan's nationalist impulses that transpired in its diplomatic offensives. Humanistic as it can be at times, Japan's global outreach is non-liberal at best because it is intellectually informed and motivated by a confluence of nationalist resurgence and realist power considerations. (Issues Stud/GIGA)

Many academics and commentators argue that Europe is suffering from a democratic deficit. An interesting proposal that has been put forward to address this problem is to elect some members of the European parliament in a pan-European district. In this article, we evaluate this proposal using an online experiment, in which thousands of Europeans voted on a pan-European ballot we created. We find that the voting behaviour of European citizens would be strongly affected by the presence or absence of candidates from their own country on the lists. If a pan-European district is created, our findings provide an argument in favour of using a closed-list ballot and establishing a maximum number of candidates from each country on the lists.

The democratisation of the EU is a historic achievement, which poses great challenges. This article argues that the EU has overcome its democratic deficit and that the nature of the Union has been defined in unambiguous terms. It will be demonstrated that the 2007 Lisbon Treaty defines the EU as a democratic union of democratic states. Moreover, the European Court of Justice has elaborated this concept in its jurisprudence with sound legal reasoning. The implication of this analysis for political theorists and constitutional lawyers is that the EU has outgrown its democratic deficit. Taking this approach enables politicians to refute the claim that the EU is not a real democracy and to present it as a union of states and citizens which works as a European democracy. The immediate challenges for the Union are to improve its democracies and to defend them against both erosion from within and foreign aggression.

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES TWO DIFFERENT, YET INTERRELATED, PHENOMENA: PARLIAMENTARY DECLINE IN WESTERN EUROPE AND THE "DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT" OF THE EUROPEAN UNION. IT ARGUES THAT THE LATTER HAS HELPED TO CONSOLIDATE THE FORMER. THIS IS ILLUSTRATED BY TWO SETS OF EMPIRICAL STUDIES. THE MAIN CONCLUSION TO BE DRAWN IS THAT A SIMPLE REORDERING OF SOME POLICIES WITHIN AND ACROSS DIFFERENT PILLARS WILL NOT REMEDY THE CURRENT DEMOCRATIC SHORTFALLS.

This article deals with the variation in the demand for self-government in Scotland – as measured by the vote in the two referendums – between 1979, when devolution was rejected, and 1997, when devolution was endorsed. The existing literature mainly deals with each of the two referendums in isolation and does not offer an explicitly comparative analysis of them. However, implicit comparisons contained in analyses of the 1997 referendum tend to identify as the main cause of the variation the 'democratic deficit' created by Conservative rule between 1979 and 1997, which was consistently rejected in Scotland. I take issue with this explanation on theoretical and empirical grounds and advances an alternative account grounded in an explicit comparison of the two referendums. Based on a rationalist approach, the analysis presented here identifies three key elements in the voting dynamics at the two points in time – a gap between support for self-government and the actual vote in the referendum; an interaction effect between attitudes to devolution and to independence; and the role of the European context in shaping perceptions of independence. I argue that significant change in these three variables (rather than a 'democratic deficit') appear to have been the most important determinants of the different results of the two referendums.

The present work focuses on the role played by Jacques Delors, who held the presidency of the European Commission between 1985 and 1995, in fostering public attention to the question of the so-called democratic deficit of the European Union (EU). It argues that Delors's involvement in this question was a direct consequence of his post-1989 view of European integration as a "collective" project, that is, a political enterprise based on the direct consensus and involvement of its citizens. This perspective was shaped by the reconfiguration of the role of the European Community in the post-Cold War European scenario and by the impact that "democratic" transitions in Central and Eastern Europe had on the Community itself. As an advocate of a "collective" Europe, Delors criticised the Maastricht Treaty for its failure to push towards political integration, publicly disputing the democratic character of the EU since its very inception.