Suchergebnisse

In Belgium, the idea of 'openness' is a well spread notion in electoral political discourses and the 2012 local election in Wallonia is no exception to this trend. Despite a clear victory, it is indeed very common for local political leaders in Belgium to announce that they will open their majority to other lists. The idea of 'openness' is also part of the local electoral campaign in terms of recruitment: non-partisan candidates – who clearly want to distinguish themselves from the party – are recruited to figure on the lists as 'independent candidates'. They are called 'candidates d'ouverture' as a sign of openness towards the civil society, the opposition, or dissidents from other political parties. Actually, these candidates are recruited for various reasons: there are sometimes used to demonstrate the citizen character of the list, to enhance the fact that the list 'makes politics differently from established political parties', to underline the local roots of the list, and sometimes the 'candidates d'ouverture' are simply used to complete vacancies on a list.

In May 2014 and for the second time in her political history, regional, federal and European elections were organized simultaneously in Belgium. In the direct follow-up of the sixth state reform that increased the powers and the autonomy of the Belgian Regions and Communities, these elections were crucial for the future of the country and for the multi-level coalition formation at the regional and federal levels. The political campaign was dominated by socio-economic issues and demands for further autonomy, particularly in the Flemish region. Regional electoral results confirmed the success of the regionalist parties in Flanders, but also in Brussels and in the German-speaking community. These successes allowed regionalist parties to enter all regional and federal governments – often as the dominant party – with the exception of the Walloon and the French-speaking Community cabinets.

In recent years, public authorities and civil-society organisations, driven by increasing public disengagement and a growing sense of distrust between the public and their representatives, have been instituting exercises in public deliberation, often using 'mini-publics', that is relatively small groups of citizens, selected according to various criteria and representing different viewpoints, brought together to deliberate on a particular issue. From small-scale experiments, mini- publics have recently taken a constitutional turn, at least in Europe. Iceland and Ireland have turned to deliberative democracy to reform their constitutions. Estonia, Luxembourg and Romania have also experienced constitutional processes in a deliberative mode. In Belgium, the G1000, a citizen-led initiative of deliberative democracy, has fostered a wider public debate about the place and role of citizens in the country's democracy. At the same time, the European Union institutions have introduced different forms of deliberative democracy as a way to reconnect with citizens. These empirical cases are indicative of a possible 'constitutional turn' in deliberative democracy in Europe. These examples of constitution-making happened in a particular time and place but they may also serve as models for other events.

Because of its very conception, the G1000 in Belgium cannot be categorized as a form of constitutional deliberative democracy per se. Its grassroots origin never indeed entailed to change the constitution. Yet this chapter contends that there are some constitutional deliberative democracy features in the G1000, which paradoxically were not thought of by its citizen organizers who sought in the first phases of the G1000 to avoid any political and institutional ties. In fact, their focus was much more on a high input and throughput legitimacy, rather than a high output legitimacy. Their goal was to demonstrate that ordinary citizens, randomly selected, had a say about major social and political issues and that they were wiling and able to deliberate about them, should a design conducive to deliberation be put in place. While the G1000 scored highly on the input dimensions – the quality of representation was good and the agenda could not have been more open – and fairly highly on throughput legitimacy – with a clear script and trained moderators, but with processes of aggregation insufficiently transparent –, the outputs were in the short term very limited, which was a major source of criticism as media had fostered a climate of great expectations about the outputs. The absence of formal links to the main political actors meant that the organizers could not guarantee any formal implementation of the results. So the design characteristics that increase input legitimacy also undermine output legitimacy. But on the longer term the political uptake and the social uptake of the G1000 are increasing as, on the one hand, most of the political parties are now advocating some forms of participatory and deliberative democracy and, on the other hand, several experiences inspired by the G1000 have sparked around in Belgium and in neighboring countries. This twofold output consequence of the G1000 seems to indicate that this experience has fostered some sort of constitutional deliberative democracy broadly defined.

Thanks to crowdfunding, deliberative mini-publics can be funded bottom-up to reach a wider support in the population and secure financial autonomy for their design. But who are the people willing to pay for deliberative democracy and why? This article answers this twofold question using an original survey with crowdfunders of the G1000 in Belgium. First, the financial support for deliberative democracy mainly comes from the more socially advantaged groups. But second, the crowdfunders largely diverge in their democratic preferences. Some are critical and favour any forms of alternative decision-making process, including technocratic forms. Others demonstrate a stronger attachment to electoral institutions and their political actors. Hence, the study of the crowdfunders of the G1000 shows that deliberative democracy attracts the support of citizens with different political orientations. This sheds light on the complex and intertwined links between a mini-public and its larger maxi-public.

From the beginning of the 1990's onwards, political analysts in all Western European countries discovered the contours of what they thought to be a widespread crisis of democracy. The alleged decline of political trust and public participation, and the rise of electoral volatility pointed out that the gap between politicians and citizens had never been wider. This political climate characterized by a deep-rooted crisis of democratic legitimacy offered an excellent breeding ground for critical reflection on the role, shape and function of democracy in modern societies. It gave rise to a fruitful quest for new and innovative ways of governing a democracy. It is in this turbulent period that the ideal of a deliberative democracy was coined (Dryzek 2000). A community of international scholars and philosophers, inspired by the work of Jürgen Habermas, became more and more convinced that a vibrant democracy is more than the aggregate of its individual citizens, and that democratic politics should be about more than merely voting. The quality of a democracy and the quality of democratic decisions, according to them, did not depend on the correct aggregation of individual preferences, but rather on the quality of the public debate that preceded the voting stage. Democratic decisions were thus no longer considered a function of mere compliance with aggregation rules. Instead, they are determined by extensive argumentation about political choices before voting on them. Because of its strong focus of public involvement in politics, this deliberative model of democracy started out in life as a theory of legitimacy (Benhabib 1996; Cohen 2002; Dryzek 2001; Parkinson 2006). By including everyone who is affected by a decision in the process leading to that decision, deliberation has important political merits: it is capable of generating political decisions that receive broad public support, even when there is strong disagreement on the aims and values a polity should promote (Geenens & Tinnevelt 2007, p. 47). After all, talking about political issues allows citizens to hear other perspectives to a problem and to see their own perspectives represented in the final decision. As such, deliberative democracy seeks to score high on input, throughput and output legitimacy. However, deliberation's beneficial effects do not come about easily. If deliberative democracy wants to contribute to increasing the legitimacy of the political system as a whole, it has to be legitimate in itself. In other words, deliberative events have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning before their outcomes can generate legitimate political decisions. It is therefore crucial to assess the internal legitimacy of deliberative mini-publics before making claims about their contribution to the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. In this paper, we set out to assess the internal legitimacy of one specific deliberative event, namely the G1000 project in Belgium (Caluwaerts & Reuchamps, 2012a). Our research question is therefore: to what extent does the G1000 live up to the criteria of input, throughput and output legitimacy? The G1000 project takes a particular place in the world of deliberative practice because it was not only grass roots in its process and its results, but also in its organization. Most deliberative events are introduced and funded by either public administrations or scientific institutions. The G1000 was rather considered a citizens' initiative from its very inception. All of the organizers of the event were volunteers, and all of the funds were gathered using crowd funding. So instead of a scientific experiment, the G1000 was more of a democratic experiment by, through, and for citizens. This grass-root structure makes it a very interesting case for students of legitimacy, because as we will see later on it situated at the heart of the democratic trade-off between input and output legitimacy.

From the beginning of the 1990's onwards, political analysts in all Western European countries discovered the contours of what they thought to be a widespread crisis of democracy. The alleged decline of political trust and public participation, and the rise of electoral volatility pointed out that the gap between politicians and citizens had never been wider. This political climate characterized by a deep-rooted crisis of democratic legitimacy offered an excellent breeding ground for critical reflection on the role, shape and function of democracy in modern societies. It gave rise to a fruitful quest for new and innovative ways of governing a democracy. It is in this turbulent period that the ideal of a deliberative democracy was coined (Dryzek 2000). A community of international scholars and philosophers, inspired by the work of Jürgen Habermas, became more and more convinced that a vibrant democracy is more than the aggregate of its individual citizens, and that democratic politics should be about more than merely voting. The quality of a democracy and the quality of democratic decisions, according to them, did not depend on the correct aggregation of individual preferences, but rather on the quality of the public debate that preceded the voting stage. Democratic decisions were thus no longer considered a function of mere compliance with aggregation rules. Instead, they were determined by extensive argumentation about political choices before voting on them. Because of its strong focus of public involvement in politics, this deliberative model of democracy started out in life as a theory of legitimacy (Benhabib 1996; Cohen 1997; Dryzek 2001; Parkinson 2006). By including everyone who is affected by a decision in the process leading to that decision, deliberation has important political merits: it is capable of generating political decisions that receive broad public support, even when there is strong disagreement on the aims and values a polity should promote (Geenens & Tinnevelt 2007, p. 47). After all, talking about political issues allows citizens to hear other perspectives to a problem and to see their own perspectives represented in the final decision. However, deliberation's beneficial effects do not come about easily. If deliberative democracy wants to contribute to increasing the legitimacy of the political system as a whole, it has to be legitimate in itself. In other words, deliberative events have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning before their outcomes can generate legitimate political decisions. It is therefore crucial to assess the internal legitimacy of deliberative mini-publics before making claims about their contribution to the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. Our research question is therefore: to what extent can deliberative mini-publics live up to the criteria of democratic and political legitimacy? In this paper, we set out to assess the internal legitimacy of one specific deliberative event, namely the G1000 project in Belgium (Caluwaerts & Reuchamps, 2012). The G1000 project takes a particular place in the world of deliberative practice because it was not only grassroots in its process and its results, but also in its organization. Most deliberative events are introduced and funded by either public administrations or scientific institutions. The G1000 was rather considered a genuine citizens' initiative from its very inception. All of the organizers of the event were volunteers, and all of the funds were gathered using crowd funding. So instead of a scientific experiment, the G1000 was more of a democratic experiment by, through, and for citizens. This grass-root structure makes it a very interesting case for students of legitimacy, because as we will see later on it situated at the heart of the democratic trade-off between input and output legitimacy.

At the very moment that humanity is facing a broadening ecological crisis, and that both policy makers and civil society are calling for a transition towards more sustainable societies, modern science seems incapable of providing operational solutions for managing this transition. In this context, both Noble prize laureates and high-level science officials have stressed the need of an in depth transformation of the modes of organization of scientific research for governing the transition to sustainable societies. However, existing analyses of on-going initiatives show that most of the barriers to a major, consolidated effort in sustainability science will not be removed without far-reaching institutional change. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an incremental institutional change approach, based on a gradual institutionalization process of existing initiatives. The analysis in this paper shows that strategic research for sustainability and reform of research funding mechanisms will only be effective if they are supported at the same time by reforms of career and training paths at higher education institutions. To promote this vision, the paper proposes a set of capacity building measures that can be undertaken at the level of research funding, higher education institutions and networking.

Transparency is a widely used concept in debates on international politics, from transnational anti-corruption campaigns to renewed requests for greater disclosure on health, finance, or even security issues. Calls for transparency date back at least to the League of Nations, when internationalists demanded open diplomacy. Yet, it is in the subfield of GEG, and its developments on nonstate actors as a key research topic (see introduction), where the practice and theory of transparency has made the most profound inroads (Gupta 2010a). GEG has been a particularly fertile ground for the development of informational governance (Mol 2008) and the rise of numerous transparency initiatives which have been analyzed in a rapidly developing literature. Importantly, current GEG research is also highly relevant for other IR subfields. For one, recent GEG research can help IR scholars to further refine the concept of transparency and to increase conceptual clarity and sophistication. Second, research on GEG has improved our understanding of the factors that determine the effectiveness of transparency as a governance tool in international politics.

The Bologna Process experienced a rapidly growing and an unexpected level of support. The authors revisit the key moments of the strategic promotion of the Bologna model and address the issue of the advantages other countries from other continents might gain from lining up with versions of the Bologna model. During the first years, the Process drew on a wide variety of practices and methods, but once it was taken out of Europe, it turned into a closed system based on strict principles. Europe still expresses doubts but it spreads its certainties as it integrates them in its new Licence-Master-Doctorate (LMD) system, which is presented as universally relevant, even though they represent only one particular means of conceiving, addressing and resolving the problems of higher education systems. The example of the export of such a model in Africa can lead people to worry that it might add up to nothing more than a 'sovereignty bubble' in a political system that sorely needs to encourage creativity, critical stances and collective endeavours.

While a great deal of attention is devoted to the Pacific region as the new chessboard of international politics, Pakistan remains a key actor in terms of both threat and potential. Two observations back this argument: first, Pakistan's fundamental roles as a state are challenged by its ongoing conflict with India and internal insurgencies. Second, due to a power-status gap, Pakistan experiences difficulties in holding specific self-conceived roles. In addition to hampering its socio-economic potential, these developments prevent Pakistan's quest for normalization in the system. As a consequence, we argue that engaging with Islamabad should be a priority for Washington so as to prevent the country from further aligning with Beijing, thus reinforcing China's regional leadership and status as peer-competitor to the United States. Indeed, as the potential for deviance in the international system arises from its normative dimension, the US, as the global leader, counts among its roles that of norm-setter and primary socializer for most states. Our research proposes to look at an old puzzle with new theoretical insights. By addressing the question of Washington's engagement towards non-conforming states, we aim to document a set of socialization processes as intervening variables linking American global role as leader and primary socializer to Pakistan's process of social integration (normalization/deviance). Drawing from sociology and social psychology, the paper seeks to explore the ability of the leader to act as a primary source of role location and status recognition towards non-conforming states so as to integrate them (back) into the US-led system.

Ever since the 1990's, deliberative theory has been heralded as the most promising new theory on political legitimacy. Democratic deliberation, conceived as the rational exchange of arguments, is claimed to improve the quality of democratic decision making because it instigates a more considered judgment; it allows citizens to hear other perspectives to a problem and to question their own opinions. However, deliberation's beneficial effects do not come about easily. If deliberative mini-publics want to contribute to the legitimacy of political decision making, they have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning. It is therefore crucial to assess the internal legitimacy of deliberative mini-publics before making claims about their contribution to the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. In this paper, we set out to assess the input, throughput and output legitimacy of four deliberative events, namely the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly, the Irish "We, The Citizens"-project, the Belgian G1000, and the Dutch Burgerforum. Based on a most-similar comparison of these cases, we argue that their internal legitimacy differs a great deal, and that this is due to factors relating to their process design, such as funding and recruitment.

Ever since the 1990's, deliberative theory has been heralded as the most promising new theory on political legitimacy. Democratic deliberation, conceived as the rational exchange of arguments, is claimed to improve the quality of democratic decision making because it instigates a more considered judgment; it allows citizens to hear other perspectives to a problem and to question their own opinions. However, deliberation's beneficial effects do not come about easily. If deliberative mini-publics want to contribute to the legitimacy of political decision making, they have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning. It is therefore crucial to assess the internal legitimacy of deliberative mini-publics before making claims about their contribution to the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. In this paper, we set out to assess the input, throughput and output legitimacy of four deliberative events, namely the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly, the Irish "We, The Citizens"-project, the Belgian G1000, and the Dutch Burgerforum. Based on a most-similar comparison of these cases, we argue that their internal legitimacy differs a great deal, and that this is due to factors relating to their process design, such as funding, recruitment and moderation.

Ever since the 1990's, deliberative theory has been heralded as the most promising new theory on political legitimacy. Democratic deliberation, conceived as the rational exchange of arguments, is claimed to improve the quality of democratic decision making because it instigates a more considered judgment; it allows citizens to hear other perspectives to a problem and to question their own opinions. However, deliberation's beneficial effects do not come about easily. If deliberative mini-publics want to contribute to the legitimacy of political decision making, they have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning. It is therefore crucial to assess the internal legitimacy of deliberative mini-publics before making claims about their contribution to the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. In this paper, we set out to assess the input, throughput and output legitimacy of four deliberative events, namely the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly, the Irish "We, The Citizens"-project, the Belgian G1000, and the Dutch Burgerforum. Based on a most-similar comparison of these cases, we argue that their internal legitimacy differs a great deal, and that this is due to factors relating to their process design, such as funding, recruitment and moderation.

The results of the UK referendum in favour of leaving the European Union (EU) clearly put into question the European economic and political project as well as its institutional structure. This article argues that the Brexit may be a momentum to reform the institutional structure and procedural rules through which tax policy is made at the EU level. The UK referendum is indeed unlikely to further slow down the EU harmonization process in tax matters, which has always followed a tortuous path. Instead, the Brexit may give momentum to reform major weaknesses of the EU institutional and decision-making process in tax matters, in particular the unanimity rule and the role of the European Parliament. Finally, with regard to taxation specifically, the establishment of an EU tax, providing the EU with sufficient genuine own resource, could also reinforce EU's legitimacy by countering the criticisms related to Member States' contribution to the European budget.