Suchergebnisse

This title answers the question 'which institutional architecture for which kind of democracy for the EU?' by bringing two debates together - the institutional analysis of the Union and its democratic assessment. The authors examine a series of institutional architectures in light of the democratic quality of the processes and decisions generated by them. The discussion of these various institutional architectures is preceded by an analysis of the democratic values and principles according to which institutional architectures and governance structures should be assessed

This title explores the theoretical issues, empirical evidence and normative debates elicited by the concept of multi-level governance (MLG). Three policy areas are investigated in vindicating the usefulness of MLG as a theoretical and empirical concept, with particular reference to the UK and Germany

The article starts from a critique of the widespread assumption that intergovernmentalism is not only the more practical but also the more democratic way of handling the current European crises – and particularly the euro crisis – to argue for the need to rethink the working and the definition of democracy in the current heightened interconnectedness of political organization. It suggests that perceiving European citizens as being separated into distinct state communities stands in the way of a full appreciation of the externalities, hence of the reciprocal responsibilities, that they owe each other and turns apparently democratic decisions into potential acts of domination, as theorized by both Pettit (1997) and Bohman (2006). It suggests that we should embrace a more encompassing and dialogical notion of democracy which translates Pallasmaa's (2012) notion of hapticity from the field of physical architecture to that of institutional architecture. It concludes by suggesting that there are already institutional architectures in the EU which lend themselves to a haptic declension, for example the European Semester.