This paper looks at the role of the European Parliament (EP) in three phases of Brexit: the attempt by the David Cameron Government to renegotiate the UK’s membership of the European Union prior to the 2016 referendum, the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement...

This article considers how a plurality of views on how the EU ought to be legitimated may even contribute to its overall legitimacy and not, as is often assumed, to its contestedness as a polity. It draws lessons for the EU from a recent turn in the literature on legitimacy towards analysing...

This article analyses how the European Parliament's contribution to policy outcomes varies across three branches of economic decision-making and two roles typical of a parliamentary body. The former are based on Majone's distinction between stabilization, redistribution and regulation. The...

This paper argues that indicators of democratic performance should in the first instance be selected for their normative defensibility, rather than their empirical measurability. Yet democratic theory is a hard task-master in setting conditions for the normative derivation of indicators. It at...

John Locke famously argued that the governed are unlikely to consent to a form of political power that unduly exposes them to harm. Nowadays, non-arbitrary political power is often understood as requiring governing institutions to strike a difficult balance between capacity and constraint....

In this paper, we apply a revised version of the discourse quality index (DQI) developed by Steenbergen et al. on European Parliament debates in an attempt to evaluate the democratic quality of representation at the EU level. This updated measurement instrument, after the inclusion of new...