In this article, we critically discuss the issues of discursive quality and democratic legitimacy in deliberative experiments taking place in a transnational and pluri-lingual setting. Our main argument is that while deliberative polls through careful scientific design and organisation may...

The capability approach developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen has received substantial attention in recent years, in philosophical exchanges as well as in more applied discussions on policy-making, in particular in developing countries, but lately also in Western countries, including...

How can sociology contribute to the understanding of the social and political transformations that are affecting contemporary Europe? The article proposes that sociological accounts of European integration should focus around the basic problem of internal differentiation and external adaptation...

How can the EU rectify its legitimacy deficit? On the basis of three logics of political integration we identify explicit strategies for how the legitimacy deficit of the EU can be remedied. The first strategy amounts to a scaling down of the ambitions of the polity-makers in the EU. If pursued...

Why do democracies give birth to bureaucracies and bureaucrats? How and why has a seemingly undesirable and unviable organizational form weathered relentless criticism over many years and is possibly experiencing a renaissance? Normative democratic theory, theories of formal organizations, and...

‘Rights to solidarity’ is a rather new expression, recently minted in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. In this chapter, the term will be used to refer to social and economic rights ; the basic question that will be posed is what the Charter has to say about the...

How can students of the European Union get from describing recent advances, to speculating about what are possible new directions and research agendas? How promising are terms such as “governance” and “the new governance” for improving the understanding how the Union is overned and...

In democratic societies, legal procedures are to ensure legally correct and rationally acceptable decisions, i.e. decisions that can be defended both in relation to legal statutes and in relation to public criticism. But can the legal system via the discretion of the judges itself really...