This paper is about a counterfactual empirical assumption: If the Laeken convention had been elected, we would have had a more democratic as well as a more legitimate process of European constitution making. Electing conventioneers and re-opening the convention is probably a successful way to...

In this article, I outline an analytical framework allowing for an assessment of the democratic legitimacy of the decision-making system of the EU’s second pillar with reference to five criteria. The criteria are developed on the basis of a discourse-theoretical reading of a deliberative...

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...

This paper reveals the underlying market’s preferences over the on going Euro area sovereign debt crisis. It builds on a loss function with reference to the ‘basis’, the difference between the spread over swap and Credit Default Swap (CDS) for sovereign bonds. This loss function is general...

In this paper I provide a preliminary sketch of the types of logics of evaluation in the third sector. I begin by tracing the ideals that are evident in three well-articulated yet quite different third sector evaluation practices: the logical framework, most significant change stories, and...