The paper suggests a practice turn in the analysis of political legitimacy. Current social science research on political legitimacy suffers twofold. First, it shows an undue (silent) impact of an ethics-first perspective. Second, empirical approaches to political legitimacy mostly focus on...

This paper shows that the main pattern of European democratisation has unfolded along the lines of an EU organised as a multilevel system of representative parliamentary government and not as a system of deliberative governance as the transnationalists propound. But the multilevel EU has...

By raising the question of what made constructivism possible the paper discusses the puzzle and promises of constructivist scholarschip in IR. It is argued that the communicative style which coined constructivism as a movement provides the key. Two puzzles are the focus, first, a lack of...

The Convention appears to many as both a confirmation of the thesis of the new institutionalism on the value of institutions for shaping the outcome of constitutional politics (the politics of creating EU fundamental rules) and a new model for democratic deliberative politics. From this second...

In the presence of competing interest groups, this paper examines how the form of votebuying contracts affects policy outcomes. We study contracts contingent upon individual votes, policy outcomes, and/or vote shares. Voters either care about their individual votes, or about the policy outcome....

While most economists agree that seigniorage is one way governments finance deficits, there is less agreement about the political, institutional, and economic reasons for relying on it. This paper investigates the main determinants of seigniorage using panel data on about 100 countries, for the...